Chucking it 201: What are your Obligations, Really?

In a previous post, we raised a series of broad questions designed to get you thinking about whether chucking it all is right for you. And we posed them in the order we suggest you think about them. The first in-depth post explored whether you actually like travel. Here’s the second piece of the puzzle: what obligations, real and imagined, stand in your way? (We’ll discuss finances in a later post; for now we are concentrating on all of the things that keep you from travel.)

What Do We Owe to Others?

This is a big question, and one on which philosophical contractualists have a lot to say. We’ll keep it simple here. Everyone’s life is an enmeshed network of dependence: we need people to grow the food we eat, we need a job, we need to feel needed. Those obligations can be joyful (raising children, at least some days) or un-joyful (taking care of a spouse with a broken leg), freely assumed or thrust upon you.

Before you consider chucking it all, you will need to take these obligations into account. We thought a lot about whether we were selfish, about whether the itinerant life, with its lack of connection to a community, would make us less virtuous. (Yes, we really did; we’re that pretentious.) We found a series of thought-experiments useful in coming to the decision to leave the life we had created over the years. Here are the questions we asked ourselves about family-, career-, and community-based obligations:

• Did I and do I willingly accept this obligation? Is this the right obligation for me, now?
• If I disencumbered myself of this obligation, what would happen? Would someone else take it up? Does it genuinely need taking up? i.e.,
• Is this really an obligation, or have I taken it on for some other reason? What can be negotiated? (We discovered many of this sort, chains we had forged for ourselves over the years without testing reality.)

For some obligations, the answers are obvious: if you need to take care of your family, you need to take care of your family. Though even here, we suggest trying to think of multiple options to create more of what you want.

Renegotiating Obligations

John was retired when we decided to chuck it all and travel the world. Laurel was not, and struggled with a sense of obligation to her job. (This is something almost every potential retiree has to face: how can they get along without us?!) She had to think carefully about what she really wanted from life, what she had left to contribute at work, and how best to time things to minimise disruption. John had to decide whether to sell all the books he had amassed over an entire scholarly career – owning them felt like a fairly substantial obligation in its own right. In the end, we realised that we wanted to travel more than we wanted the other things. And we came to see that many of our obligations were either illusory or unwelcome. We consulted with many of the interested parties about how and when and also why we were planning to opt out.

You will need to be creative during this process, and we certainly do not recommend chucking people when you chuck it all. For instance, what if you promised to come visit the extended family every Christmas? Could you do some part of your job, or finish your degree, remotely? What if you postponed leaving until you had planned and celebrated your best friend’s 75th birthday? How about taking your kids out of school for a year to travel? These conversations can be awkward and painful, as they involve people talking about what matters most to them. But having them openly will mean that you feel better about any decision you make.

What If Now Isn’t The Right Time?

If your obligations really do prevent you from chucking it all, don’t despair! Our advice, taken from an old Soviet saying, is to ‘always be working on a tunnel’. If long-term international travel really is your dream, scheme and plot so that you are ready to pounce when the moment arrives. Make a plan to reduce and renegotiate obligations that are uncongenial, save money, start getting rid of extraneous things. And keep your eye on what it is that you really want.