The Traveler: a personality with a necessity in novelty and self-transcendence

The aim of this article is an attempt to create a model of the Traveler's personality. It is quite a specific type of person whose way of life is traveling. The personality of the Traveler is the cornerstone of Traveling Philosophy because without a person who performs the journey there is no Traveling itself. Even though J. Steinbeck considered that "[w]e do not take a trip; a trip takes us", the role of personality in this process is hard to overestimate. People always traveled to discover new lands, to make acquaintance with a neighbor, to find treasures, to test their might, to gain knowledge of the previously unknown and, finally, to become different than they were before they left homeland. Then why do some people set off to journeys that are sometimes dangerous and complicated and why do others stay at home? Why, what for and for what purpose do these people risk their lives and transcend from the comfortable and understandable world? What is the motivation? What are the main characteristics of the Traveler's personality? The world outlook, interests and value system (where the top spot is the value of Novelty) are the defining and motivating factors of the Traveler's behavior. It is the world outlook that creates the sense-making basis for a person to choose Traveling as a way of life. Values are considered as strategical intentions of the personality that define its behavior and integrate in a particular key. As the specifics of a person's psychology, methods of his/her intellectual and emotional interaction with the world result from each value, it is appropriate to accompany each aspect of the Traveler's life with the relevant psychological module. The result is the characteristics of the personality in a vertical section: from values, aims and purposes to the emotional and volitional sphere, cognitive strategies and inherent peculiarities. Also it is proposed to consolidate all possible variants (external "geographical" and internal "metaphysical") of travel in a person's life into one key, namely, to consider them as a process of personality's transcending outside of boundaries of its society, habitual world, mentality, culture, personality, etc. The role of the Traveler in the community's life is hard to overestimate since not only s/he creates socially interesting Products that conclude the results of the journeys and introduce new meanings, values, cultural codes into his/her environment; but also s/he partially becomes the Product of his/her way of life. The Traveler gives an amazing example of a self-actualizing personality that proceeds along the path of individuation, finding Self and Meaning. Path to Self through self-transcendence during Traveling helps society to see other perspectives besides those that exist on the objective utilitarian and practical level of being. The Traveler is desperately absorbed into the world of Novelty and Changes and carries away other people with similar values taking them out of the circle of meaningless existence and existential vacuum.

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