It’s all about the Journey and not the Destination. Really?

Shubh Agrawal
5 min readDec 21, 2023

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Header image of a person viewing the sunset

You must have heard from your friends, people on social media, and authors of self-help books that:

“It’s all about the journey and not the destination”.

I believed the same. Rectifying myself, I believed it without thinking or experiencing it.

At the time when I read such things, I didn’t have the experience of travel neither I was old enough to realize these things. So, I just picked this up in my mind.

But now after doing some traveling with different people and also growing up in the meantime, I believe I can sit and think about this quote and analyze it, not for others but for myself.

This article is just my thoughts on this topic, it’s not to influence anyone, it’s just my mind dump or it may be overthinking being fused with my love for writing.

I would like to start with a slight variation of the main quote,

Life is a journey, not a destination.

This is the original quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, as you may get by searching on Google but it’s not.
More details: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/31/life-journey/

Anyway, this isn’t a history article so leaving the facts to history people (I trust them). This quote has a significant meaning if you think about it.

In the case of our life, or the life of our pets, plants, etc. we know what the result is. Death. Death is the ultimate truth. Lord Krishna also said to Arjuna in Bhagavad Gita that Death is an inevitable part of the cycle of life and one should not fear it. So, in our life what we can focus on is “present” and “present” is what we can enjoy. And what we are doing now counts as our journey. So, life indeed is a journey and not a destination.

This is a beautiful quote that is in the movie Kungfu Panda.

“Yesterday is History,
Tomorrow is Mystery,
Today is the gift.
That’s why it is called Present.”

Now let’s shift our perspective a little.

Whenever it comes to traveling, some people say that in travel the destination is not the thing you look forward to, rather it’s the journey that you enjoy.

In the starting I believed this, what else do you expect from a person with no travel experience sitting and discussing this topic in a room on a call with a friend 🤷‍♂️

After some time, the sun shed some light on my life, and I got to make some trips. I traveled with family, and groups of friends, just me and one of my friends, I took short journeys, road trips, and multi-day train journeys and got a lot to experience. In all this, my overthinking brain was subconsciously analyzing things like journey, destination, listing out some pros and cons, etc.

I came up with a 70:30 ratio.

The 70% I put to Destination and the 30% to the Journey.

This ratio can vary depending on the type of people you are with, but I found the upper limit of the journey to be 40% so that makes it 60:40.

This is what I think. Whenever you are going to any place there is naturally an excitement about what you will see there, what you will get to eat there etc. That counts for the destination. How you will reach there is the journey part, if you are doing something adventurous then you are excited about that adventure, but don’t you think your mind made that adventure your destination? And I hope it doesn’t happen with you but if your destination is not worth it for some reason, or you had some bad experience then do you not feel bad about it? Well, I do, and I see people who say destination doesn’t matter also feels bad about such things. So, it’s natural, if you put efforts into something whether it be travel or a relationship and you don’t get the same output then it hurts.

It’s not that the journey is not the enjoying part, it surely is. When you travel with your friends the journey becomes super exciting because everyone is excited about the destination, and everyone is full of energy. In the returning part the journey can become a little boring as we get worn out and well you know, we are reaching home, so we know our destination. Overall destination plays an important role.

Going with unknown people however makes the journey a little more fun because, first of all, you have the excitement of the destination and second you are with people whom you don’t know and the same goes for them as well. So, you will communicate with them, they will share their experiences and stories and you will too. That can make a very long journey super short. On my recent trip to Manali, I got to meet a lot of different types of people from various careers and age groups and I enjoyed their company. We traveled together and had a lot of fun.

On this trip, me and the guys I met there decided to go on a trek. The views from the top of the trek (destination again) were the best views I have ever seen till now.

Halfway trek view
View from top

I mean in case of a trek, you stress your body a lot and if you reach the top and don’t get some good views then it defeats the purpose, at least for me. On my trek, I reached the destination (top) early and I got to witness the sunlight, the sunset, and the dusk.

Sunset form top

Depending on the type of person you are, you may or may not agree with my views, and to be honest, that’s okay. I just don’t try to convince myself that destination doesn’t matter. It matters. It matters a lot. At least for me!

These are just my thoughts, and I don’t want anyone to blindly follow me like I did all those authors. Everyone learns from their own experiences.

Thanks for bearing through my overthinking. If you have anything to add then please add a comment, I would love to hear different perspectives.

Also, you can DM (and follow) me on Instagram @theshubhagrwl

All the images used in this article are my original work: https://pexels.com/@theshubhagrwl/

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