Flightster

TV or Travel?

• by Colin Wright
• on August 17th, 2010
• 3 Comments

It’s an old habit of mine to be a massive prosumer; that is, I get all the facts before buying ANYTHING. I research and research and research and when I finally pull the trigger and click that ‘buy’ button, I’m sure I’ve got the perfect <insert awesome thing I bought here> for me.

Browsing the deal sites today, I noticed that I could buy a decent 40″ flat screen TV by a name-brand maker for $400. That’s absurd, but this is the future we live in, where luxury is so affordable. Why WOULDN’T you buy such a thing?

It’s funny that this is the price point it’s dropped to, because a little over a year ago I had told myself that as soon as a 40″ TV hit that price, I would snag one for my living room. I was living in a two-story townhouse at the time, and though I spent very little time in the living room, and though I never watched TV, I had justified it in my mind as ‘something that people do’…you know, normal people. Who watch TV. And hang out in living rooms.

So here I am, livingroomless and still just as TV-ignorant, and I’m realizing just what a shift in priorities I’ve had since I started up my travel blog and left the country, moving around from place to place and putting more stock in experiences over ‘stuff.’ This TV doesn’t even appeal to me as a trophy – which is why I wanted one before, to show that I was financially sound and could afford such a thing fairly casually – and that money could be put to much better use.

For example, doing a quick browse of CheapAir, I see that for $198 I can hop over to New York and back (from LA), or hell, why not just shoot up to Toronto and visit out neighbors to the North for $297? I’d still have money left over for some peanuts on the plane and a moose-antler toque to bring back for those ‘chilly’ SoCal winters.

For $179 I can book a flight to Reno and stay in a hotel for 3 nights. Want something a little more luxurious? You can crash at a high-end luxury hotel in Denver for a few nights (and fly there, of course), for a mere $347. Pocket change.

The point of throwing all these figures at you is that rather than buying one more device that won’t help you improve yourself or your life, you could go off and have the experience of a lifetime. It’s cheap as hell to fly within the States, and it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to fly overseas if you take the time to use the tools available online and really schedule ahead. Heck, if you’re really on your game, you can save money on renting a room and make some friends from foreign countries online first; then you can go stay with them when you’re in town, and vice-versa.

You could have a life-changing experience out on the open road, in unfamiliar territory, experiencing the world outside of your everyday bubble.

It’s incredibly unlikely that you’ll experience any revelations while watching the boob-tube, except of course the adds telling you all about the new TVs you should be buying.

Aim for experiences over stuff. It’s fun having things, but what those things do more than anything else is make you feel okay about an otherwise drab existence…just enough that you’ll stay put in your rut and not complain too much. It’s like hanging Christmas decorations in a jail cell: it’s a nice effort, but it doesn’t change the reality of where you are, or the fact that you’re stuck there.

Why not invest in LIFE? TVs can be stolen, burnt up or shattered in an earthquake (a constant concern in LA, by the way), but memories are there forever.

You can always earn more money and buy more things, but your time is valuable, and if you aren’t out exploring now, you may miss the window of time when you’re capable of doing so.

Colin Wright

Colin Wright is a minimalist, branding expert and serial entrepreneur. While running his blog Exile Lifestyle ,his branding studio Colin Is My Name and his e-publishing business ebookling. Colin travels the world (moving to a new country every 4 months), meeting up with amazing people, giving talks (to audiences ranging from tech industry professionals to college students to Catholic school girls) and hunting down new and interesting experiences.