I don’t like to travel. I didn’t say I don’t get value from traveling. I didn’t say you shouldn’t like traveling. I didn’t say I don’t travel. In fact, I travel a lot. I’ve visited 21 countries last I checked, a high number for Americans, I think. I rode a bike with a friend 1,500 miles from Philadelphia to Bar Harbor, Maine and back the summer between high school and college at sixteen years old.

In conversation, I find people hold travel as almost a universal virtue. I get a lot out of traveling, but I don’t see it that way.

Maybe it’s because I love living in New York so much, but I think anyone can love where they live just as much, or move to where they would love it. Nearly every time I leave, I learn about something amazing I’m missing by leaving.

The point is that any time you’re in one place, you’re not in another. If you live in a place you don’t like, why live there? If you love it, you have to leave to go some place else.

I believe anything you can find in one place you can find in another — including variety. People talk about how they see such different stuff in new places — people think, talk, and cook differently. I’ve found I can find as much variety in these things from my neighbors as from people around the world.

The thing is, when you’re observing the differences in a faraway place, you can get distracted. I mean, the Eiffel Tower looks cool and I can learn a lot from how Parisians live differently, but the Eiffel Tower distracts from learning about the people. And I think I can learn huge life lessons from any random person I stop on the street.

I put to you that anything you can get from traveling, you can get without traveling. I’m not saying don’t do it. Just that you don’t have to.

Also, I don’t like living out of a suitcase or causing all that jet fuel to pollute the air.

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