Today’s post is a guest article from my friend and education professional Craig Gonzales, who I had the good fortune to meet while he served as director of Princeton Review Thailand in Bangkok.

Cody, Brooke Ferguson & Craig Gonzales in Krabi, Thailand

But It Makes Us Seem Cool!

Having friends throughout the world makes me feel pretty cool. I remember having a coffee conversation with a group of friends in Memphis, Tennessee a few years back. We were on our way to the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago and got tired of the drive, so we stopped for some drinks with a friend. While chatting, our host dropped the “My friend in Georgia…” line. The young, arrogant boaster in me had to say, “oh yeah? I’ve been to Georgia…”

“Uhm… I meant the country,” she said while rolling her eyes.

“Yeah, me too. I spent time in Tbilisi after visiting my Peace Corps volunteer friends in Moldova and Azerbaijan,” I proudly remarked.

Shit like that is cool: To know what she is talking about, and to know that she thinks she is the only one who knows what she’s talking about.

There is a very real pride in knowing people around the world. The exoticness rubs off. It is like being attracted to the Brazilian exchange student or the British au pair. We are cool by association. Being from Texas is not cool if everyone around us is also from Texas, so we glean the coolness from our association with the Spanish, Qatari, or Thai friends that we have.

In addition to feeling cool, worldwide friends make our personal and professional lives more fulfilling. We can operate business remotely, we can rely on a warm bed and a tasty meal, and we can gain powerful insight into local business markets.

My young arrogance was not simply to seem cool to other people, though that was part of it, rather it was to make me more professionally capable and more culturally aware. But developing friendships takes time and energy. Networking is hard work, and if you know too many people, you run the risk of spreading yourself too thin.

The only surefire way to do this is to spend extensive time internationally. Spending several months in a new destination seems a requirement for this sort of true international experience. Sure, on my last trip to Darjeeling I met a lovely Tibetan lady in my hostel, but she is not really part of my network. She is someone I sometimes “like” on Facebook.

Superficial, one-off relationships are not what I am talking about.

But I Chat With People All Over!

We have conversations on the web: chat through MSN and Facebook, comment and communicate on Twitter and on blogs, and expose our language skills to those in language exchange programs. That is nice, but it is not what I am talking about.

Online friends share ideas. Good ideas—intelligent and helpful ideas. Relationships you maintain with other people online can be good, but they’re different from relationships with in-person friends, true friends.

Online friends are like study buddies or colleagues that enjoy each others’ company. The communication is intellectual, idealistic, or sophomoric. However it works, it’s narrow and important.

In-person friends do share these intellectually stimulating conversations, but they also share experiences. Money blogs and relationship blogs have individuals bearing their souls, so I am not saying web friends cannot be intimate, but true in-person friends grow together. They watch football together, go tubing together, eat breakfast together, and go through relationships together. They grow through time with each other in a beautiful way. This is something online friends cannot have, really, and it is something that some perpetual travelers and lifestyle designers may not realize we miss.

We spend time building a network, responding to blogs, and chatting on Twitter. But this is only a band-aid used to fill a very real void. Our “friendship void” makes us reach out however we can. In some cases, it is to people on the web. This is a very real experience and a very real problem.

Meeting online friends in real life (Cody, Carlos Miceli, Colin Wright, Ross Hill)

[Craig's] Personal Experience

The words ‘I’ and ‘me’ get thrown around far too often in blogs, but with that said, if I want to play the game, I should at least read the rulebook. I formalized my opinion based on the following experiences:

• While I was in high school. I had a core group of high school friends. I was part nerd, part bully, part social magnet, and part crescent fresh dude. I made many friends in high school. Most of my friends went to the same colleges, universities, military, or jobs after school. They all knew each other. I went to a school where I knew nobody. I left my friends behind for the great unknown.
• I went to university and had to make new friends. I stayed in contact with my high school friends, but they kept their relationships going. Throughout the four years of college, as I built new relationships and developed strong social skills and bonds with beautiful friends, my old friends grew closer. What I left after four years, they continued for eight.
• Upon graduation, I decided to go to graduate school. I didn’t know anyone in this new city. Most of my friends stayed in either Austin or Houston, Texas. They hung out all the time. They loved each other. I still talked to them. And sometimes I went to visit them. But throughout my entire time in graduate school, my high school friends kept their lives together, my college friends kept their lives together, and I made a brand new base of friends. In graduate school, most of my friends were undergrads. (I was still in that mindset.) In grad school, I realized that I needed some life experience, so once again, I moved away, and once again, I was the only person I knew making the decision I was making. I moved to Ghana.
• In Ghana, I made new friends. Wonderful expat and local friends. My high school friends now had almost 10 years together, my uni friends had six, and my grad school friends had already been building more than two years. I had these three groups of friends to keep up with, and surprisingly, while some came and went, there was always a core group, my core 3-6 friends, that always were together. They’d vacation together, they’d movie together, they’d have mid-week cookouts together. They grew up together. They knew each other so well. Their lives were beautiful. And I kept having to etch a new social life out of my experience. I had wanderlust.
• This experience happened to me three more times. Once, after Ghana, I took a job in a new city. I knew so few people, and had to make new friends. Then, after working for one year, I moved to Thailand. I was the only person I knew in Thailand, so I again had to make new friends. Then, after one-and-a-half years in Thailand, I moved to Singapore, where I had to start the whole process again. As you can see, this is a cycle that gets exhausting, because while I have known my new friends here in Singapore for three months, my old core groups (what is it now, five core groups of friends?) have become so close that they are experts on each other. They have spent so many hours together that they can finish each others sentences.

But Is It Worth It?

You have to decide that for yourself. Personally, I am pleased with my decision.

But I didn’t know the full consequences, mainly because I didn’t take the time to rationalize the cause-and-effect of this sort of lifestyle. I know more people than some of my friends; I know a more diverse group of people, and I have a wider perspective and more things to talk about. I love it. I love it so much. I would never trade it.

But I recognize what I have lost, and what I will not have with those I care about. For many people, family and friends are everything. Not just having them or chatting with them, but being with them. Daily, weekly, or monthly.

To have a work/life/relationship balance, you need to think of more than just money and freedom. You need to think about others. A lot of the location-independent bloggers have a positive, no-holds-barred approach to living life by one’s own means. I support that 100%. But our decisions affect not only ourselves but also our family and friends. And it is essential that we recognize and are comfortable with that transition—with that life.

For me, it is worth it. For you, I do not know.

But know that there are pros and cons to everything; there is nothing wrong with having a traditional home base and taking many mini-retirements. There is nothing wrong with taking your winter trip to Vail and your summer trip to Cancun. There is something wrong, however, with wishing you could live a different life but doing nothing to get that life.

Conclusion

Living a perpetual travel lifestyle or a location independent lifestyle has consequences. For many, the consequences are too dire to live with. That is fine. For others, those consequences are small when compared to the exciting life we live. As Socrates said, a truly wise man knows what he does not know. Consequently, a truly wise nomad knows all that he gives up in order to live this life, and is validated by his decision.

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Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: The Nomadic, Permanent Travel Lifestyle and the “Friendship Void”

Feature photo by Diego Cupolo.

This guest post comes from Jonny Gibaud, who writes at TheLifeThing.com

School – Work – Eat Some Strawberry Pie – Die.

Surely there is more to life and living than this? because if not then I want out. Shall we just take a moment to remind ourselves of the road “most traveled” and why getting out of the un-winnable rat race, whether by leaving the track completely or just moving to the outside lane where the views are better, should be high on our life goal list?

This Beautiful Thing Called Life

Life is not simply about surviving, for making do and settling for less then the best. Life is not something to be endured or regretted. Life is not being stuck in the middle of six lanes of traffic going in a direction you really don’t want to go with an aggressive backseat driver.

Life, conversely, is like imported Italian ice cream. Something to be enjoyed, to be experienced, to be toyed with, risked, investigated, challenged, experimented on and, over all, “Devoured” with lots of mess around the facial region.

Life is too short and too expansive to be trapped on autopilot on the superhighway that is the “Road Most Traveled.” How can we slam on the brakes and get off? How can we avoid falling into the trap of following the “Road most Traveled”, and instead go for a wander along the “Path” that is least followed? Away from the pollution and the noise, it is a much more beautiful experience.

The Road “Most” Traveled

I have found, in my experience, that the road “most” traveled is generally job-focused.

It is the old cliche of “go to school to get an education in order to get into college so that you can get a good job and start a good career, spend 50 years of your life working hard and then spend a few of the last years having fun with your walking stick before kicking the bucket.”

I don’t know about you but, like four-day-old seafood, that’s just not doing it for me.

In this case, the term “Job” can be supplemented for any individual aspect of a person’s life that takes an uneven share of a person’s focus.

Like farting in public, it just so happens that jobs and careers tend to be the main single-focus offenders to most people.

Life is not just about a career or any other single aspect of living, and yet those riding along on the road most traveled tend to focus solely on this facet whether this be a career, your relationships, your goals, your 10 Pin Bowling prowess or any of the many things other things people focus on.

Whether you are driving a Ferrari or a Banger, on the road most traveled you’re all going to end up in the same place.

I understand the logic for people focusing on their career early on, then maybe shifting focus to their family after that and then finally shifting focus to themselves when all the kids have left home, it’s just that this approach tends to lead to a very unbalanced life all the way through, where one aspect is focused on to the detriment of the other aspects of life.

This single focus of just one section of a person’s life, having it as the center of existence to one degree or another, is the key indicator of the road “most” traveled and leads to an unbalanced and ultimately, in my humble opinion, less interesting and overall fulfilling existence.

So what is the alternative? Well, here is a suggestion.

The Path “Least Traveled”

There will be uneven ground, there will be potholes, there might even be the odd wild cat, and yet all this is worth it because there will be spectacular views.

The path least traveled is just that, a path – a more risky and thus generally more eventful journey than the road tarmacked for the majority.

The path less traveled is like a Tightrope walking Cat performing in a very strong head wind. It is “Balance”-focused.

A “balanced” approach to life is not about not focusing on a job or any other single aspect of life but conversely focuses on seeing a job or career or any other aspect of one’s life as exactly that, one aspect of their life, not the aspect.

The path least traveled focuses on ensuring a healthy balance between all aspects of one’s life so that, in the same way that eating some greens with your red meat, you will enhance the experience.

The path “least traveled” understands that life is not and should not be defined by a single focus, but that ultimate happiness comes from experiencing everything life has to offer, at every stage.

Puffer Fish Jobs

Like the puffer fish, a job can give the illusion of being a monster with spines that requires your full attention, but in reality it is but a tiddler in the vast ocean of your potential experience.

A job, while important, is but a small part of everything that makes you who you are, and yet how many of us spend up to 100 hours a week or more focusing on careers to the detriment of all the other things that life has to offer. Your job will eventually be taken over by someone else, the company will go on without you, and you will be forgotten about fairly shortly after you leave. It is a brutal truth.

Unfortunately that is just the nature of the beast that is corporate life, it has sharp teeth, a rather bad nature and a very poor memory.

Knowing this then, are the hours you are pouring into this one avenue of your life really that well invested?

Is spending up to a 100 hours a week focusing on one small part of your life really time well invested?

People who travel the path less traveled see their career or any single aspect of their life as just one small part of their journey and existence and not the sole focus.

The path “least traveled” is an unconventional approach and people are right to say that with this more balanced approach one will probably not be able to build empires, reach the lofty career heights, be involved in every moment of their kid’s lives or spend a couple of years of pure self-focused retirement. This is true but…

It is worth remembering that empires do not last, careers are fleeting, children will not want you in their lives 100% of the time and retirements, like office parties, are vastly over-planned and under-executed.

The Key To A Full And Successful Existence

The key to a full and successful life is always to have balance. If you are currently doing 80 on the “Road Most Traveled” maybe it’s time to reflect on exactly how this is shaping your life and whether straying from the road and moving to the “Path Least Traveled”, having more balance in how you spend your time, finance and focus would improve your quality of life.

I have found that, in the most part, so-coined “Life Designers” are quite good at living in the moment and experiencing as many aspects of life as possible in balance, no matter what stage of life they are at. We could learn a lot from these guys on how to enjoy life and live more fully involved with everything it has to offer, no matter what your age or situation.

-If nothing else why not try it, if it’s not for you it is very easy to find your way back to the road again: just follow the noise.

Jonny Gibaud writes for the love of Helping People, Inspiring People, and Katie Holmes. He honed his unique writing style through his refusal to read for fear the words would attack him and borrowed his life philosophies from the local stray terrier but plans to give aspects of them back.

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A Reminder About Ramit Sethi’s Personal Finance Bootcamp

Remember to check out my video interview with Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Ramit has been the personal finance king for over four years, and his book is now a New York Times best-seller. If you want to get your finances in shape for 2010, sign up for his 6-week bootcamp through Thrilling Heroics and get $75 off (details here). Here’s what you’ll get:

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Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: The Road “Most” Traveled Is Frickin’ Dangerous Man