Reference Points
Travel Thoughts 2026
People often ask how I can afford to live the way I do.
The question carries an assumption: flights, Africa, long stays abroad — this must require wealth, luck, inheritance, some invisible cushion.
The truth is less cinematic.
I am not traveling as a consumer. I am relocating into systems.
There is a fundamental anthropological difference between tourism and immersion. Tourism compresses experience. It is engineered density — curated hotels, organized transport, scheduled wildlife sightings, restaurant reservations, and departure dates fixed in advance. It maximizes stimulation per day. It is efficient, often luxurious, and usually expensive.
This is not a moral critique on any tourist. It is simply a structural distinction. One approach is designed for comfort and concentration of experience; the other more closely resembles fieldwork — slower, less insulated, sometimes inconvenient, and often requiring trade-offs that are invisible from the outside.
Immersion stretches time.
Instead of sampling a place, you submit to it. You rent where residents rent. You shop where they shop. You learn which grocery stores carry decent produce and which days the eggs arrive. You figure out traffic rhythms rather than cursing them. You adjust to the voltage fluctuations. You wait for water pressure. You cook. You walk. You return.
You become predictable.
Behavioral economics calls this reference dependence: we evaluate comfort relative to prior conditions. The brain does not measure absolute luxury; it measures contrast. After years living across Southeast Asia, India, Nepal, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Africa, my baseline recalibrated.
I typically sit beside women washing laundry in plastic buckets, communicating (to me) through gesture and shared laughter. I feel good when they approve of my methods as if they expected I wouldn’t know. Their hands moving with speed and confidence — muscle memory built over years. Asian hands, Eastern European hands, African hands… They are not much different. Over time, my own hands changed. They stopped being careful Western hands, protected by appliances and infrastructure. They became working hands. I have also been in wealthy homes where they insist cleaning laundry this way is better and they buy washing machines only to spin the laundry AFTER they’ve done it by hand. This will forever make me smile.
Not heroic. Not performative. Just adapted.
There is a dignity in learning the mechanics of survival rather than outsourcing them.
I have walked through hospitals where supplies are sparse and triage feels intimate. I have stood in traffic systems where pedestrians are not shielded by right-of-way but by timing and eye contact. I have lived in places where electricity disappears without announcement, where WiFi collapses mid-sentence, where heat lingers and dust coats everything including my brain and temper. I have heard endless logical analyses from Westerners on this as they also smile through and ultimately feel grateful for experiencing it as we complain to ourselves trying to compare a thing we cannot compare because we will never really know, we can’t know. Yet we still prefer this reality.
When you live inside that long enough, you stop expecting insulation.
So when I say Nairobi feels “easy,” it is comparative.
It is quiet compared to cities where horns create a constant auditory assault. You can walk calmly if your body language signals belonging rather than extraction. Grocery stores are abundant and well-stocked. You can flush toilet paper. The climate is cool and dry at elevation. There are gyms, parks, café culture, reliable ride-share, and functioning public transport if you are willing to share space.
It is possible to be in the city in the morning and on the coast or near wildlife within hours. It is a regional aviation hub — an infrastructural node connecting continents.
These are not exotic observations. They are infrastructural ones.
If you stay long enough and live locally — cooking, walking, renting modestly, minimizing imported expectation — the cost structure shifts dramatically. Our ceiling budget while traveling is around $35 per night (that’s, $17.50 per person and we usually sit considerably below that) and in Nairobi, for that budget we got a safe apartment in a walkable, upscale neighborhood with a gym and pool. Not because we were wealthy. Because we were not purchasing novelty. We were absorbing routine and local living.
All of this makes me think about how perception forms — and how it shifts. I watch children playing and laughing in vastly different environments. In rural villages, play emerges from what is available — sticks become tools, tires become vehicles, open land becomes a field of imagination. In dense European cities, children move through plazas and public transport with early autonomy. In American suburbs, children navigate digital spaces with fluency and social complexity.
None of these expressions are moral statements. They are environmental adaptations.
Children everywhere become competent in the systems that surround them. Material culture, infrastructure, parental norms, and media environments shape what feels normal, safe, or possible. What one culture interprets as freedom, another may interpret as risk. What one sees as protection, another may see as limitation.
Every society calibrates childhood differently. Each produces its own strengths, anxieties, capacities, and blind spots.
What changes when you move between systems is not morality. It is perception.
Comfort becomes contextual. Complaint becomes relative. Luxury becomes infrastructural.
And time — time is the quiet differentiator.
Tourism runs on speed. Speed preserves performance. When you move quickly, you remain a category: foreigner, customer, walking currency. Interaction is front-stage — calibrated, polite, transactional. Stories are optimized. Smiles are strategic. It isn’t deception, rather it is rational adaptation to global inequality.
Time erodes performance.
Stay past the tourist half-life — a week, then two, then a month — and the tone shifts. The vendor no longer calls theatrically. The security guard nods in recognition. The neighbor’s assessment softens into familiarity.
You are no longer an event. You are part of the landscape.
Predictability lowers threat.
Lower threat allows authenticity.
The smile that comes after familiarity carries more weight than the smile that greets a wallet.
You begin to see people not as representatives of a culture but as individuals with tempers, humor, fatigue, ambition, boredom. You see how they treat each other when you are not the center of the exchange. You feel your own posture change. You stop photographing everything. You learn the cadence of traffic, the timing of markets, the informal rules of space.
The relationship shifts from extractive to reciprocal.
I am not wealthier than those who wonder how I afford this life. In many ways, I have less financial buffer than most. What I have done is reduce overhead and increase tolerance for uncertainty. I chose mobility over accumulation. Adaptation over predictability. Exposure over insulation.
This choice is not glamorous. It does not photograph as a perfect life. It is sometimes exhausting. It strains relationships. It reveals personality under stress. It can be quietly lonely.
But it is instructive.
When your reference points expand across systems — economic, infrastructural, cultural — they do not easily contract. You cannot unknow how most of the world manages water, power, illness, childhood, traffic, space.
Luxury begins to look different.
Sometimes it is silence instead of horns.
Sometimes it is steady electricity.
Sometimes it is hot water.
Sometimes it is the ability to flush toilet paper.
Sometimes it is the ease of walking unremarked.
And sometimes it is hands that can type, build, scrub, carry, and belong across environments.
That is not wealth in the conventional sense… Just adaptability.
And adaptability, in a world of accelerating instability, may be the most practical form of security there is.