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8 Signs You've Lost Your Sense of Adventure

Lifestyle
by Paul Flynn Apr 9, 2014

You may have lived on a communal farm in the Prairies in the early ’80s. You may have spent one year traveling around in your Volkswagen van with your girlfriend when you were 20. But if you recognize yourself among the following traits, the hard truth is you’ve become a boring domestic creature.

1. Hotel rooms make you squeamish.

Let’s face it: North American hotels are disgusting. You can’t just put your bag on the carpeted floor; you might bring home a colony of those horrible bedbugs everybody’s talking about. As a rule of thumb, you always bring a bottle of disinfectant with you to give the bathroom a good wipe — you never know what the previous guests might have left in the tub or on the tap, and you wouldn’t want to catch someone’s germs. Yuck!

2. A trip to Costco is the excitement of the month.

You work eight hours a day, five days a week, so when the opportunity to go for a weekend trip to the next big city and go shopping at Costco presents itself, you can barely sleep with excitement. You can’t contain the thoughts of the cheap bulk oats and the delicious chemical-filled Cheezies you’re going to fill your car with.

3. You believe the rest of the world is weird, disgusting, and dangerous.

This is an extract from a conversation I witnessed — no joke:

    “I can tell you that we’re pretty lucky here in Canada. Everything is so modern and clean. When John and I went to Egypt, we were grossed out by all the dust and grime on those old buildings (pyramids?).”

Yeah, Europeans are dirtbags, Asians eat dogs, South America belongs to ruthless drug cartels, and all of Africa is a powder keg. Let’s just stay home, honey.

4. You’re always too busy for excitement.

Guess what? So is everyone else. We all have the same (small) amount of free time on our hands, but some of us are choosing to make good use of it.

5. You’re obsessed with the weather.

Don’t get confused here — this obsession with rain and wind has nothing to do with the possibility of going for a hike, sailing, or anything of that sort. It’s only laundry related. If it rains, it’ll screw up your weekend drying routine, but if it’s windy, boy oh boy, those clothes are going to dry so fast you’ll probably set a Guinness World Record for number of loads completed in 48 hours.

6. You make plans for the future.

You talk about your retirement every freaking day God makes. You worry about your financial investments, you explain in great length what you’ll do when you finally stop working (mostly sunbathing), and you’re looking into buying a $60,000 RV (so you won’t have to stay in gross hotels). Well, I’m sorry to say, but you’ve got it all wrong. Nobody knows what tomorrow is made of, so if I were you, I’d have fun right here, right now.

7. You seek exoticism in the wrong places.

The local co-op isn’t usually a hotbed of excitement, but it is for you. That passion fruit you purchased for $1.99 apiece is the most adventurous culinary experiment you’ve had in the past 10 years.

8. You say you’d like to see the world.

Unfortunately, there’s quite a wide gap between saying and doing. You spend hours on the internet looking at pictures of beautiful foreign places, but you never actually do anything to get there. That’s called procrastinating, and that’s a very dangerous thing to be doing.

Traveling to new places can be scary because it takes you out of your comfort zone (in this case, your home). But remember that you can see the world. You’re just as able as anybody else to do so. All you need is to book a flight, or jump in your car, or hop on a train and start exploring.

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