“The Men Who Don’t Fit In” by Robert Service has become the credo of Expat Chronicles since I discovered the poem (read it here).
I recently read “Self Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which includes this condemnation of the wanderlust of us expats, backpackers, vagabonds and the men and women who don’t fit in. Bolded highlights are mine.
It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Traveling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still; and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet. I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins. Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. But the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness.
I want to argue against this point, but I can’t. I can, however, add context from Emerson’s life. He wrote this after taking a Grand Tour of Europe. How many people in 2025 have visited all the flashy destinations on the old continent, skipping only the unremarkable like Slovenia? Most people haven’t even today. I, of the race that don’t fit in, have never done the Grand Tour.
Doing the Grand Tour in the early 19th century is a hardcore (and privileged) travel experience, maybe akin to doing a Grand Tour of Africa today. Or all of Asia including the Middle East. Emerson also spent a winter in Florida before writing this. Pre-Civil War Florida was more like Belize today, a wild jungle but with cooler winters and even fewer inhabitants.
Maybe it takes a heavy dose of travel to realize it’s not a panacea. That’s why I agree with his conclusions, but take the wholesale condemnation with a grain of salt. The icing on the cake is, decades after writing that, Emerson took a Grand Tour of America’s Western territories and California. Today that would be like taking a couple months to see the sights of Alaska, the Yukon and northern reaches of Canada.
But expat veterans identify with something in what Emerson wrote. The people who made those destinations famous did so by staying home. The wise man visits cities like a sovereign, not an interloper or a valet. Traveling is a fool’s paradise. In the most beautiful of places, there I am: the sad, identical self that I fled from. Our system of education fosters restlessness.
Robinson Crusoe, considered the first English novel, may not be politically correct today but that’s on brand for Expat Chronicles. It’s brilliant. I see why it’s timeless. Right out of the gate, Defoe (who worked in international business himself with Iberia) starts the book with a more fleshed-out expat manifesto. Where “The Men That Don’t Fit In” boils it down to the essential, Defoe expands on where my head was when I took the plunge back in 2008.
My head began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts. My father, who was very ancient, had given me a competent share of learning, as far as house-education and a country free school generally go, and designed me for the law; but I would be satisfied with nothing but going to sea; and my inclination to this led me so strongly against the will, nay, the commands of my father, and against all the entreaties and persuasions of my mother and other friends, that there seemed to be something fatal in that propensity of nature, tending directly to the life of misery which was to befall me.
My father, a wise and grave man, gave me serious and excellent counsel against what he foresaw was my design. He called me one morning into his chamber, where he was confined by the gout, and expostulated very warmly with me upon this subject. He asked me what reasons, more than a mere wandering inclination, I had for leaving father’s house and my native country, where I might be well introduced, and had a prospect of raising my fortune by application and industry, with a life of ease and pleasure. He told me it was men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me or too far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found, by long experience, was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind…
.After this he pressed me earnestly, and in the most affectionate manner, not to play the young man, nor to precipitate myself into miseries which nature, and the station of life I was born in, seemed to have provided against; that I was under no necessity of seeking my bread; that he would do well for me, and endeavour to enter me fairly into the station of life which he had just been recommending to me; and that if I was not very easy and happy in the world, it must be my mere fate or fault that must hinder it; and that he should have nothing to answer for, having thus discharged his duty in warning me against measures which he knew would be to my hurt; in a word, that as he would do very kind things for me if I would stay and settle at home as he directed, so he would not have so much hand in my misfortunes as to give me any encouragement to go away… and though he said he would not cease to pray for me, yet he would venture to say to me, that if I did take this foolish step, God would not bless me, and I should have leisure hereafter to reflect upon having neglected his counsel when there might be none to assist in my recovery…
I observed the tears run down his face very plentifully… he was so moved that he broke off the discourse, and told me his heart was so full he could say no more to me…
I resolved not to think of going abroad any more, but to settle at home according to my father’s desire. But alas! a few days wore it all off; and, in short, to prevent any of my father’s further importunities, in a few weeks after I resolved to run quite away from him…
It was not till almost a year after this that I broke loose, though, in the meantime, I continued obstinately deaf to all proposals of settling to business, and frequently expostulated with my father and mother about their being so positively determined against what they knew my inclinations prompted me to. But being one day at Hull, where I went casually, and without any purpose of making an elopement at that time; but, I say, being there, and one of my companions being about to sail to London in his father’s ship, and prompting me to go with them with the common allurement of seafaring men, that it should cost me nothing for my passage, I consulted neither father nor mother any more, nor so much as sent them word of it; but leaving them to hear of it as they might, without asking God’s blessing or my father’s, without any consideration of circumstances or consequences, and in an ill hour, God knows, on the 1st of September 1651, I went on board a ship bound for London.
I didn’t know I didn’t fit in or anything like that. I just couldn’t stay put in the face of everything. Defoe nailed it.
Expat Chronicles 