Travelling to Deconstruct Your Assumptions

Par Gabriel Goldberg 11 February 2026 9 min read

For a long time, I thought I travelled to discover places. Over time, I understood that I was really travelling to deconstruct my certainties. A personal essay on what China, Japan and human encounters taught me about the reality of the world. ⏱ Reading time: 14 minutes We don't travel to see. We travel to understand. For a long time, I thought I travelled to discover places. Cities, landscapes, architecture. I ticked off destinations the way one ticks off achievements. One more country on the list. One more stamp in the passport. Over time, I realised I was wrong. What travel has truly given me is not a collection of visual memories. It is something far more precious, and far more unsettling: the ability to doubt my own certainties. We talk endlessly about mobility, destinations, hotels, itineraries. We reduce travel to logistics. To photos. To aesthetics. But we rarely talk about what travel actually does to our perceptions. How it reconfigures our intellectual reflexes. How it forces us, sometimes brutally, to admit that what we thought we knew rested on nothing but a narrative. And that is perhaps its greatest value. Walking through the alleyways of Beijing, far from media narratives — where real understanding begins. The China nobody shows you In recent years, I have had the privilege of spending time in China, particularly in Beijing and Shanghai. Not as a hurried tourist. Not between meetings. But walking, talking, observing, taking the time to meet people. Very…