Bleak, but true. In fact, it's your genes that have the urge to reproduce themselves. You are just the host organism that allows them to do it. Once you have allowed your genes to make a new generation, you are pointless in the grand scheme of things.

Which liberates you to travel the world and find new things, explore your own abilities, take on amusing challenges, meet interesting people.

Or just watch TV.

Whatever you want to do, just do it - as long as it doesn't harm someone else, of course. In the context of eternity, none of it matters a jot.

Some great answers and plenty of food for thought. I guess the real answer for us can only come once we've been on the road for a while.

Thanks all for your input
Steve

Something someone said to me that seems to succinctly seperate the tourist from the medium / long term traveller......
'We don't travel to see different things....We travel to see things differently. '

We have found on our trip that this lack of purpose as such is why we are going to go home after a year, rather than travel for another 12 months. We figure we will go home, work on our careers for a few years and then go back to travel again.

It depends on your personality. Personally I am fairly goal oriented. In the 3 years leading up to my trip, I ran my first marathon, got my bench press over 100kg, saved enough to go on an extended motorbike trip etc. etc. So at the start of my trip I had a few goals, or things I had always wanted to do, one of those was to learn Spanish, study martial arts in China, volunteer on a vineyard in France and ride around the world on a motorbike. I did the MA in China, my Spanish is at basic conversational and we are about to go and work on a vineyard, albeit in Spain for the next fortnight. Also have done 33,000 k's around Europe on the motorbike. Not the exact goals I set out with, but close enough :)

So for me, the part that gave purpose to the long term trip was to have small goals like this that I could work on throughout the trip.

On the bonus side, I unexpectedly found that I really enjoyed making video blogs of my trip and my editing/filming skills have really improved along the trip. I can't wait to get home and get better equipment (my skills have outgrown my current gear) and make really great adventure riding films around Australia :)

Personally, I have really enjoyed the last 12 months and the things we have done, but equally I am really looking forward to getting home and getting stuck into some of the things you can only do and achieve when you have a routine and are located in the same place.

Maybe your goal can be to learn to live without purpose ;)

Stunned!
 

The question and the answers composing this thread are some of the most thoughtful, brilliant and just plain interesting comments I have read on the HUBB. Thank you , thank you all.

I lean toward the universal urge to survive replies - and all I can add is that we are, by nature hunter/gatherers, and we have sex and women bear forth our next generation. But how does over landing by motorcycle compliment our "purposes"?

When you are old like me and while still enjoying sex, realize that the procreative years are long gone by, I am left with abiding by that ancient tribal instinct to follow the sun. I motorcycle and live in a perfect equal lateral (Isosceles) triangle.

Arizona , USA............... A Coruña, Spain,
-------------------\........./
--------------------\....../
---------------------\.../
----------...Buenos Aires, Argentina

depending on the time of year, much like the ancient Anasazi and the Sinaqua who traveled north in the summer and south in the winter I am in one or the other of these places or traveling in between..

I feel more in tune with ancient stirrings when I am on the road to warmth, or to the sea, or to the mountains to escape the heat. This all feels very right and creating some remnants of meaning for my life - as I have just attempted to do, fills the idle moments with no time to spare. Or, I just have sex or drink!

xfiltrate