Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Like Ioper says below, you're romanticizing the idea of merchants traveling and what that was actually like. How does this sound to you: You'll spend 22 hours in a plane (including 4 1/2 hours laid over in Los Angeles) flying from Sydney to Indianapolis, at which point you'll rent a car and drive an hour to a small town that's home to the CVS Pharmacy Midwest Distribution Center. You'll check into a Holiday Inn, eat dinner at an Applebees, and spend the next two days touring a warehouse so you can prepare an estimate on light bulb costs as part of a redesign of the lighting system. On the second day you'll take a late flight back after work that has two layovers but avoids the need to stay an extra day.
To be fair that is a particularly grim example. There are people who travel for work in finance who mainly shuttle between 5* hotels in London, NYC, Hong Kong. There are people in marketing, media, fashion, conferences who mainly travel to luxury resorts to attend events where they mostly stand around. There are people who do go to more boring places but who travel mainly locally, 1-3 hours by plane or train from where they live. And besides, even if you’re in manufacturing going to Shenzhen every month for a few days, you can go Monday-Friday and “work” a grand total of 15 hours over the week with the rest spent travelling, in hotels watching TV, or drinking with your coworkers which, while work, is something a lot of people find more enjoyable than Excel or writing emails.
In my experience travelling for work is something naturally conscientious people struggle with and naturally lazy people love.
Well said. I'm naturally lazy and would love to travel more.
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I’m well aware that this is a romantic view of it - the lives of premodern merchants were undoubtedly harsh. And I have done something akin to what you describe before, as I mentioned to Ioper (though less extreme than that; typically the duration of the stay wasn’t two days). The number of times I’ve actually flown eludes me now, and I don’t disagree that the exhaustion of constantly moving and never staying someplace for long sets into your bones after a while. Your experience really does depend on the length of the trip though - shorter trips where you have no time to do anything else outside of what you went there to do probably suck, longer-lasting trips are probably more favourable and (for me at least) are a net positive.
Regardless, the compulsion to travel still remains, and I get atypically antsy after having stayed someplace for too long. In spite of the energy that traveling constantly takes, there’s just something about the constant change of scenery that’s refreshing, and it stops you from getting bogged down in the same routines. The dullness and repetition of everyday life seems to grind me down badly in a way it doesn’t for many others.
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