If you're feeling existential anxiety, look into Philosophy. If you're too lazy to read, Alain de Botton has some insights, you can watch in video format:
Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gVyEOefhIQ&list=PLa_3jLb0w_...
The School of Life https://www.youtube.com/c/theschooloflifetv
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
It's always been pretty interesting (and I'd say quite well-known) that the Nordics do have a somewhat higher suicide rate than other similar states. But it's also likely a pretty bad proxy; I'd be suspicious of a metric suggesting the average North Korean citizen is substantially happier than the average Finn.
Probably better is the World Happiness Report (https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/social-environments-fo...). It's a bit arbitrary for my taste, but does at least have a pretty long history as well as plenty of transparency about what it's measuring and why. And it consistently places the Nordics in the top ten.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/well/mind/john-sarno-chro... https://backpain.2uo.de/
Just to clarify, this suggests that your parents earn total around 16000 a year, pre-tax [0]. Perhaps your guess was accurate, and they really do - but I also find that the average person is normally wildly off in their estimates of the UK wealth distribution. A few thousands more a year would already place them in the top 50%.
[0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f...
Touring is like traveling, it is in fact traveling at its best, it's like an adventure.
The only difference with traveling for leisure is that you don't stay in the same location for long, but you are away from home for a long time nonetheless.
Usually you travel around 200kms a day on average, someday it's 800km under the snow, some day it's 50kms on the coastline of beautiful Sardinia, but you might cross region borders or country borders, people speak different languages, you travel from north to south or west to east and everything changes.
East Germany and West Germany are different, German Switzerland and French Switzerland are different, Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels-area in Belgium are different.
North and South Italy are completely different.
To explain my point better I'll tell you what a musician told me.
One year we met with Bob Log III (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Log_III) a few times, because we were playing in the same venues, so we spent few nights together before and after the shows.
He told us he used to make a crazy number of shows in Europe, sth like 80 shows in 3 months.
He always travels alone, at least he did at the time, and drive his own car.
One night he was going from Innsbruck in Austria to Stockholm in Sweden where he had a show 48 hours later, stopping at the northern German border to get some sleep.
He told us it wasn't uncommon for him, he did it to pack as much shows as possible in as little time as possible, earn as much money possible, and then spend a couple of holiday weeks with his family in some European city, before going back home.
But then he said he stopped doing it.
He was only doing 30 shows in a row at max, no more than that.
Why, we asked.
He said: because as fun as it is to be always around partying with the great people that come at my shows who am I grateful to, because they are the ones allowing me to live my life as a musician, I started forgetting things.
I couldn't remember faces, dates, venues.
I kept going to the same places and not remembering people names.
So he decided to do less shows, max 30, in a bit less than two months, to make good memories that stayed.
What I wanna say is that it is absolutely non-boring, non-repetitive and definitely not something that feel like working, not at the level I did it anyway, but too much is too much, even too much fun can be too much and lose its meaning.
https://www.artofmanliness.com/living/leisure/against-the-cu...
Now the question becomes: are those impactful actions benevolent moving of molecules or malevolent? Generally I'm seeing it as malevolent with things like climate change and dropping bombs on innocent people who become another statistic or 'collateral damage'.
Yes there is a lot of good in the world, and I probably have 'mean world syndrome'[0], but when you're exposed to the news more than ever now via the Internet, you can't help but think we're living in a very divided and malicious world.
> Mucha gente cree que en la vida solo hay un gran amor, lo que no saben es que se pueden vivir varias vidas. […] Hoy acaba algo pero es el día de tu siguiente vida. Tienes que vivir muchas vidas […], muchas...
(English translation: https://www.deepl.com/translator#es/en/Mucha%20gente%20cree%.... )
I like to think that this can be applied not only to love (like here) but also to switching jobs, careers, places, … anything really that causes a big change (a diff, as you say) in life.
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
(They change the sky above, not their mind, who rush across the sea.)
(Oh, and then there is "No matter where you go, there you are." https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/11/22/where-you-go/ )
I will say, there are places that calm my soul, like looking out on the North Dakota Badlands will make me happy for a long period afterwards. I don't know why or how, but it has done me a lot of good over the years. I do wonder if others have that travel place that just sets them right.
As to the continued happiness aspect, George Lucas is more elegant on the subject than I will ever be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rePgwJWg7cw