The Case for Traveling Like It's 1995

I was about ten years old when my family took a trip to Cabo San Lucas, and my best friend Morgan came with us. I don't remember every detail — I was ten — but I remember the feeling of it. Playing in the pool until our fingers pruned. Smiling and screaming with a belly full of laughter while running full speed into the ocean. The salt air and the sound of the water. Going parasailing over water so blue it didn't look real. The colorful tiles in our hotel room. Small, sensory, specific things.

Twenty-five years later, I can still feel that trip. And I find myself wondering whether that kind of memory-making is still available to children today, and honestly, to the rest of us.

Because there was nothing mediating that experience. No screen to document it for later. No algorithm suggesting where to go next or making us feel like the version of our vacation is less [fill in the blank] than someone else's. We didn't experience less. We experienced more because there was nowhere else to be. Morgan and I were just there, fully, in the way that children are when nothing is competing for their attention.

That quality of presence — total, unself-conscious absorption in where you actually are — is what I mean when I talk about traveling like it's 1995.

What the Algorithm Took From the Road

Modern travel is, in many ways, extraordinary. We can research a place in depth before we arrive, translate languages in real time, and navigate unfamiliar cities without ever feeling truly lost. The friction has been engineered out.

But friction, as it turns out, is part of how memory forms.

When I wrote about going analog earlier this year, we explored what neuroscience tells us about attention: that analog experiences narrow focus rather than splinter it, that effort deepens meaning, and that moments requiring full presence tend to imprint more deeply. Travel is perhaps the clearest canvas for this truth.

When you unfold a paper map in a foreign city and work out where you are, you are building a spatial memory that a blue dot on a screen simply cannot create. When you ask a local for a restaurant recommendation because you have no other way to find one, you have a conversation that changes the trip. When your camera only holds 24 exposures, you look before you shoot.

Pre-smartphone travel was no less informed. It was presented differently. The gap between where you were and what you were experiencing was much smaller because the tools to bridge that gap didn't yet exist.

The Nervous System on Vacation

There is also a physiological argument worth making here. Chronic low-grade digital stimulation, like checking our phones, scrolling, and background alertness, keeps the nervous system in a state of mild activation even when we are technically at rest. We explored this in depth in our piece on the gut-brain-skin axis: the body interprets persistent arousal as a threat and responds accordingly.

For many people, vacation does not actually interrupt this pattern. We bring the devices. We stay reachable. We document rather than inhabit. The nervous system receives a change of scenery, but not a change of state.

What 1995-style travel offered, even if we didn't have a framework for it, was genuine deactivation. Long stretches of time with nothing to check, no metrics to track, no one watching. The ping of an incoming Slack or email was nonexistent. The body could actually exhale.

That kind of rest is harder to manufacture than we think, and more valuable than we tend to credit.

What We Pass Forward

The memory of Cabo stays with me not because it was extraordinary, though it was, but because I was completely engrossed in the experience itself. Morgan and I weren't performing the trip. We were living it. And that quality of full habitation is something I think about now when I see people on vacation, faces tilted toward screens while the ocean does something extraordinary just behind them.

This is not a judgment. It is a question. What are we offering the next generation when we hand them a device to manage their boredom on a beach in Mexico? What are we denying ourselves by keeping our phones in hand, scrolling through others' highlight reels, instead of letting our imagination soar with a paperback book? And what are we offering ourselves when we spend the first ten minutes at a new place, capturing the scenery in photographs instead of just breathing it in?

The goal isn't to go back. It's to borrow something forward: the understanding that being somewhere, fully, is its own form of luxury. One that doesn't require an upgrade.

Weekly Wellness Practice

The 1995 Travel Experiment

On your next trip — even a day trip, even a weekend nearby — try introducing one or two of these small shifts. You don't have to go all the way. Just notice what opens up when you do.

• Leave your phone in the hotel room for one full hour each day. Not silenced — left behind.
  
• Take a paper map, or ask someone on the street for directions to something. Follow the conversation wherever it goes.
• Pretend like your phone is a wind-up Kodak and limit yourself to five photos per day. Look first. Decide whether the moment actually needs to be captured. Take one photo in the moment and let that be perfectly imperfect.
• Eat somewhere without checking reviews. Trust the look of the place, the items on the menu posted outside, the smells wafting onto the street, and the number of locals at the tables.
• If you're traveling with children, put your own phone away first. Give them the gift of your undivided presence in an unfamiliar place. Ask the questions that stoke their curiosity; the ones you know you won't get the same answers to when they're adults.
• At the end of each day, write down three things you noticed. Not photographed – noticed. A color, a sound, a moment of unexpected connection.

The point is not to optimize the trip. It's to actually be on it.