“The journey is the reward.” – attributed to Steve Jobs
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Going Someplace
A book called Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, written by Rolf Potts and published in 2002, reminded me of both the benefits of traveling and the benefits of seeing in new ways. Seeing in new ways can be understood to mean seeing:
- things you weren’t looking for,
- things you didn’t expect,
- things you weren’t supposed to see,
- things you don’t understand, or
- seeing without trying to understand at all.
Clearly, what you see determines the benefit of travel, and if you don’t see anything new then nothing will change, and what’s the benefit of that? But things are not quite so simple.
If you live an anxious life and travel to a place that deprives you of anxiety, then in this place you may see nothing manifestly different, but it will feel different. This is the objective of most vacations: to get away from what people usually see and, as a result, see ourselves differently.
Traveling makes me nervous. I’ve traveled enough and I’m not interested in sightseeing. From having travelled to many remote destinations I know that most of the effort lies in just getting there. And then, when I get somewhere, since I tend not to see myself differently, there’s not much to do except look around and go home. This served me well as a mountaineer since, in the high mountains, it’s not safe to hang around.
If the best of travel is adventure, and the best adventures are in your mind, then maybe you don’t need to go so far, or anywhere at all! It might sound jaded, but once you’ve seen the view from one mountaintop, you’ve seen the view from all mountaintops, roughly speaking. I feel the same way about cities, at least modern cities.
The adventure is mostly in getting there. It’s the same with being creative. It’s the struggle that counts. As my friend Fred said, “I have no interest in going on a cruise… unless someone blows up the ship!”
“The reason vagabonding is so appealing is that it promises to show you the destinations and experiences you’ve dreamed about, (but) you’ll never quite find what you dreamed. Indeed, the most vivid travel experiences usually find you by accident, and the qualities that make you fall in love with a place are rarely the features that took you there. In this way, vagabonding is not just a process of discovering the world but a way of seeing –an attitude that prepares you to find the things you weren’t looking for.” — Rolf Potts, (2016, 54)
Going to Non-Places
If the benefit of travel is the changes it brings, then can you not create change for yourself without going anywhere? This question got me thinking about how much one can vary one’s life just by thinking about it.
I flew to cities across the US as my father’s photo assistant when I was 11 and 12. We photographed modern, empty corporate offices and unoccupied residences. There were no people; people get in the way. It was all about travel, design, and space. It felt like a museum whose galleries were scattered around the country.
I liked the vagabond nature of mountaineering, sleeping wherever night caught us, eating the little we packed in, and spending the day watching the wide or threatening sky. When I needed to travel for other reasons I found it to be easiest and most exciting to camp and eat wherever was most unusual and unexpected: under a bridge, in the bushes along some unmarked road, or a few hundred feet into the woods. In after dark and out before dawn, I avoided lights and people, and made sure that no one could see me.
Nothing ever happened, but I was left with the feeling that shook the hand of the otherwise nameless “in between.” I felt I gained a little more knowledge of those places between our destinations. Metaphorically, the paths that lead to personal change are usually in between our expectations.
Going Nowhere At All
It felt familiar reading Rolf Potts’s book, and I had not the slightest desire to travel. I’m more goal oriented now, and good traveling must not be. Having goals can easily distract you from opportunities.
“A good traveler has no fixed plan, and is not intent on arriving.”— Lao Tzu
My most indelible memories are of places where there was little to see and the landscape hardly changed at all: walking across a trackless glacier, driving hours through an unchanging landscape, or flying through an endless sky. The distortions of space and time are difficult to remember but hard to forget.
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Creativity is my focus. To enhance yours, let’s talk.
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Take the notion of vagabonding and apply it to your mind. Skip the costs and hassles of transportation and consider how you could take yourself to another state of mind. If your life is crazy boring and your opportunities are few, then I can easily understand the attractions of drugs and doing whatever gives you satisfaction. I want more of that myself.
Satisfaction comes from things we incorporate into our lives. Drugs are only interesting in so far as they create enduring change. People are only interesting when they reveal authentic ways of thinking. Shallow romantic encounters quickly become as unappealing as yesterday’s burrito. Aside from marking the point at which you turn around, these rewards are not worth the effort.
New Ideas
The point of vagabonding is to explore new paths that lead to new destinations, even when these are not what you planned; especially those that are not what you planned! The point of vagabonding is to get out of your old mind.
Might this be a skill rather than a situation? Could you travel your mind without leaving your home? What are you doing here, or what could you be doing here that’s creative?
Let’s clarify what being creative means, because in our twisted society creativity is misunderstood. Creativity is not being useful, productive, appreciated, recognized, or successful. The only success a creative person achieves is their own sense of accomplishment, and that’s occasional. The greatest struggle in being creative is to feel any accomplishment at all, and that becomes more a learned sense of balance than any demonstrable output.
The best definition of being creative is doing something without knowing what you’re doing. A creative thing is not just something that’s new to other people, it’s also new to you. If you just appear creative while following a rehearsed presentation, then you’re an actor in a deception. You’re staging a production.
Because being really creative means you are exploring new territory, you can expect to make mistakes. In every thoughtful decision you are trying not to be creative by applying an existing criteria or familiar frame of reference. You are trying to tame the novelty by fitting it into a preexisting framework. If you removed the novelty from that formula, then there would be nothing creative about it.
At every point in a creative process you have the choice of adding chaos or exerting control. Fitting the two together can be creative, but it’s the chaos that makes it so. What emerges may have a logic to it, but it will seem arbitrary and formless at first.
On first view, abstract art looks arbitrary and formless, which is probably how it appeared to the artist at first. The viewer then “gets control” of the experience by assigning it meaning: it’s colorful and lively, or it reminds the viewer of a landscape or a reflection of something. By assigning a meaning we focus our perception and see what we think. The creativity happens in the viewer in the process of expanding their sight or recognition, but once the image is identified the creativity is over. The viewer then takes their interpretation, replays it in their mind, and needs to think no more.
Theoretical physics is the example I live with. It’s creative when it doesn’t make sense, in those times when the concepts are in conflict and I’m confused. In an attempt to understand things better I follow the work of people who have taken similar ideas in other directions. Almost immediately I’m over my head in terminology and technical details that I can barely make sense of. Do I recognize what they’re doing here? Is this helpful to me at all? Usually not. I’ll look for some souvenirs and return only slightly edified to where I started.
We are led to think this is bad and that things must make sense and we should understand. We’ll invent sense by adopting distorted points of view or inventing them ourselves. This is what I was taught: the smoke and mirrors that make the illusion seem real.
Mathematics helps disguise our lack of understanding because whatever works is considered correct if it reproduces someone’s observation. Some people claim to make sense of it, but most don’t try and just accept what the experts and artful dodgers say without challenge.
The result is poor work like the bad carpentry that holds up a collapsing house. Eventually, it will fall down and the creative process will start again. It’s called “punctuated equilibrium,” and it happens wherever there’s a contest between stability and change. Your life is a good example.
Ideas that are Never New
There is the danger of the opposite of creativity: of never traveling in your mind regardless of what you do. It takes practice to appreciate the chaos of change and leaving old investments behind. It’s easier to fool yourself into believing that what satisfies you is useful.
Holding on to something of losing value is called “the sunk cost fallacy.” This is the illusion that what was valuable once, but is no longer valuable, couldn’t become any less valuable, so it’s worth retaining. We always have reasons for what we’ve done that encourage us to keep doing it. We’ll have few reasons to do what we have never done before, and we’ll easily find reasons not to do it now.
The formula for profit in the selling of social media is to deliver what engages but does not satisfy. And who knows this formula better than all of us, who are focused on what attracts us but are rarely satisfied.
“I vastly underestimated the damage from social media because even larger than the mental health crisis is the diminishment of the human capacity to pay attention, which is driven in part by the explosion of short-form videos since the arrival of TikTok. The average American teen now spends five hours a day on social media, mostly swiping through short videos… years of consuming short videos during childhood and puberty seems to disrupt the development of executive function, which refers to the cognitive processes that support goal-directed behavior.”
—Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist (Edssall 2026)
The internet makes it easy for people to be amused, and in this way has undermined its potential. Serving commercial purposes, A.I. will further amuse people without taking their minds anywhere new. We know this will continue because it serves both vendors and consumers.
It’s not a new form of intelligence that makes it dangerous, it’s the appearance of a new form of stupidity. A.I. can enliven or depress people’s mental function. Its result depends on the wants of the people who use it. In the direction things are going in now, we’re heading toward artificial stupidity, not artificial intelligence.
“Uncontrolled use of A.I. leads to a substantial decrease in knowledge. The data indicate an effect likely between 20 and 40 percentage points compared with previous years… Even only after a few years of usage, students cannot fathom mastering a difficult subject without the assistance of AI tools.” — Marton Benedek and Balazs R. Sziklai (2025), Corvinus University of Budapest
“A.I. assistance reduces persistence and impairs independent performance: After brief A.I.-assisted sessions (10 minutes), participants were significantly more likely to give up on problems and performed significantly worse once the A.I. was removed, compared to participants who never had A.I. assistance.” — Grace Liu et al. (2026)
Politics, technology, education, and psychology have always been bedfellows. They all concern themselves with redirecting people’s minds. The commodification of mind—which is what the internet offers—and the manipulation of mind—which is what A.I. offers—will naturally combine. They will redirect or redefine vagabonding to be something that stays uncreative and avoids enlightenment. The solution is not to forbid their use, it’s to appropriate them for better use.
“Apathy feeds on itself: The more action appears futile, the more likely opposition to the corrupt exercise of power diminishes or fades away… As apathy spreads, the ability of authoritarian leaders in the Trump mold to smash Democratic norms and wrest control of elections will grow stronger. ” — Thomas B. Edsall (2026), NY Times columnist
I use A.I. to answer physics questions and locate resources. I only expect it to return consensus opinions and I don’t believe it. In any area where there is dispute you can be sure A.I. will deliver to you the most common, wrong answer. If you understand this is what you get, then it’s quite useful.
A.I. doesn’t tell you what’s true, it gives you the consensus, and that’s always flawed. A.I. is an aggregator of crappy news that speaks well. You should never expect more from A.I. than what you would get from a random selection of people on the street.
Doing the Creative Work
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view… The only thing that can do that is a good story. Good stories are a kind of benevolent Trojan horse. You let them in, and they add complication, allowing you to understand that sometimes a thing and its opposite are true at the same time.” — Ken Burns, from “Donald Trump, Our Foundering Father” by Maureen Dowd (2025).
To get creative, travel. Not physically travel, though you can try that, but mentally. Find other perspectives and espouse them. If it makes you feel strange to proclaim things you don’t understand, all the better.
We’re often told not to paint a target on ourselves, but that’s exactly what you want to do. It’s not that you want to get your head blown off, you want to get your head blown open. Just be careful of the company you keep.
If my therapy practice is any guide, one of the most dangerous persons to be around is yourself. You are typically self-supportive when pursuing satisfaction and reward, but you can be quite self-discouraging and unhelpful when trying to think differently. You must recognize this behavior and fence it in. We are all inclined to doubt what does not yet serve us, but that’s no reason to limit what you think.
All creative work involves learning from failure. That means your failures are assured and you need to welcome them as opportunities. It is important to plan your itinerary when traveling in mind or body. It’s important to give yourself the rest you’ll need and to have a plan when things go awry. You don’t wait for failure to plan for it. The problem is not to spend so much time protecting yourself that you never leave home.
The best time to get creative in any project is at the beginning, and you do to some extent. Get more creative now. The worst time to get creative is tomorrow. You’ll never be fully prepared or protected.
Creativity requires the same three things that therapy requires: courage, commitment, and honesty. Get in the habit of not just doing those things, but being those things. You may find yourself alone, but at least you’ll be in good company.
References
Benedek, M., and Sziklai, B. R. (2025 Oct. 15). “Impact of AI Tools on Learning Outcomes: Decreasing Knowledge and Over-Reliance.” arxiv.org. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16019
Dowd, M. (2025). from “Donald Trump, Our Foundering Father” by Maureen Dowd, NY Times, July 5, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/opinion/donald-trump-fourth-of-july.html
Liu, G., Christian, B., Dumbalska, T., Bakker, M. A., and Dubey, R. (2026) “AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance.” https://ai-project-website.github.io/AI-assistance-reduces-persistence/
Potts, R. (2016). Vagabonding, revised edition 2016, Ballentine Books.
Edsall, T. B. (2026 April 14). “Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump? New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/opinion/trump-protest-ai-phones-social-media.html
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