Young people were burned out. Then they quit the rat race to travel

Yeah, there is a _well trod_ backpacker circuit through the developing world. I went traveling with nothing but a well worn copy of Lonely Planet, but you can do it with trip advisor now, they have hostels and such covered very well.

Stories about different generations are generational. If you're old enough, you remember similar stories about Gen X. In 10-20 years, you'll read similar stories about the next generation.

Sorry Gen Z, travel wasn't invented in 2022

I don't think "Gen Z" is making this claim. CNN is just feeding into your irrational annoyance for younger generations. It's an evergreen topic in the media that gets clicks. I'm sure some people are downright angry and these youths are too lazy to work, or whatever, just like the older ones who lost it towards one of the travelers in the article. Ragebait is something mass media is good at, after all.

I personally hope the article inspires someone to stop and smell the roses somewhere new, even if it is just across town, no matter which generation they're from.

I thought the influencer thing was mostly a show and not actually making any money?

In the 1970s it was suitcases (or backpacks) full of Levis jeans and/or American rock / blues / jazz albums.

How are you making money in travel without be being in hospitality? I can't imagine hotels are colluding in a conspiracy like you suggest or airlines.

Actuslly, idk who could be?

I went bankrupt after a lay off (no college debt, stupid amounts of credit card debt accrued before I was even 20), so I had no debt, then at my next job, compulsively saved money because I was afraid of getting in debt again and getting laid off again, that job was a disaster that I hated every day. Saved up a few thousand dollars, finished my lease on my apartment, put my stuff in storage, parked my car at my parents house, and bought a one way ticket to Guatemala with no plan.

You can do it _fairly_ cheaply if you have no debt, are healthy, have no obligations, and have a place to crash for a while when you get back and you have useful job skills so are relatively assured of finding a job quickly. I think I spent $5000 in 3 months including plane tickets there and back, and with me not particularly making an effort to save money (some nights staying at nicer hotels and hostels, paying for nicer buses, going out to eat a lot). I probably could have done it for half that if I really pushed it and stayed at cheaper hostels and made more of my own food (keeping in mind this was 2012.) and could have really extended the trip if I worked. I had a friend who stayed on the backpacker circuit for 2 years taking jobs at random hostels and farms.

Meanwhile a 26 year old in the trades has probably been working 50-70 hours/week for the last 7 or 8 years. Has taken a total of about 30 paid days off in that time. Is just reaching the point where they are able to claw some autonomy and free time out of their job.

To me this article fits pretty cleanly into that huge category of "journalists write about the experiences that they and their friends have."

Lots of people burn out in high school and don't really come face to face with it until a few stops further down the "tracks".

From experience I can say the burn out doesn't start at 26. If you've been an academic high achiever all your life burnout is real and the fuse is probably lit when you're a preteen. Then you graduate, get your first real job and the last bit of fuel is finally extinguished.

In my consort, if you didn't follow the "program" you were written off as a lazy slacker.

I don't know how old you are, but my impression is that high school to good college to job pipeline is significantly more intense and stressful than it used to be.

This comment seems very holier-than-thou. Some people are burned out by their degree. Burnout is highly personal - I've no doubt I could've succeeded in a law degree but it is completely orthogonal to my natural interests and would have been gravely taxing.

I've personally known people who pulled 10-12 hours of school/studying since probably the age of 16 - to get to an elite university program and then to go to an elite firm only to burn out around two years in.

Take the “burnout” with a grain of salt. I think what actually happens is many people graduate, work a menial, entry-level job for a couple years and start wondering is this really it? 40 more years of this?

As for financing, I backpacked Europe in my 20’s and it was pretty straightforward. After graduating, most people I knew lived in super nice, downtown apartment paying 2-3X what I was paying in a less lively area with a couple roommates. You do that for a couple years and you’ve got plenty of cash - not to mention I spent less money traveling abroad than I did just existing in the US.

Taking that extended time off was one of the best decisions I ever made. You talk to any European and they’re shocked that Americans never take more than 2 weeks of vacation. It’s a shame more people don’t get to experience it.

I urge you to talk to some of these young people to understand the issues they face. Work is far from the only source of burnout, but now more than ever, people are expected to be more productive for less wages. Newbies in the workforce tend to have the least say in their schedules, what they do, have the lowest pay and have the most pressure from different people close to them to follow their desired career trajectory.

As someone who manages many developers who are 26 and younger, they are not "burned out." They are reaching for "burnout" as a convenient, widely-accepted-in-this-industry excuse for not delivering expected work. I've never seen this kind of behavior from non-Gen Z.

I guess you're assuming that getting a degree can't be as bad or worse than the job itself, and 4+4 years is plenty. I suppose even 4 years is plenty. Also I think this was in the UK, not the USA. Who says they did have debt, or a lot of it?

My huh? moment was the quitting after 9 months in (what sounded like) their first job, but I'm on the other side of the spectrum, I suppose I should've jumped ship earlier a couple times in my life and not try to wait it out.

4 years is plenty of time to burn out. I burned out on competitive high school sports faster then that. There is also a quarter life phenomenon.

I took 3 months to go backpacking in Central America after I hit a dead end in my career. I talked about it in the first interview when I came back, and I think we spend more time talking about my experiences backpacking than we talked about programming in that interview. I also met my wife (who was also backpacking) on that trip, now happily married with 3 kids and making about 4.5x more a year than I was when I quit to go travel.

I think there is a point, probably somewhere after 6-9 months where employers might see it less as a fun 'sabbatical' and more of like "this person doesn't really want a job", though.

I took a year off to travel in my 20s. When I was done it took 6 months to find a job in my field. I then took 2 years off to travel in my late 30s. And it took 1 month to find a job in my field. The companies that used that time off against me I probably wouldn't be happy working there anyway. The others that were curious about that special time were regaled with stories of being a fish out of water or finding solutions to real problems with nothing but duct tape and hand tools.

And, yes returning to a fixed, landbased, lifestyle has not been easy but it works for us, right at this moment. I know I can travel again. I've seen the greener grass and know I can leave this life behind and go back to it at any time.

I spent my twenties hitchhiking the world, with not even a van, I was often sleeping in my tent or at mosques and gurdwaras. Along the way I made a lot of connections and I learned several languages to proficiency. Hitchhiking is, after all, talking to people every day, often relative elites in their countries if they own their own car. That international experience eventually got me steady work, to this day. My tree-planting, fruit-picking, busking, or Christmas-lights-rigging friends generally managed to move on to very respectable careers, or simply living from renting out property they bought -- if you were making a couple of hundred euro a day, but living on 5€ as a shoestring traveler, you could eventually buy a flat and begin the real estate investment game. We all frequently joke about how bourgeois we have become today.

That said, my circle was all Eastern Europeans, and things might be harder for USA Americans where cost of living is high and blank stretches on your CV are viewed with suspicion.

It is definitely consumption, and is uniquely thought of by some as either not being consumption or being more virtuous than purchasing things, and simultaneously being a status marker.

I wonder about your definition of consumption and I fear it might too all-encompassing to signify anything meaningful.

Most of the resources people are competing for are also produced by humans, so I don't think that reducing the population would necessarily improve the collective standard of living, because you reduce the supply of goods and services just as much - or more - than you reduce the demand.