Travel Is Not Frivolous: Why I Started Treating Experiences as Self-Investment

For a long time, spending money on myself felt suspicious.

Not in an obvious way. I could justify plenty of things: a mortgage, childcare, retirement savings, work clothes, the practical purchases that made me look responsible, stable, adult, and adequately committed to the long-term project of being useful.

But spending money on something just because I wanted it? Because it would make me feel alive, make my life bigger and more interesting? That was harder.

Somewhere along the way I’d absorbed the idea that wanting things for myself was morally questionable. I should be fulfilled by marriage and family. I should be the responsible one. I should not need much, or want too much, or spend now what might be “borrowed” from my future or my child’s. I should earn love, earn respect, earn rest, earn permission.

Very efficient system, really — if the goal is to build a life where everyone else gets considered first and you become a very well-organized afterthought.

The guilt was never really about travel

At a glance this looks like a post about travel spending. It is, but only partly. The deeper question was never whether I should book a flight or a hotel. It was whether I believed I was allowed to invest in a life that actually felt good to live.

That’s a different question entirely.

I grew up with a strong sense of responsibility, and some of it served me well — I’m genuinely grateful for the discipline and the ability to delay gratification. We love a woman who can read the cancellation policy and contribute to her retirement. But responsibility can curdle into self-erasure if you’re not careful, especially for women raised to believe “good” means self-sacrificing, modest, agreeable, and suspicious of wanting anything that doesn’t obviously serve someone else.

I’d internalized a version of goodness with almost no room for desire. Good women didn’t need too much. Good women didn’t spend on themselves. Good women didn’t inconvenience anyone with their wanting.

No wonder travel felt frivolous. It required me to admit I wanted something.

The first time travel felt like self-investment

It wasn’t glamorous in the way people mean glamorous. It was walking around Keukenhof about six months postpartum.

I was exhausted. My body didn’t feel like mine. My life didn’t feel like mine — I’d become a mother inside a relationship that left me feeling increasingly controlled and diminished. And there I was, in the Netherlands, walking through flowers.

That sounds almost too neat. Like it should come with a gauzy filter and a caption about blooming. No thank you. It wasn’t that simple. But something happened there. For the first time in a long time I felt: I still exist. Not only as a mother. Not only as someone responsible. Not only as someone trying to survive. I was still a person — a woman, a mind, a body, a self with curiosity.

That trip didn’t fix my life. But it gave me a glimpse of myself inside it. And I want to be careful here, because I’m not selling travel as a cure for trauma. A plane ticket isn’t therapy. A hotel room isn’t justice. A beautiful city doesn’t undo what someone did to you.

But after having a baby with a controlling partner, travel was one of the things that made me feel like my life was worth living again. It gave me air. It gave me proof the world was still bigger than the one I’d been trapped inside. It gave me back a version of myself I could recognize.

That’s not frivolous. That’s a person remembering she’s a person.

Experiences keep paying after the trip ends

The more I traveled, the more I saw that a trip’s value doesn’t end when the trip does. A good experience keeps paying dividends — not financially, but emotionally, socially, creatively. It gave me better stories, something to talk about outside of work, new ideas about how to live, and proof I could navigate the unfamiliar and solve problems. It made me less embarrassed about being new at things. That’s the kind of return I care about — not because every experience has to be productive (please, let joy live), but because some spending genuinely shapes the person you become.

The clearest example: I took my grandpa to Panama. He does not love traveling — that’s the polite version. He is not pacing his house waiting for someone to hand him an itinerary and a packing cube. But afterward he told me it was one of the highlights of his life.

How do you put that in a budget category? Grandfather has one of the highlights of his life before his window for travel closes. Line item: priceless, emotionally destabilizing, worth it.

Money matters. But sometimes we evaluate spending too narrowly. We ask “was this necessary?” when the better question is “what did this make possible?” That trip made something possible between us that wouldn’t have happened at home, promising to get around to it someday.

On another trip — Washington, D.C. — we were eating continental breakfast when we fell into a real conversation about my religious beliefs. I’d expected his mind to be more closed and his love to feel more conditional. Instead I found he was more open, and his love more unconditional, than I’d given him credit for. That conversation was worth the trip. Not because the breakfast was impressive — it was continental breakfast, let’s remain calm — but because travel creates openings. You’re out of your roles, away from the usual environment, sitting across from someone with coffee and institutional scrambled eggs, and a conversation happens that might never have happened otherwise.

Sometimes the experience is just the container for the thing that actually changes you.

Not all spending is self-investment

Let me be clear, because this is where the idea gets abused: “self-investment” is not a magic label you slap on a purchase to avoid being honest with yourself. That’s how we end up calling $900 of random online shopping “healing.” Again — no thank you. Some spending is avoidance. Some is insecurity, or status, or boredom, or trying to look like a woman with a full life instead of building one.

For me, an experience starts to feel like real self-investment when it does at least one of these:

• aligns with my values
• creates meaning beyond the moment
• improves my confidence
• deepens a relationship
• gives me new ideas about how to live
• helps me accept myself more
• builds skills or perspective
• gives me stories I’ll keep telling
• builds toward a more fulfilling future
• offers high value on something I’d have wanted anyway

That last one matters. I’ve spent money on skincare and aesthetic treatments in Korea because they were things I’d have considered at home anyway — at far better value through travel. That’s different from buying something just because it’s cheaper abroad. A discount on something you didn’t actually want isn’t savings. It’s clutter with a passport.

You can’t steal from your future self

Here’s the tension I sit in: I believe in living now, and I believe in protecting my future. Those aren’t opposites — the healthiest version of self-investment respects both. Don’t bankrupt your present for a future you’re not guaranteed; don’t bankrupt your future trying to feel alive today. Both mistakes are real, and both usually come from fear.

The answer isn’t reckless spending. It’s intentional trade-offs — which, for me, means actual financial goals and a clear picture of the whole. I’ve learned from the FIRE movement, not because everyone needs to retire at 42 and live on lentils, but because it forces useful questions: What kind of freedom do I want? What trade-offs are actually worth it? Where am I spending by default versus because I care? What am I protecting, and what am I postponing?

You don’t have to choose between being financially responsible and having a life worth living. But you do have to decide on purpose.

Spend where it actually fulfills you

So here’s what I’d say to the woman who can’t justify spending on herself: look at what you’re already spending on. Not with shame — with honesty.

Are you paying for a bigger house because it makes you feel successful, even though it doesn’t make your daily life meaningfully better? Are you leaking money toward furniture, conveniences, and little things that quietly add up without actually fulfilling you? Are you spending in ways that signal responsibility or status, but never in ways that expand your life?

This isn’t judgment — I’m not opposed to a nice couch or a manicure. I support domestic comfort and hands that look less feral. But if you tell me you can’t afford the thing that would make your life bigger while money quietly leaks toward things you don’t care about, that’s worth a better question. What if you cut in the areas that don’t fulfill you? What if you stopped worrying whether a smaller house makes you look less successful? What if you remembered you’re accountable to you?

You only get one life. That sounds obvious until you notice how many decisions you’ve made as if there’d be a practice round.

The better question isn’t “Can I justify this?”

For years, my question was can I justify this? It’s not always a bad one. But if you’re a woman who already over-justifies her existence — her wants, her rest, her needs, her joy — it’s a terrible starting place.

Try instead: Does this align with the life I’m building? What does this make possible? What am I saying yes to here — and what am I saying no to? Because every yes has a no attached. Money spent here can’t be spent there; time spent here can’t be spent elsewhere. That’s not a reason to never choose. It’s the reason to choose carefully.

I know “work hard, play hard” is a cliché. I also think it’s sometimes true. I’d rather work intensely part of the year and use it to fund travel, experiences, and meaning than coast through slower weeks and never go anywhere. That’s not everyone’s answer — some people want steadiness or spaciousness more than big experiences, and that’s valid. But I know myself: I’ll work hard when the work is connected to something. Ambition for its own sake feels like a trap. Ambition that buys freedom, options, and stories feels like fuel.

You are the asset

This is the line I keep coming back to: you are the asset.

Your confidence matters. Your perspective, your curiosity, your aliveness, your ability to move through the world — those matter. Your children having a mother who likes her life matters. Your future self matters, and so does your present one.

Investing in experiences doesn’t mean ignoring your responsibilities. It means refusing to build a life where “responsibility” is just a more socially acceptable word for self-abandonment.

Keep reading

• You don’t need a different life to start living more of this one
• How to plan an international trip in less time than you think
• I wouldn’t leave my hotel after dark on my first solo trip — now I go out alone on purpose

Case in point: how I planned a Seoul skincare trip on a tight, standby-flight window.

A concrete example of treating yourself as the asset: my Korean skincare tune-ups in Seoul.

Related: living below your privilege out of fear.