i want to be disgustedly well travelled and educated

i want to be disgustedly well travelled and educated

gor

Oct 04, 2026

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last night i was going through my notes app and found eleven different notes with the exact same sentence written somewhere inside them: i want to be disgustingly well travelled and educated.

i laughed when i saw it because apparently i have been trying to tell myself the same thing for years and, somehow, i still haven’t gotten tired of wanting it.

ever since i was a kid, i have wanted to be around everything. dance, theatre, art, literature, music, languages, history, people. i kept finding little doors into different worlds and walking through them. somewhere along the way, i made some of my closest friends through those worlds, studied something i genuinely loved, and met people who changed the way i looked at my own life. people ask me about my dream job sometimes and i never really know what to say. my dream has never fit neatly into a profession.

i want to travel the world. i want to learn languages. i want to read books from countries i’ve never seen. i want to know why people believe what they believe, how cities came to look the way they do, how history keeps appearing in ordinary life. i want to know astronomy and geography and architecture and literature and all the strange little histories of things nobody thinks to ask about. i want to learn the piano. i want to memorize poems because i love them. i want to be the person someone comes to with some completely random question and, somehow, i have an answer.

i want to be absurdly educated. not for a degree or a title or the pleasure of sounding intelligent. i just want to understand. i want to recognize constellations while lying on grass in the middle of summer. i want to look at the moon and know what i’m looking at. i want to understand ancient civilizations and dead languages and religions i wasn’t raised around. i want to know the names of trees and flowers and herbs. i want to pick up a book from another century and have enough context to understand what the writer was trying to say.

i want knowledge to make the world feel larger every time i learn something.

and when i say i want to travel, i don’t mean airports and hotels and photographs in front of famous buildings. i want to disappear into places a little. i want a rainy afternoon in some tiny coffee shop in germany with a book i found in a secondhand store that morning. i want to get lost in italy and end up somewhere i never planned to go. i want to sit in a bookstore in england and leave carrying more books than i can reasonably justify. i want to take trains across countries and stare out of windows for hours. i want to hear languages i don’t understand and eventually understand some of them.

i want to know what people eat for breakfast. what they complain about. what music they play in their kitchens. what their streets smell like after rain. i don’t want places to be photographs i took and forgot about. i want them attached to people, conversations, meals, songs, stupid accidents and entire afternoons i could never have planned.

i want to come home with my head full of references.

i want to hear someone mention shakespeare and know what they mean. i want to recognize a painting from across a room. i want to hear a song and understand where some part of it came from. i want to read poetry from different languages and feel how the same human ache keeps finding different words for itself. i want to sit across from somebody who knows something i don’t and spend three hours asking questions.

and, honestly, i think i want the people almost as much as i want the places.

i want passionate people in my life so badly. friends who get excited about useless facts. people who send me a paragraph at two in the morning because they read something that made them think of me. people who will get on a train because we’ve never been there before. people who want to sit around talking about love and relationships and poetry and art and music until nobody knows what time it is anymore.

i want people who will say, let’s go.

let’s drive somewhere at midnight. let’s see the ocean. let’s book the train. let’s learn a language badly together. let’s sit on the floor and listen to an entire album. let’s stay up until four talking about the person we love. let’s walk until our feet hurt. let’s find a place we’ve never heard of and make it ours for an afternoon.

i don’t want to spend my twenties believing that people like this don’t exist. i know they do. somewhere, there are people who want to know everything. people who want to travel and still be fascinated by their own neighbourhood. people who want deep friendships, ridiculous adventures, beautiful conversations and a life that gives them something to be astonished by.

i want to find them.

i want the ordinary things too. hot coffee on a rainy sunday morning. a book open beside me at two in the morning. music playing while i get ready. singing badly when nobody is listening. smiling at animals on the street. complimenting strangers. helping an old person cross the road. hugging my best friend for too long. the smell of earth after rain. late-night drives. summer grass. crowded trains. unfamiliar cities. somebody’s hand finding mine.

i want to fall in love with ordinary days because the more i learn about the world, the more ridiculous it seems that any of this exists at all.

i want to know too much. i want to have seen too much. i want overcrowded bookshelves and a full passport and a head cluttered with useless facts, poems, names of places and stories about people i once met. i want every language i learn to rearrange the way i think. i want every place i visit to leave something behind in me. i want every person i love to add another room to the house inside my head.

i don’t know if there is a single word for the kind of life i want.

maybe it is curiosity. maybe it is hunger. maybe it is just being young and wanting to experience as much as possible before the years start becoming memories.

i just know that i keep opening my notes app and writing the same thing. i want to know. i want to see. i want to go. i want to come back different. i want to be disgustingly well travelled and educated.

if this was useful, a coffee helps me to keep writing

<3

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