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.
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.