Why I Travel Alone and Why You Should Try It at Least Once

Why I Travel Alone and Why You Should Try It at Least Once

There’s a particular kind of silence you experience when standing alone in a train station in Jeonju at dawn, with nothing but your backpack and a map folded in your jacket pocket. After thirty years of chasing stories across newsrooms, fighting deadlines, and constantly being accountable to editors and audiences, I found myself at fifty-eight sitting in that station—and I realized I had never truly traveled alone before. That morning marked the beginning of something that would reshape how I understand the world, myself, and what it means to be present.

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Last updated: 2026-03-23

Most people, when they hear I travel alone now, assume I’ve become some sort of adventurer or spiritual seeker. The truth is simpler and, I think, more meaningful. I discovered that traveling alone isn’t about escape or reinvention. It’s about finally listening to the rhythm of your own life without the metronome of other people’s expectations. In this essay, I want to explore why I travel alone, why you should try it at least once, and what this particular form of solitude can teach us about living more deliberately.

The Myth of Traveling Alone: Loneliness vs. Solitude

Let me address the elephant in the room first. When I tell people I travel alone, I often see a flicker of concern cross their faces—as if I’m confessing to something brave or troubling. The assumption is that traveling alone must be lonely, and loneliness is something to be avoided at all costs. But after years of covering human interest stories, I learned that loneliness and solitude are entirely different experiences.

Loneliness is what you feel when you’re surrounded by people but fundamentally disconnected. I felt it many times in crowded Seoul newsrooms, in rooms full of my peers, yet isolated by the weight of my own thoughts. Solitude, by contrast, is a state of being fully present with yourself and your surroundings. When you travel alone, you aren’t escaping people—you’re escaping the noise that prevents genuine connection, both with others and with yourself.

During my KATUSA service years ago, I learned something about solitude in military contexts that never left me. Even in the most communal environments, soldiers develop an interior landscape—a private space where they process their experiences. Traveling alone as a civilian feels similar, except you’re choosing that solitude rather than having it imposed. And that choice makes all the difference.

The paradox is this: when you travel alone and embrace solitude, you often end up connecting more meaningfully with the people you meet. Without the buffer of a companion, you’re more likely to start conversations with locals, ask genuine questions, and listen intently to the answers. I’ve had more profound exchanges with strangers while traveling solo than I ever did on group tours or vacations with friends.

Why I Travel Alone: Reclaiming Time and Attention

In my three decades as a journalist, I was trained to observe everything. But observation requires a particular kind of undivided attention—the ability to notice not just what happens, but the texture of how it happens. The color of light on wet pavement at 6 AM. The specific cadence of a vendor’s greeting. The way elderly people in a café hold their spoons. These details don’t matter to a story’s structure, but they matter to understanding a place in your bones.

When you travel with others, even people you love, you’re constantly negotiating. Where to eat, what to see, when to move, when to rest. These negotiations are natural and often pleasant, but they fragment your attention. You’re never fully immersed in a moment because part of your mind is always managing the group dynamic. Traveling alone removes that layer of mediation entirely.

I discovered that I travel alone because I want to experience a place on its own terms, not filtered through anyone else’s preferences or pace. In Busan last spring, I spent an entire afternoon in a small museum dedicated to Korean fishing culture. Most travel companions would have found it quiet and slow. I found it meditative. That afternoon reshaped how I understand the relationship between humans and the sea—something I’m still thinking about months later.

There’s also a practical freedom to traveling alone. You can change your mind. You can stay three nights somewhere you planned to visit for one, or leave after an hour if it doesn’t speak to you. You can eat dinner at 10 PM or noon. You can walk until your feet ache or sit in one café for six hours reading and writing. This isn’t indulgence; it’s attentiveness. You’re training yourself to notice what you actually want, rather than what you think you should want.

The Independence Factor: Self-Reliance as Meditation

I won’t romanticize it—there are challenges to traveling alone. Figuring out transportation, navigating language barriers, troubleshooting problems without a sounding board. But these challenges are precisely why you should try it at least once. They teach you something about yourself that comfort never will.

After decades in structured newsroom environments where roles and hierarchies were clear, I learned more about my own capabilities in solo travel than I had in years. When your GPS fails, when you take a wrong train, when you need to communicate something important in a language you don’t speak—you discover reserves of resourcefulness you didn’t know you had. This isn’t just about practical problem-solving. It’s about understanding your own resilience.

There’s a particular confidence that comes from successfully navigating an unfamiliar place alone. It’s not arrogance; it’s the quiet knowledge that you can handle unexpected situations. That you don’t need someone else to complete your experience. That you’re sufficient unto yourself. This is something meditation teachers talk about but rarely articulate clearly—the knowledge that you are fundamentally whole on your own.

I noticed this most acutely when I got injured during a solo trip to the Seoraksan mountains. A twisted ankle, nothing serious, but enough to need help getting down. What struck me wasn’t the injury but how naturally help appeared—other hikers, a ranger, local people—once I accepted I needed it. Traveling alone doesn’t mean never asking for help. It means developing the clarity to know the difference between help you need and company you want. And that distinction changes how you move through the world.

Why You Should Try It at Least Once: The Invitation

I want to be direct about why I’m writing this. It’s not to evangelize solo travel as the ultimate life experience. It’s because I’ve spent three decades covering stories about human flourishing, and I’ve noticed something: people rarely regret doing difficult things alone. They regret avoiding them.

If you’re considering traveling alone—even considering considering it—I’m inviting you to lean into that instinct. Whether you’re in your thirties navigating early career uncertainty, in your fifties reassessing what matters, or anywhere in between, traveling alone teaches lessons that guided group experiences simply cannot. You learn what you’re made of. You discover what you actually enjoy versus what you think you should enjoy. You practice solitude in a way that makes regular life less lonely, because you understand yourself better.

Start small if that appeals to you. A three-day trip to a neighboring city. A week exploring a region you’ve always wondered about. The destination doesn’t matter nearly as much as the structure: you, your choices, your pace, your attention. That’s the formula.

And you’ll be surprised what you notice when you’re not sharing observations with someone else. How the quality of light changes hour by hour. How strangers’ lives intersect in small, beautiful ways. How a single meal can taste different depending on the exact moment you’re eating it—not just physically different, but existentially different, because of the consciousness you bring to it.

The Deeper Work: What Solitude Reveals

Here’s what no travel guidebook will tell you: traveling alone is inherently contemplative work. Without external stimulation from companions, you’re forced to reckon with your own interior life. This can be uncomfortable. In my early solo trips, I realized how much I’d filled silence with noise—podcasts, news, other people’s thoughts—specifically to avoid sitting with my own.

The gift of traveling alone is that it creates space for that reckoning. You notice patterns in how you think. You understand your fears more clearly, separate from how you perform them for others. You get curious about your own desires in a way that regular life doesn’t encourage. All of this is valuable introspection, and it doesn’t require dramatic realizations or life-changing epiphanies. Sometimes it’s just the quiet knowing that you enjoy morning coffee in a particular way, and you’re allowed to arrange your life around that preference.

I’ve met travelers of all backgrounds while moving through the world alone—a retired teacher from Daegu exploring Southeast Asia, a young man from Incheon traveling through Europe, an elderly woman from Gwangju who’d just decided at seventy to see what she’d been missing. What united us wasn’t age or background. It was the recognition that we were each attending to our own lives with intention. That’s what traveling alone cultivates: intentionality.

This intentionality doesn’t stay confined to travel. It follows you home. You start noticing how you spend your regular days. You become more deliberate about which obligations you honor and which you can release. You’re less likely to fill weekend hours with activities that don’t serve you, simply because you’ve tasted what it feels like to structure time entirely around your own values.

Practical Wisdom for Your First Solo Journey

If this resonates and you’re thinking about traveling alone for the first time, let me offer some thoughts based on what I’ve learned and observed.

First: safety is real, and it’s worth thinking about clearly rather than fearfully. Research your destination. Tell someone where you’re going and maintain basic check-ins. Trust your instincts about people and situations. But don’t let fear prevent you from going. The statistical reality is that traveling alone is quite safe, particularly if you’re making thoughtful choices. What often masquerades as concern for safety is really cultural messaging that women (and to some extent, men) shouldn’t be alone, shouldn’t be independent, shouldn’t prioritize their own experiences. Separate fact-based precautions from fear-based limiting beliefs.

Second: you don’t need much. One of the surprising discoveries in traveling alone is how little you actually require to be content. I travel with a single carry-on for weeks now. This simplicity itself becomes meditative. You’re not managing possessions; you’re focusing on experience. The less you’re attached to stuff, the more present you can be.

Third: loneliness will visit, and it’s okay. You might have a moment—in a restaurant, in your accommodation, on a long transit—where you feel the weight of being alone. This is human. Notice it. Feel it. It usually passes quickly, and it always teaches you something about yourself. Often it just means you’re tired or hungry or you need to move your body.

Fourth: you don’t need a big purpose. You don’t have to travel alone to “find yourself” or complete some spiritual quest. You can just travel alone because it interests you. Because you want to see something. Because you need a break from your regular life. The meaning emerges from the experience itself, not from whether you’re accomplishing some predetermined goal.

Conclusion: An Invitation to Begin

When I think about why I travel alone now, and why I believe you should try it at least once, it comes down to this: in the second half of life, the most valuable commodity isn’t achievement or accumulation. It’s genuine aliveness—the experience of being fully present in your own existence. Traveling alone cultivates that aliveness in a particular, powerful way.

It’s not the only way to achieve it. But it’s one of the most direct ways. It removes mediation. It requires your full participation. It teaches you that you are sufficient. And it gives you memories that belong entirely to you, not filtered through someone else’s experience or perspective.

You don’t need a big reason to start. You don’t need to be a particular kind of person—adventurous, spiritual, independent. You just need curiosity about what it might feel like, and willingness to find out. If that curiosity is stirring in you, I’m inviting you to listen to it. Pick a place. Make a plan. Go. See what you discover about the world, and more importantly, what you discover about yourself when you’re the only person responsible for your own experience.

That’s the gift of traveling alone. That’s why I do it. And that’s why I believe you should try it at least once.