Dan Gilbert's TED talk covers people having miserable experiences and synthesising happiness to make them feel good. That makes it not reliable, travel could be an instance of that.
It should be possible through behavioural studies and observation to prove whether there is any substance to "Travel is fatal to bigotry" or "You can't fail to come away from traveling inspired with a fresh perspective", and whether that makes any difference to anything.
"Traveling opens your eyes to some of the real problems people face", does it? "gives you the opportunity to come up with solutions to tackle those" and do people use that opportunity?
$22k and 1 year is a lot of opportunity cost. This is argued by someone who travelled easily from a powerful country, with an iPod and laptop, to surf, party and program while meeting Ruby programmers, and claiming travel is a way to "get out of the echo chamber"(!) From someone who talks about how possible it would be to turn it into a fulltime lifestyle doing the same consulting he did to pay for it in the first place, and after all that singing the praises, doesn't do so.
Is it really so downvotable to question how much is hype, and how much substance?
Something I learned is that there are many things in life you cannot predict or plan for, and that the more you expose yourself to unfamiliar situations, the more likely you are to encounter interesting situations and outcomes. On your travels you might encounter the person who becomes your next business partner, your future intimate partner, your dream job, a sense of perspective about one or more things (one which you may have never realised you lacked), a particularly amusing/terrifying/depresssing/interesting situation, etc.
It is incredibly difficult, I should think, to quantify and measure any of this. However, I'm fairly certain very few exciting or interesting things, or things with growth potential, happen to people who spend all day at home and/or in the office compared to those who go off to explore the world.
And yes, you may also discover nothing of interest, and then you'll have "wasted" your time. So, how risk aversive are you? How important is it to you that you need new experiences - how sure are you of this if you haven't had those experiences? Tricky question. My philosophy has become "let's find out rather than theorize" and it's always been the right choice.
I will say that I think there's too much emphasis on travelling internationally to acquire these experiences. I suspect the type of people taking these trips and developing these exciting experiences and assuming it's about international travel might not do much travelling in their local environment and confuse the international environment as being the source of the new experiences, rather than their effort at exploring new environments.
I also think it's a bit naive to accept Mark Twain's observations about his world as necessarily applying directly today's world; the population of the US in 1861 when Twain started travelling was around 26 million: the diversity and interestingness of a given location was very different from what you have today (quite literally, any given place will have 150 years of additional history and I can guarantee it'll be far more interesting than the 150 years preceeding 1861!).
That being said, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine you're more likely to have interesting and unusual experiences in cultures or locales vastly different from what you're used to than otherwise.
There might be an opportunity cost but life is short. On your death bed you're more likely to fondly remember the time you had that delicious cheese in Paris, or lived with that little family in the Himalayas. Certainly more fondly than the nine months toiling away in a cubicle.
In short give it try and find out. But don't bother if you can't summon a positive attitude, you'll just waste your time.
It should be possible through behavioural studies and observation to prove whether there is any substance to "Travel is fatal to bigotry" or "You can't fail to come away from traveling inspired with a fresh perspective", and whether that makes any difference to anything.
"Traveling opens your eyes to some of the real problems people face", does it? "gives you the opportunity to come up with solutions to tackle those" and do people use that opportunity?
$22k and 1 year is a lot of opportunity cost. This is argued by someone who travelled easily from a powerful country, with an iPod and laptop, to surf, party and program while meeting Ruby programmers, and claiming travel is a way to "get out of the echo chamber"(!) From someone who talks about how possible it would be to turn it into a fulltime lifestyle doing the same consulting he did to pay for it in the first place, and after all that singing the praises, doesn't do so.
Is it really so downvotable to question how much is hype, and how much substance?