For years, I assumed that if travel was becoming less exciting, the answer was obvious:
Go somewhere new.
A different country. A different city. A different coastline. Somewhere I hadn’t seen before.
For a long time, that worked.
There was genuine excitement in discovering Southeast Asia: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines. The same was true closer to home. Over the years I travelled around Britain through Cornwall, Devon, Dartmoor, the Peak District, the Lake District, the Welsh coast, Northumberland, Shropshire and many places in between.
I wanted to see them.
The curiosity was real.
But eventually something changed.
I became less interested in travelling somewhere new while becoming more interested in repeatedly exploring places I already knew.
That seemed contradictory.
Surely somewhere 300 miles away that I had never visited should be more interesting than somewhere five miles from home that I had walked twenty times?
Yet increasingly it wasn’t.
A road trip could feel like effort for surprisingly little reward. Meanwhile, a familiar local landscape could still pull me back because I had discovered some forgotten history, an obscure ruin, another footpath, a photographic possibility or simply wanted to see the same place in a different season.
The geography was becoming more familiar.
But the experience was becoming richer.
Eventually I realised that I had been treating two very different forms of discovery as though they were the same.
Breadth and depth.
That distinction may explain far more than why my enthusiasm for conventional travel has declined.
It may also explain why my everyday life at home works so much better than the everyday baseline I have repeatedly created abroad.
I call the missing variable The Depth Deficit.
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