If you've ever googled "Should I travel," you've seen what traveling "looks like": rivers, castles, beaches, famous monuments. And the website will probably go on to say "If you're considering traveling, do it! Open your eyes! Become a worldlier person!"

We all know it's not really that simple. Besides, the buzzwords are irritating to swallow: must I leave the country to open my eyes? What does it mean to be a worldlier person? As I roughly paraphrase from a very public MIT mailing list, "people travel to show off to their friends, and it is intrinsically a pretty meaningless endeavor."

Maybe so. How traveling improves your life varies from person to person. Indeed, some people's main takeaway is the admiration from other people. In particular, I'm thinking of people who travel to seven different countries in seven days and promptly upload 400 selfies onto Facebook afterward. There's nothing wrong with that — personally, I find it kind of depressing, but whether we like it or not, a lot of how we act revolves around the engineering of other people's perceptions of us. So hey, if traveling's going to help you in that department, post all the pictures you want!

If you are on the other side of the screen, though, keep in mind that traveling is never as nice as it looks in the pictures. It's stressful to catch planes, to interact with people who don't quite speak English, to navigate a strange city when you can barely read a map and so on. The lowest point of my travels was going to the wrong airport in Berlin (there are three) and not realizing it until I couldn't find the gate. I couldn't really communicate with the customer service, the Wi-Fi was sh*tty and I had a connecting flight in London I needed to catch. I ended up dropping a couple months of my food budget to buy a ticket on the spot.

So let's move on to the more interesting part; why would traveling be worth the pain for you?

Some say the act of getting away from the familiar is valuable. Billions of people lead lives radically different from yours. There exist cynics who describe traveling as a contrived activity concocted by the tourism industry, but a lot more of your life has been influenced by contrived norms than you realize. And nothing makes that more clear than traveling to a place with a different way of doing things.

For example, I had never thought about what it was like to be elderly in the United States; many of the elderly get humiliatingly shunted into retirement homes, and they otherwise have very little visibility. Well, being elderly here in Budapest is awesome. Young people respect you. There are lots of old people everywhere haggling over vegetables, taking the subway, sunbathing on Margit Sziget, playing chess in the baths — it's a culture that strongly embraces the elderly continuing to lead exciting and fulfilling lives. And I'm glad to know now that there are better alternatives to the way people approach retirement in America.

And it's fun, you know? Leisure-traveling forces you to get away from your everyday work or school environment. If you're traveling with other people, you get to interact with them in a different setting and get to know them better. Traveling alone, especially if you're an introvert like me, is a great way to clear your mind of all the noise from interacting with other people. You can be as incredibly slothlike as you'd like, go anywhere you like without recognizing anyone and never have to explain yourself. I thoroughly enjoyed spending three days in Rome alone with my own thoughts and an incredible city. OK ... so I'm also a bit of a misanthrope.

Others say you travel because of the inspiration you can attain from visiting the most famous sights in the world. The Colosseum in Rome, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the Eiffel Tower in Paris: these are all huge cultural icons that you'll encounter no matter where you go. The more of them you see in person, the more culturally literate you are. And why does it matter to be culturally literate (yet another buzzword)? Well, maybe because it's part of the human experience, and the more culturally literate you are, the more you'll understand other people.

I don't know. I think it's kind of bullsh*t; there's no such thing as a human experience that you should live by. After all, whatever you experience and do is by definition a "human experience." Most of the icons and sights we tour, we probably only visit for the sake of seeming "worldly." Also to avoid the embarrassment that crops up when a friend exclaims, "you went to Rome and didn't see the Colosseum?"

There's my two cents on traveling. There are plenty of benefits to traveling, many of which can be found doing something less expensive than traveling: spending a weekend on the nearest lake, learning about other cultures through books, photoshopping pictures for Facebook and so on. But then again, none of them quite address the 17th reason to travel on this list of "17 Reasons Why Around The World Travel is Good For You" — Just for the hell of it. It's not a great reason that something is good for you, but it's certainly a reason to do it.

So there you go. Do it for the hell of it.