ARI Research Essay No. 01

ARI Research Essay No. 01

What Does It Mean to “Find Your True Self” Through Travel?

⏤ Self-Discovery as Interpretation and Choice, Rather Than Revelation

Jenna Hong, Ph.D.

Authentica Research Institute (ARI)

July 2026

This research essay revisits the familiar association between travel and self-discovery through established discussions of existential authenticity in tourism studies. Rather than proposing a new theoretical framework, it asks what we actually mean when we say that travel allows us to “find our true selves.”

1. Travel and self-discovery: a familiar pairing

“I travelled and found my true self.”

Variations of this statement appear everywhere: in travel memoirs, destination marketing, lifestyle media, and self-development discourse. Travel is frequently imagined as more than temporary mobility or leisure. It is presented as an opportunity to leave behind the routines of everyday life, encounter unfamiliar places, and discover aspects of oneself that had previously remained hidden.

The idea is intuitively appealing. Yet it also raises a series of deceptively simple questions. If the person encountered while travelling is the “true” self, what does that make the person who existed before departure? Is the self who fulfils everyday roles—as an employee, parent, child, colleague, or friend—somehow less authentic? And when the journey ends and ordinary life resumes, what happens to the supposedly more authentic self discovered elsewhere?

Tourism scholarship has long approached questions of this kind through the concept of authenticity. Earlier discussions largely focused on whether toured objects, places, or cultural representations could be considered genuine. Wang’s (1999) influential account of existential authenticity redirected attention away from the authenticity of objects and toward tourists’ modes of being. What mattered was no longer only whether the encountered object was “real,” but whether tourism activities might enable people to experience themselves, their bodies, and their relationships in ways they perceived as more authentic.

This shift provides a useful starting point for reconsidering the language of self-discovery. To “find oneself” through travel need not imply that a fully formed and immutable true self has been hidden somewhere beneath the surface of everyday life. It may instead describe a process through which people come to see themselves differently under altered circumstances.

2. Is the “true self” something waiting to be uncovered?

The language of self-discovery carries an interesting metaphor. To discover something usually implies that it already exists. We discover a buried object, a distant star, or something once lost but now recovered. Applied to the self, the metaphor suggests that somewhere beneath social expectations, routine obligations, and everyday roles lies a more genuine version of who we really are.

Human lives, however, are rarely so easily divided.

People behave differently at work and at home, with close friends and with strangers, alone and in groups. Responsibility may bring forward one aspect of a person, while uncertainty brings forward another. None of these selves is necessarily false. They emerge in different relational and situational contexts, and together they form part of a person’s lived identity.

Debates on existential authenticity in tourism have developed through similar tensions. Early formulations highlighted tourism as a setting in which individuals might temporarily escape ordinary roles, experience greater freedom, and reconnect with desired forms of selfhood (Wang, 1999; Kim & Jamal, 2007). Later scholarship questioned the implicit assumption that the self at home is necessarily inauthentic while a “real” self waits to be discovered elsewhere (Shepherd, 2015). Discussions of existentialism and tourism have consequently become more attentive to how travel experiences are interpreted in relation to a person’s broader life rather than treating the destination itself as a space that automatically produces authenticity (Kirillova, 2019).

From this perspective, self-discovery through travel may be better understood not as the excavation of a hidden inner essence, but as an encounter with possibilities and limitations that may be less visible under familiar conditions.

The distinction matters. It allows us to avoid turning the travelling self and the everyday self into opposites—one genuine, the other artificial. The more productive question is not which one is “real,” but what becomes newly visible when familiar circumstances change.

3. Why travel can still make us see ourselves differently

Rejecting the idea of a hidden, essential self does not mean denying that travel can be personally significant. Travel may not magically reveal who someone “really” is, but it can alter the conditions under which people encounter themselves.

One of the most obvious changes concerns the organisation of everyday life. Daily routines are structured by timetables, obligations, habitual relationships, and expectations. Many choices are made almost automatically because the surrounding conditions are familiar.

Travel temporarily loosens some of those structures. Seemingly ordinary decisions—when to wake, where to go, what to eat, whether to continue or turn back—may become visible again as choices. Plans fail. People get lost. Communication becomes difficult. Weather changes. Physical limits become apparent. Unexpected help, disappointment, conflict, or generosity may interrupt carefully designed itineraries.

These moments do not necessarily turn travellers into different people. They may instead make habitual reactions easier to notice.

How do I respond when plans collapse?
How comfortable am I asking for help?
How much uncertainty can I tolerate?
What do I choose when nobody else has already decided for me?
What kinds of places, activities, or relationships actually matter to me?

Tourism research has repeatedly connected non-routine environments and challenging activities with possibilities for self-exploration and existential reflection (Kim & Jamal, 2007; Kirillova, 2019). Yet these possibilities are more usefully understood as contingent than automatic. Travel does not produce self-knowledge by itself. Rather, unfamiliar conditions may interrupt habitual ways of acting and create opportunities to notice one’s responses more clearly.

Travel also changes bodily and sensory experience. People walk at different speeds and distances, eat unfamiliar foods, sleep differently, encounter new climates, hear unfamiliar languages, and experience spaces through smell, sound, temperature, fatigue, and physical movement. Tourism experience is therefore not simply cognitive. It is embodied.

Buchmann et al. (2010), for example, show how experiences of authenticity may emerge through the intersection of place, relationships, prior knowledge, and embodied encounters rather than through objects alone. What makes a journey memorable may consequently have less to do with the objective extraordinariness of a destination than with the particular configuration of place, people, bodily experience, and personal meaning through which it was lived.

4. We do not discover ourselves alone

Popular images of self-discovery often depict the solitary traveller: someone standing before a vast landscape, temporarily removed from society and turning inward.

But self-understanding is not necessarily a solitary achievement. People often come to know themselves through their relationships with others.

Travelling with someone for several days may reveal dimensions of both people that remain largely invisible in ordinary life. Receiving help from a stranger may expose one’s willingness—or reluctance—to trust. Conflict with a companion may clarify what one expects from relationships. Waiting for another person, compromising over an itinerary, or depending on someone else can reveal forms of patience, control, vulnerability, or care that are difficult to observe in isolation.

Wang (1999) distinguished between intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions of existential authenticity, and subsequent tourism research has continued to emphasise that authenticity may involve not only self-expression and self-exploration but also relationships and shared experience. Kim and Jamal (2007), for instance, associated serious participation in tourism-related activities with both the construction of desired selves and the formation of meaningful interpersonal relationships. Buchmann et al. (2010) similarly highlight the importance of fellowship, embodied engagement, and interaction with place in shaping tourists’ experiences of authenticity.

The “true self,” then, cannot easily be imagined as a purified inner core that exists independently of others.

Who am I when another person needs to be waited for?
How do I respond when I cannot control a shared plan?
Am I comfortable receiving help?
How different am I alone, and in relation to others?

These are also questions of selfhood.

The self may be understood less as something completed in isolation than as something continually expressed and interpreted through relationships with people, places, and circumstances. From this perspective, finding oneself through travel may involve looking not only inward, but also at how one relates to an unfamiliar world.

5. The seductive promise of the “life-changing journey”

As travel and self-discovery have become increasingly intertwined, tourism is often presented as a product of transformation itself.

Leave, and you will change.
Travel alone, and you will discover who you are.
Go somewhere extraordinary, and your life will become clearer.

Such claims are not entirely without foundation. Some journeys do become important turning points. Tourism research has examined experiences in which travel contributes to shifts in self-understanding, values, and perspectives on life, including transformations that continue beyond the immediate journey (Brown, 2013; Kirillova et al., 2017).

Yet not every trip produces healing, clarity, or transformation.

We do not leave our ordinary anxieties at the airport. Stress, family tensions, habits, fears, and unresolved questions often travel with us. Some journeys create exhaustion rather than liberation. Travelling companions may become more difficult rather than closer. A highly anticipated destination may feel surprisingly ordinary. Conversely, an experience that seemed insignificant while travelling may only become meaningful years later.

“Travel changes people” can therefore describe a possibility, but it should not be treated as a universal promise.

The idea that travel is necessary for self-discovery can also become another social expectation. Time, financial resources, mobility, and access to travel are not distributed equally. Nor is there any reason to assume that a person who travels frequently necessarily lives a more reflective or authentic life than someone who does not.

The significance of a journey cannot be reduced to geographical distance or the extraordinariness of the destination. What matters is not only what happened, but how an experience is received, interpreted, remembered, and situated within the wider course of a life.

6. A more important question than whether we found our “true selves”

Travel can produce intense experiences of freedom, stillness, uncertainty, connection, or clarity. A problem that seemed insoluble at home may appear different when seen from elsewhere. A person may temporarily experience a way of living that feels unexpectedly closer to what they value.

But every journey eventually reaches its final day.

Bags are packed. Airports and railway stations reappear. Familiar homes, responsibilities, and routines return.

This may be where the most interesting part of the self-discovery narrative begins.

What does the freedom experienced while travelling mean once ordinary life resumes?
Does a relationship that seemed important during the journey remain important afterwards?
Can a newly recognised possibility become part of everyday choices?
Or does the experience simply remain as a valued memory?

None of these outcomes is inherently superior. Not every journey needs to transform a life.

The more useful question may therefore be less whether the person encountered while travelling was the “true” self and more what became newly visible through the experience, and what questions that visibility leaves behind.

Contemporary discussions of existentialism and tourism increasingly encourage attention to the relationship between travel experiences and wider questions of meaning, identity, freedom, and everyday existence (Kirillova, 2019). From this perspective, self-discovery is not necessarily an event completed at the destination. It may continue through return, memory, reinterpretation, and later choices.

Perhaps, then, the familiar statement “I found my true self through travel” can be reframed.

Travel may not be a place where a hidden and definitive self is finally uncovered. It may instead create temporary distance from familiar life, allowing us to ask again who we might become and what we consider worth living for.

The self we “find” through travel may be less a final answer than a new question—one made possible by seeing an ordinary life, for a moment, from somewhere else.

References

Brown, L. (2013). Tourism: A catalyst for existential authenticity. Annals of Tourism Research, 40, 176–190.

Buchmann, A., Moore, K., & Fisher, D. (2010). Experiencing film tourism: Authenticity & fellowship. Annals of Tourism Research, 37(1), 229–248.

Kim, H., & Jamal, T. (2007). Touristic quest for existential authenticity. Annals of Tourism Research, 34(1), 181–201.

Kirillova, K. (2019). Existentialism and tourism: New research avenues. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 5(3), 429–442.

Shepherd, R. J. (2015). Why Heidegger did not travel: Existential angst, authenticity, and tourist experiences. Annals of Tourism Research, 52, 60–71.

Steiner, C. J., & Reisinger, Y. (2006). Understanding existential authenticity. Annals of Tourism Research, 33(2), 299–318.

Wang, N. (1999). Rethinking authenticity in tourism experience. Annals of Tourism Research, 26(2), 349–370.

Suggested citation

Hong, J. (2026). What does it mean to "find your true self" through travel? Self-discovery as interpretation and choice, rather than revelation (ARI Research Essay No. 01). Authentica Research Institute. https://www.authenticaresearch.org/ari-publications/ari-research-essay/no-01