OPINION: Why Everyone Should Travel Alone at Least Once

By Owen Konzolo

Since I started working, I’ve been travelling alone a lot more. Not by design, simply because work takes you places, and sometimes nobody else is coming with you.

The first few times were mildly uncomfortable in the way that most things outside your comfort zone are.

A little too much time with your own thoughts, a few too many dinners where you’re quietly googling whether it’s weird to eat at a restaurant alone.

The answer is no, by the way. You just bring a book and look very purposeful about it.

Travelling Alone

But somewhere between the first trip and the several that followed, something changed.

The discomfort stopped feeling like a problem and started feeling like the point.

Travelling alone hits you with realisations. The quiet, accumulating feeling you get when you’re doing something completely ordinary.

Sitting in a bus. Looking out of a window. Watching the world go by.

Also Read: Can Moving to Europe Make Your Skin Lighter? Here’s the Truth

I was on a bus not very recently, making my way from Nairobi to Voi, a few hours away.

Music in my ears, other passengers around me, and outside villages passing. A woman hanging laundry. Children are walking somewhere.

A man sitting outside a shop doing absolutely nothing in the most peaceful way imaginable.

Life was happening completely independently of me and my plans and whatever I’d been mildly stressed about before boarding.

There is something about watching other people’s lives go by.

Their routines, their rhythms, the texture of a life lived somewhere entirely different from your own, that puts things in perspective in a way that no amount of journaling has managed for me personally.

You’re reminded that the world is very large and very full. And it only really happens when you’re alone.

When there’s nobody next to you to nudge and say, “Look at that,” you just look. And it lands differently.

It’s Not Just You

I know how this sounds. Travelling alone as a vehicle for appreciating life is the premise of roughly every book displayed at airport terminals. But the research is actually interesting.

A 2025 paper on the psychology of solo travel found that solo travellers experience measurable improvements in self-efficacy, the belief in your own ability to handle what the world puts in front of you, alongside reductions in anxiety and stress that persist well after coming home.

Psychologists use the term “identity flexibility” to describe part of what’s happening: the capacity to move between different versions of yourself rather than staying locked into the one your daily routine has assigned you.

When you’re somewhere unfamiliar with no one to defer to, you encounter situations your existing identity doesn’t have a ready-made response to.

You figure it out. And each time you do, something shifts quietly.

You Do Make Friends, For The Record

A necessary clarification, because people always assume solo travel means solitary travel: it doesn’t.

Some of the best conversations happen because you’re alone without a companion to default to, you end up talking to people you’d never have approached otherwise.

The person at a café who knows exactly where to eat in the city. The fellow traveller with opinions about everything.

The boda rider whose perspective on his own town is more interesting than anything you read before arriving.

Travelling alone doesn’t mean being lonely. It means being available.

To the people around you, to your surroundings, and to yourself in a way that’s genuinely harder to access when you’re busy being someone’s travel companion.

Why Everything Feels A Little Rosier

I’m not trying to oversell this. Travelling alone won’t resolve your emails or fix whatever you’ve been putting off at home. It won’t make you a permanently different person.

I’ve returned from trips feeling genuinely renewed and then felt stressed about something completely mundane within forty-eight hours of getting home. That part doesn’t change.

But what it does, consistently, is remind you that there’s so much more to life. Not in a grand sense. In a very specific, ordinary one.

The light somewhere at a particular time of day. The smell of something cooking from a window you pass.

The feeling of being somewhere new with nowhere to be except exactly where you are. It feels like a reset. Like something that had gone slightly dim gets turned back up.

You remember what you find interesting, what makes you laugh, what kind of person you are when nobody who already knows you is watching.

Also Read: Dem Wa Facebook Biography: Age, Children, Education, Football Career and Success Story

That last part is probably the real thing. Knowing you’re there by yourself, for yourself, it sounds like the tagline of a wellness retreat, I’m aware. But it does something. The way small moments land.

The way ordinary life, when you return to it, feels a little more worth paying attention to.

Which, I think, is the whole point of leaving your bubble and exploring the world in the first place.

Follow our WhatsApp channel for instant news updates

A photo of the road for illustration
PHOTO/Jibi travels