The feeling of wanting to leave everything behind...
It’s quite ironic that in a world as vast as ours, we often find ourselves clinging to just a tiny part of it. Often, we die in the same place we came into existence, surrounded by roughly the same people. Somehow, we’re expected to remain close to our roots, our family, and the friends we accumulated in that environment as if we’re irreplaceable parts of it. As years passed, we grew attached to our little bubble: it feels safe and familiar, and it’s hard to imagine life outside of it.
Yet, some people decide to escape the bubble, detach themselves from the known and familiar, and start over elsewhere with a clean slate. This desire to escape might stem from necessity, but it could also arise from a deep wish to part from the past, from what we, for years, called our ‘life,’ and start over fresh. But where does this urge to leave everything behind come from? And is packing our stuff and starting somewhere afresh actually a smart move? Is there anything profound and meaningful about changing location, or is it just a means to escape discontent?
This video explores the curious feeling of wanting to leave everything behind through a philosophical lens. You may be familiar with that urge—this nagging desire to pack your bags and leave. This desire could arise from apparent reasons, such as having made a mess of your life or being in a destructive environment. Sometimes, the reasons may be unclear, and the wish to leave seems irrational and inexplicable.
Maybe this tendency to move on is an inherent human feature, a remnant of our ancestors’ nomadic mode of living. Or perhaps it’s an unconscious longing to break with the monotony of daily affairs, to refresh oneself in new environments. I remember my first strong desire to leave everything behind occurred in 2010 during a period of depression and the lengthy, painful ending of a long-term relationship, which was pretty toxic when I look back on it.
During that time, I fantasized about becoming a travel blogger, going from city to city, or disappearing in the wilderness like the well-known adventurer Chris McCandless. I dreamt about finding a job abroad and starting a new life there; at some point, it didn’t matter where it would be: Asia, Spain, Iran, anything would do. But why was I so desperate to leave? From what I recall, there were several reasons.
First, I felt my past hanging around my neck like a millstone, and every confrontation with my surroundings reminded me of some dreadful experience. Second, due to the financial crisis, I couldn’t find a job fitting my education, so I worked in factories and warehouses to pay my bills, which I generally didn’t like doing. The future felt hopeless to me. And the sum of all past and present circumstances seemed to arouse a strong and nagging desire: the urge to leave.
Like a butterfly, I wanted to emerge from my chrysalis that held me prisoner for so long and fly away. Like a snake, I longed to shed off my old skin and roam freely in the wide world. I wanted adventure, new sceneries, and new people, hoping that novelty and being on the move would wash off the dirt of the past and turn me into a new person. Eventually, I found a job I enjoyed, enrolled in a university, expanded my social circle, and had loads of fun in the years after.
Hence, the feeling of wanting to leave everything behind went dormant. My life didn’t seem so bad anymore; the contentment with the present overshadowed past grief, and so, what I had, I did not want to leave behind. The wish to leave correlated with dissatisfaction with my existence, which I eventually mitigated by making my life at home more fun. Yet, the urge to leave never entirely went away.
When I saw some friends moving to Germany and establishing themselves in their new environments, the call to adventure awakened me again. I asked myself: am I here to stay? Or am I supposed to leave? Of course, I knew this rearoused desire to leave again matched a recurring dissatisfaction with my life, a restlessness telling me it was time for change. So, I identified two main options: to solve this dissatisfaction locally or to follow the urge and leave for better pastures.
The latter was much stronger, which led me to spend a lot of time abroad since the pandemic ended and entertaining the idea of, at least partly, establishing myself somewhere far from home. It’s funny when I think of it because I could have solved my dissatisfaction locally by changing my thinking and altering my close environment. To be happy, I don’t need to change scenery. After all, happiness comes from within, isn’t it?
So, in a way, this urge to leave is irrational when we do it out of pursuit of happiness. Let’s explore this a bit. The feeling of wanting to leave everything behind implies discontent with current affairs. We want to escape because we’re unhappy and believe we will leave that unhappiness behind by going elsewhere. But does changing scenery actually work, especially in the long term?
After all, isn’t our unhappiness the product of our thinking rather than our circumstances? And isn’t it so that wherever we go, we always take ourselves with us, including our tendencies to be unhappy and discontent? Ah, the chase for happiness in external things. The desire to travel and move abroad surely fits in that category.
We see people changing locations for precisely this reason: the expectation that doing so will bring them contentment. Some leave permanently out of pure disgust for their current environment: “This country is going down the drain,” they say. “These darn leftist cultural Marxists have ruined the West; I’m leaving,” some exclaim, and off they go. Others travel from place to place, eager to receive these shots of pleasure with every new sight that temporarily mutes their ongoing discontent with life under the guise of ‘finding oneself.’
Yes, research shows that travel does increase happiness. However, like with every form of pleasure we obtain from the external world, it’s not a permanent cure for unhappiness; the happiness it generates is fleeting. Some Stoic philosophers argued that traveling is a waste of time. And we can also apply their argument to leaving our current environment behind in pursuit of happiness.
Seneca, for example, wrote a letter about this subject alone, explaining why traveling is not a cure for discontent. He opens his letter with the following passage: “Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate. Though you may cross vast spaces of sea (...) your faults will follow you whithersoever you travel.”
The travel bug was a thing already back then. The first sentence of his letter implies that plenty of people attempted to travel to improve their moods. But let the Stoics be concerned with precisely that: ‘one’s mood.’ Seneca argued that travel doesn’t solve discontent in the long run. You always take yourself with you. When the novelty of changing sceneries subsides, your mind catches up; you will most likely experience the same feelings of discontent, lack, and restlessness you experienced before you arrived.
The Stoics explain that these things are internal problems and we cannot solve them by changing location. We can leave everything behind, build a new life on another continent, surround ourselves with a fresh group of people, and even change our names and identities; we still have to put up with ourselves. Ultimately, how we feel doesn’t depend on circumstances but on how we think about them. From that viewpoint, leaving everything behind to pursue happiness is ridiculous and irrational. We just moved the problem to another place.
But what if we look beyond this idea of happiness and equanimity as a pursuit in life? What if we don’t necessarily seek happiness and contentment by starting over new, but something else? There are different ways of looking at life besides the scope of happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain, or contentment and discontent. Not everything we do has to be judged within these dichotomies.
Leaving everything behind may not be a good strategy for increasing long-term happiness without considering our inner faculties. But what if we look at it differently? Is there something meaningful, something profound about packing our bags and setting up camp in a new environment, aside from just ‘happiness’? If we take more of an existentialist viewpoint, the wish to leave it all behind begins to make more sense.
If we consider the existentialist idea that existence precedes essence, starting over somewhere else is another way to shape our lives as we see fit. Moreover, according to philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, we’re both blessed and cursed with the freedom of coming into existence without intrinsic meaning. Our responsibility is not to adhere to some ultimate, overarching purpose or belief system but to exercise the freedom we have.
We can exercise this freedom in different ways, and that’s the beauty of it: we can shape it into whatever form we like. The idea of stepping out of our habitat, leaving the familiar, and establishing oneself in the world is quite the assertion of freedom. It involves us stepping out of a preordained environment. It could entail leaving behind familiar values and ideas about existence and the world around us. It allows us to redefine ourselves and our place in the world.
We take a deliberate step towards self-determination, taking control of our own narratives, unshackled by the expectations of others. We make a choice that reflects our personal values and desires, which are not dictated by societal norms – if anything, we walk away from these norms. We assume responsibility for our future, actively shaping our lives rather than remaining within a bubble, passively defined by our circumstances.
It’s a gesture of liberation from the constraints of predetermined existence. The movie Interstellar takes a curious philosophical position when a character named Professor Brand discusses the protagonist, Joseph Cooper’s mission, saying: “We’re not meant to save the world. We’re meant to leave it.” When watching this movie, I remember this quote really struck a chord.
It made me reflect on the exploratory nature of human beings, and how we’ve always traveled the world and established ourselves in unfamiliar places. The idea of our species eventually leaving this planet and spreading across the galaxy mirrors how we’ve operated in the past. The quote also implies a sense of purpose. Quite differently from the existential position, the idea that we’re meant to leave the Earth suggests a more prominent, perhaps cosmic, significance, as if humanity’s journey is, somehow, predestined.
Ultimately, I believe the urge to leave everything behind is more than an escape from the familiar or a quest for happiness elsewhere. It’s a deep-seated part of who we are. I remember how my brothers and I could play with Legos all day, building spaceships and fantasizing about how we’d discover new planets. We’d take our Lego characters everywhere, whether it was a family visit, a vacation, or a walk in the forest; every trip we’d turn into an adventure.
Our play always had this tendency of exploration, which, as far as I recall, felt exhilarating to emulate. It was like we were playfully getting ready for our adult lives, hoping we could have space adventures in real life someday, which, unfortunately, never happened. Still, the way we played back then tells me something. I think it’s evidence of the adventurous spirit and curious nature ingrained in us as human beings.
So, the feeling of wanting to leave everything behind is perhaps not an anomaly but a reflection of our truest selves. Thank you for watching.