Jul 30, 2024 5 min read Wandering 101

Wandering is Good for You

Manhattan tile job.

Note: This is my personal experience of the benefits of wandering, based on tens of thousands of miles walked on four continents, in dozens of countries, and every state in the US. It also takes into account a thousand hours of reading and study, and hundreds of conversations with mystics, wildlings, and mad scientists from around the world.

It is not yet empirically validated.

There are few behaviors as holistically good for a human being as just wandering around. It strengthens the body and the mind. But it's viewed with skepticism because it isn't 'productive' within the framework of industrial society.

The thing is, for 90% of our history, we humans used wandering as our primary means of gathering resources. It was a core behavior loop, and quite literally what made us human. It's no wonder we miss it.

While you and I do our wandering in the industrial context - we're not out looking for a berry patch or hunting a wooly mammoth - we can still reap the benefits by using wandering as our ancestors did: to gather resources.

Find a new place to get a cup of coffee. Buy a pen at an unfamiliar store. Look for a food item you've never tried before.

By imitating the behavior of our ancestors as best we can, we get most of the benefits with significantly less risk than hunter-gatherer wandering. Here's 4 of those benefits.

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Wandering is using intuition to move through territory.

1 - Wandering Builds Strength and Endurance

Step count.

Stability.

Stamina.

Strength.

Walking improves all of them. That’s a big part of why New Yorkers live longer than the national average.

And while it is possible to walk without wandering, and wander without walking, these two things are deeply intertwined. We evolved as endurance hunters and explorers. Walking is our thing.

That makes wandering a great way to build and maintain a basic level of fitness without having to 'exercise'. (Though exercising in addition to wandering is obviously good.)

2 - Wandering is Relaxing

The wandering of our ancestors was often food-focused with life/death stakes. We're lucky we live when and where calories are relatively abundant, allowing our wandering to be low-stakes, and thus relaxing for the body and brain.

Wandering takes input from the unconscious mind, and in order to do that the wanderer has to find a playful and curious state of mind, which can sometimes last for days after we wander, stoking our feelings of wonder, excitement, and possibility.

Wandering is a form of freedom. And freedom is relaxing.

3 - Wandering Makes You Smarter

When we move around in familiar (and safe) territory, we often fall back on a brain system called the default mode network, which saves mental resources by putting our navigation on auto-pilot. The problem is that this information can get out of date. Or leave out important stuff that's just off the edge of the map.

Wandering encourages us to follow our intuition, and gives us time to be curious about the world around us, which has a way of leading us to important stuff that we don't know we don't know, and that we'd struggle to find through our normal channels.

By taking you into new territory, wandering builds new neural pathways in the brain, and also creates new areas of your map of reality in the mind.

By showing you that people do things differently in different places, wandering is fuel for the self-reflective mind to challenge what we think we know, and grow past our old limitations, helping us to do more with less, becoming more confident, curious, and kind-hearted across a wide range of situations. And just to spell it out, getting smarter means creating better outcomes for your future self.

4 - Wandering Yields Bootye

The EROI on wandering in the modern world is trash. You're not going to find a $100 bill every time you go out. It's not a replacement for work. But that doesn't mean it doesn't reward the wanderer.

Wandering scales with your budget, so you can go out with zero dollars, or with $1,000. Money in your pocket definitely gives you options and access, but it also pushes off some of the realness of exploring the world in search of resources, and washes out some of the brightest tones.

The goal of modern-day wandering is not to acquire bags of stuff (or like our ancestors, a caloric surplus), the goal is to go out in the world and find beauty, horror, and inspiration. Whatever makes you feel, whatever makes you think. Whatever gets you out of the mundane and into the arcane.

The goal of wandering is to see the world and yourself more clearly, and to share your resources with the people you encounter (be that a smile, your attention, or your money) and to trust that more than enough will come back.

It always does.

When I say wandering generates bootye, I'm not saying wandering will help you stack cash. It won't. But wandering will make you rich like a Caribbean pirate, because the quality of moments you live gets soooo high.

What we industrialized humans miss from our wandering days is the joy of finding something in the wild, whether that be a warm bowl of pasta, a cold sip of water from a drinking fountain, or a shared joke with a stranger. And this kind of bootye the world offers up to the wanderer by the chestful.

It makes you feel alive.