Traveling abroad was the first time I witnessed absolute poverty in person.

It also let me see for myself some of the obvious shortcomings of countries usually held up as our betters. It was a shock. But, it also let me experience some of the things that really were better. It was both a reminder that home is doing some things right after all- but could do other things better.

(Depending on your politics, you normally tend to see your own country as either entirely behind or entirely the best)

It felt like civic education. Not unlike studying history and government.

You may have been immersed in American culture, but has any of it perrmeated you, or have you stayed within a Chinese bubble, in America, as your friends seems to have? I think that's a totally different thing.

>>Just my humble opinions, most human beings have remarkably similar values across different culture, we all want paradoxically to belong to the herd and also distinguish ourselves from the herd.

We want to be normal but not common.

I have lived abroad for about 7 years now. It has dramatically changed how I think about the world, what my values are, and what I want in my own future. It is miles beyond "I heard some new stories from the countries I stayed and it changed my perspective!"

The OP asked for concrete examples and not vague sweeping statements and here you are doing exactly this. As someone with the same sentiment and question as the OP I'm disappointed.

Vague sweeping statements? I’m literally an entirely different person because I decided to spend years abroad. That isn’t concrete enough for you?

I grew up in a decayed industrial town in the Midwest. My parents didn’t go to college and I had very little interest in traveling or foreign cultures. If you were to predict my life based on my family and socioeconomic background, I’d be still living in the same empty town as everyone else I grew up with.

Instead, I was lucky enough to get a remote job as a customer service agent. At some point after that, I realized I could work from anywhere, so I used it as an opportunity to visit Japan and then Europe.

Now, I’ve lived in / visited over twenty countries, have a deep interest in foreign languages, and am in the process of getting foreign citizenship. It wasn’t a deliberate, “eureka!” moment, but a gradual exposure to new ideas and people. That’s how life works in general IMO.

The world is a big place and people have different values. Traveling is the single easiest way to understand this. It is really that simple.

As an American, I’ve noticed that this attitude of disinterest toward the outside world is common, even encouraged. It’s not a good thing and frankly it’s the source of a lot of problems with the country today.

> As an American, I’ve noticed that this attitude of disinterest toward the outside world is common, even encouraged. It’s not a good thing and frankly it’s the source of a lot of problems with the country today.

As an American, I've noticed that self-flagellation of the kind exhibited in this comment is extremely common, as is fetishization of travel/other cultures. This difference in our perspectives may have to do with where we grew up "decayed industrial town in the Midwest" (you) vs. "bastion of liberal globalism" (me).

Anyway, the reason people are pushing back against your comments here is because they have a "I have attained enlightenment and you can too" vibe. I just don't associate enlightenment with hanging around on hackernews arguing about whether traveling has led you to enlightenment.

Anyway, I don't question that seeing the world up close and personal has been important part of your life. I only doubt that it is universalizable. I think your experiences have to do with your unique personality and circumstances and can't be generalized.

You are projecting your own biases and worldview on to my comment, which says more about you than me. Nowhere did I fetishize foreign cultures or put down America in general.

And yes, decaying industrial town is an exact description, not self-flagellation.

> Nowhere did I [...] put down America in general.

> As an American, I’ve noticed that this attitude of disinterest toward the outside world is common, even encouraged. It’s not a good thing and frankly it’s the source of a lot of problems with the country today.

In no way does that indicate I’m anti-American or engaging in self-flagellation.

Having a minor criticism of one’s country is a healthy, normal thing.

We've established that you did "put down America in general". We can disagree over whether that constitutes self-flagellation. Moving on, I didn't say you are "anti-American" nor did I say that there's anything wrong with "criticizing one's country". I will say that criticizing a culture is hard because cultures are not uniform, which was my point ("decayed industrial town in the Midwest" and "bastion of liberal globalism" are very different in terms of "disinterest in the outside world").

I don't question your experiences, I only pointed out that they are yours, and I doubt they can be universalized. The kind of meaning that you're talking about just isn't one-size-fits-all.

Ah, so a US citizen living in the middle of nowhere learned something by seeing civilisation. This is an example of why the OP asked for more details. Now I know that your experience isn't applicable to a lot of people who already live in a city, have friends in other countries, have travelled a bit, etc.

Your reply is kind of insulting, honestly. Not appreciated.

As I said, most people (including those that live in a city, or have friends in other countries, etc.) still view the world in their own local way. It has nothing to do with cities or civilization, as the inside of any college classroom would make clear. Actually living in another country and delving into their culture for a sustained period of time is not the same as reading about it in a book.

Perhaps you think you’re already enlightened and already know everything. If that’s the case, there isn’t much I can do.

I agree the GP was cruel and demeaning and at least partly wrong.

But it's been asked for someone to describe the specific changes in their worldview that resulted from living abroad (and specifically the ones that could not have been garnered by other means).

If it's about gaining understanding, what specifically have you come to understand that has been really valuable to you?

Is it like "After seeing first-hand the way asian countries do urban planning and public transportation I have a much better foundation for forming opinions about the way things should be done in the USA"?

Or "After spending a month living and eating as the Italians do, I had an epiphany about how to live a healthy, meaningful life and when I got back to the states I completely rearranged my method going through life, converting to a diet of wine and fish and making lots of new kinds of social connections that I otherwise would not have"?

Those (pretend) experiences sound profound, meaningful, and worthwhile.

It's not totally clear though that the benefits couldn't be had without living abroad by a sufficiently imaginative person with the correct literary diet etc. Then again, it would be the height of arrogance to think oneself so imaginative as to be able to comprehend every important facet of human culture from afar.

"It's not totally clear though that the benefits couldn't be had without living abroad by a sufficiently imaginative person with the correct literary diet etc." -

I see observations like this one as being totally off (and I may have been guilty of having slightly similar, although way more nuanced, views years ago). Can someone playing volleyball and being sufficiently imaginative understand/feel playing football (the European one)? From a theoretical point of view, they may have a sorta intellectual understanding of it. Both sports involve a ball, they are both team sports, there is a referee etc. But until you do it, you have no real understanding of the differences in the practice of the sports. You don't get, in the sense that you don't feel, the positions, the dynamics, the different energetic systems that are taxed.

And it is the same for traveling as described here. Sure, you can have a sorta understanding of Cuba, the mix of poverty and ambition, the political ideas that motivated the revolution and the quite different reality of day-to-day living. Sounds like Detroit, does not it? Maybe. Or you may think, getting back to my previous example, that you don't need to go to Brazil to experience playing football, you can just go to a park in SF, play a pick-up game, and get the same football experience as you would get in Brazil. Intuitively and logically, the answer is no, you cannot. Because it is not just the action, it is the action in a particular context.

When I was in Cuba years ago, I understood much better than I could have imagined, through a mix of observation and participation, the dynamics emerging from the interaction between top-down politics and local (black) markets. I understood much better (through observation!) how romantic relationship develops when people are looking for a way out and have developed quite ingenious ways of tricking "whales". Would have been possible to get the same understanding in my hometown or in the town I have been living in for more than 15 years? I don't think so.

I went to Argentina for some time. I got to know better how different cultures (Italian, Spanish, Native) may get mixed together, but still maintain visible and distinguishable cultural roots. And now I can see the mix and the roots in other situations and in other contexts.

Experiencing different cultures made my life incredibly (with respect to my previous perspective) more profound, interesting, and adventurous.

Eh, I would say the notion that the benefits of travel can be neatly summarized in a list of Reasons Why It's Worth Your Time is sort of beyond the point. In fact, I'd say that's one of my main takeaways from traveling so much: realizing the limitations of the Western "rationalist" worldview that demands logical reasons for everything, as if Man were a computer program.

It's a bit like asking someone what they've learned about life in the past 5 years. The answer is likely, a lot of things, more than one can conceivably verbalize at the drop of a hat or even verbalize at all. Language is a tool added on top of reality, not reality itself. As I explained above, it's about a much deeper expanding of one's perspectives, which has absolutely nothing to do with education or information. It's about realizing that different cultures have unique starting points as to what they consider valuable or admirable, then experiencing that for yourself.

This, I think, is something really relevant when it comes to the US. Most of us have a hard time divorcing the idea of wealth from excellence. Being rich alone is enough to earn you respect, no matter how vulgar or manipulative the source of wealth. Many other places (say, France or Japan) don't unify the two and the consequences are very observable.

I could say things like, "The public transportation system in Japan is amazing and makes me wish we had it in the US," or "the outdoor heaters in Paris make street culture much richer," but frankly these seem so insignificant that it's almost laughable to use them as a justification for traveling. It's akin to watching a deeply moving film and then suggesting others watch it because "the colors were nice." Not everything requires argumentative justification, nor should it.

So your experience invalidates someone else's experience?

It's ironic since what you said invalidates the 90% of "middle america" experience - where they never really leave hone/farm/city and country bumpkin life... doesn't mean it's wrong or write - but one can find enlightenment in travel that you take for granted.

I wouldn't consider living abroad for 7 years travelling (unless you change location often?), although I absolutely agree that actually living in some different country for years might deeply change you as a person.

However, I agree with OP that most travel stories (staying a few days to a month in the same place) sound very superficial and I also struggle to figure out why I should be travelling more often.

I moved around quite a bit. Depends on where you draw the line between traveling and living abroad, I suppose.

I would like to address several of your posts together, using my own experiences.

As a fellow Chinese who lived in Europe for a couple years and lived in several cities across Canada, each a couple years (so not 2 week travels):

1. It forced me to abandon my old friends and make new friends. Is this a good thing? not necessarily. An easy thing? absolutely not. A good thing? I think so. First of all, distance kills friendships. And I'm forced to make new friends when I feel lonely. When I have new friends, I learn about their cultures, about their hobbies. I spent 20+ years in China and never got drawn into bodybuilding, now I do it everyday because my new foreigner friends introduced me to it and it becomes an integrated part of my life and source of happyness. I still keep in touch with a few close close friends remotely, who lives all over the world now.

2. It forced me to do things I normally won't do/step out of my comfort zone. This is related to your comment:

>Which when I thought about it is super ridiculous, why can't I enjoy these things if I was going by myself??? Or put in another way, why can't we see our local city and people in our local community with the same freshness, open-ness and kindness as we'd if we were tourists or backpackers traveling in a distant land?

You certain can, but it's difficult. Human brain is designed to find patterns. We get used to things fast. There's no incentive for us to step out of our comfort zone in familiar environments. Once we know about a shortcut, we'll always take it. It's the not knowing of the shortcuts that forced me to be out of my comfort zone a lot (and back to 1, I wont force myself to make new friends if I dont have to). Things like, I public speak a lot more than before, I try actively making friends, and again I workout daily now.

3. By doing all 1 and 2, I gained new perspectives about myself. About what really makes me happy. If I didn't live abroad, I'll probably anchor my happiness a bit more on the traditional Chinese values such as having a big place in the tier 1 cities in China and having kid(s), and make sure the kid(s) excel in all the stuff, just like my high school classmates are doing right now. Now instead I saw so many different ways of living one's life. So many different ways of finding happyness, I incorpated those into how I define my happiness. I do things that truly make me happy rather than things my peers are doing. On the flip side, I dont give fucks to many things anymore, because I saw ppl who dont give fucks to those and they are fine. I wont know those people in my old city with my old circle, or at least not as many.

4. It satisfied my curiousity. You can know a lot about the world by means other than traveling and experiencing in person. But can you be sure the experience is the same? Different or not, I was curious to know.

5. Lastly, if I can change history about myself, I'd travel sooner in my life. This is probably related to 3. People say traveling broaden's one's perspectives. Concretely I think what that means is it makes you better at problem solving. With more perspectives, you either gain new approaches to solving problems, or some problems become too trivia you give little amount of fucks than you previously would, or some problems become irrelevant to you. One example I think is I'm not as easily influenced by commericals, marketing, or news as much. And many of those are intentionally stress inducing. When I see things that are utterly important in one culture are not important elsewhere, it helped me stop accepting messages that tell me what's important.

I dont have a foreigner partner btw lol.

>Just my humble opinions, most human beings have remarkably similar values across different culture

China, a country that idolises Americanism.

America, a country that is Americanism.

Take this from a New Zealander (a country that has mass immigration from China and a fanciful view of America), if you were to go to South America and stand on the street of a town in say Colombia, you might wonder if we were the same species.

You forgot to add:

America, a country and a people that shits on China. Daily.

Just ask anyone here on HN or Reddit. And Twitter, especially Twitter.