My cousin is forty-two years old. Last year, he traveled abroad for the first time and went to Iceland.

After he came back, his whole state was off.
It’s not the kind of “Wow, I saw the Northern Lights, so healing” state, but the opposite—he became a bit silent, completely different from the guy who used to crack jokes as soon as he opened his mouth.
I invited him to dinner and asked him three times before he finally told me the truth.
He said he always thought traveling was for young people, and now he realizes he didn’t just miss Iceland.
My cousin is a typical “work first, enjoy later” type.
In his twenties, his friends pooled money to go to Lijiang, Tibet, Southeast Asia, but he never went.
His catchphrase was “When I earn enough money, I want to go to the best places, stay in the best hotels, not suffer through budget travel like them.” He actually did it.
By thirty-five, he was already a middle manager at a company, earning over 700,000 a year, with a house and a car.
Then his father was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer.
He put everything aside and spent the last year with his father.
When his father passed away, his mother couldn’t handle the grief and was hospitalized.
This delay of his lasted three years.
Finally, when he could breathe and go out for a walk, his own neck, waist, blood pressure, and blood sugar all went wrong.
On his last day in Iceland, sitting by the hotel window watching the snow, he suddenly cried.
He told me he wasn’t crying because of the scenery.
He suddenly realized that when he was twenty-two, if he had squeezed into a big dorm with friends in Western Sichuan, he would have spent the whole night on the mountain top watching stars, and the next day he could still hike for eight hours.
Now, standing in front of Iceland’s most beautiful glacier, he could only walk twenty minutes before gasping, and the guide told him to take a break.
The twenty-something young man with him had already climbed to the top of the glacier to take photos, while he stood at the foot of the mountain, feeling like an outsider.
The scenery was the same.
But the body that looked at the scenery was no longer the same body.
Speaking of this, I remembered an aunt I met many years ago in Yunnan.
She was in her sixties, walking alone by Erhai Lake with a backpack.
I struck up a conversation with her, and she said she was retired.
Her son had asked her to join a tour group, but she didn’t want to; she just wanted to go out for a walk and clear her mind.
I asked if she had been to Yunnan before.
She smiled and said, “This is the first time in my life.”
She said she had always wanted to come when she was young.
At twenty, she and her classmates saved money together, but her classmate’s family had an accident, so they couldn’t go.
Later, she got married and had children.
Her kids needed to go to school and take extra classes, her husband was busy with work, and she kept thinking “Maybe later.”
By the time she finally had time, she couldn’t walk fast anymore.
She said she now counts her steps every day when she walks, her knees can’t climb mountains, and sitting for long makes her back ache.
“I looked at the steps in the Double Dragon Ancient Town, and I thought, when I was twenty, I could run up those steps. Now I have to hold the railing and inch up step by step.”
She finished and looked at me, asking my age.
I said twenty-eight.
She said, “Hurry up and go travel. Really, you don’t realize now that your legs are treasures.”
I’ve thought about this for a long time.
I always thought “Travel while young” was just a motivational quote, something those internet influencers who say “The world is so big, I want to see it” use to lure followers.
I’m a rational person.
I believe in delayed gratification, I believe in suffering first and enjoying later, I believe that by thirty-five, you’ll have money and leisure to go to better places than at twenty-five.
But that day, I suddenly understood one thing—
The happiness of traveling isn’t determined by money, but by the body.
When you’re twenty, you stay in hostels, sleep in bunk beds, a dozen people in a room, and you can laugh and chat with strangers until three in the morning.
The next morning, you get up at six to watch the sunrise, and it’s completely fine.
When you’re forty, you stay in five-star hotels, with beds softer than at home, but you can’t sleep until three, wake up with back pain, and only want to go back to sleep for a couple more hours.
When you’re twenty, you eat street food, a ten-yuan fried noodle dish can make you happy all day.
When you’re forty, you sit in a Michelin restaurant, the waiter describes where each dish comes from, you nod and smile, but inside you’re thinking that after this meal, your stomach will be uncomfortable again.
When you’re twenty, you hide under eaves during rain, laughing as you do.
When you’re forty, your first reaction to rain is whether to go back to the hotel, call a cab, worry about catching a cold, and how it will affect tomorrow’s plans.
It’s not pretentious; it’s physiological.
By the way, I saw a statistic a few days ago that said the maximum oxygen intake starts to decline after twenty-five, knee cartilage begins to wear down after thirty, and balance ability deteriorates year by year after thirty-five.
These numbers alone don’t feel like much.
But put them in the context of travel, and you understand—
Why a twenty-year-old’s hike is “challenging oneself,” but a forty-year-old’s is “showing off.”
Why a twenty-year-old’s all-night stay is “crazy youth,” but a forty-year-old’s is “ruining the next day.”
Why a twenty-year-old sees steep stairs and wants to rush up, but a forty-year-old sees them and wants to go around.
The scenery never changes.
What changes is your body—the body that carries happiness.
I know that by the time I get to this point, some people will argue with me.
They’ll say that with age comes experience and aesthetic appreciation, that older people see deeper into the scenery than the young.
That twenty-year-olds only take selfies with Mona Lisa at the Louvre, but forty-year-olds can see the nuances.
I agree with this half.
Experience can indeed deepen your view, but only if your body can still take you to that place.
You can’t appreciate the scenery you can’t reach, enjoy the food your stomach can’t digest, or walk on legs that can’t support you.
The “depth” that middle-aged people have over the young can’t buy the “breadth” that youth has over middle-aged.
And I increasingly feel that—
In travel, breadth is more important than depth.
After my cousin told me those words and fell silent for a moment,
He finally said, “Listen to your brother. Some places, if you don’t go now, it’s not a matter of ‘going a little later,’ but ‘never going again.’”
It’s not that the place is gone, but that you are gone.
It’s that person who can squat to eat street food without caring about dirt, climb a six-hour mountain without complaining, sleep in the same room with strangers without awkwardness, run in the rain and laugh out loud—that person is no longer there.
That person is the true protagonist of travel.
The place is just a supporting role.
So, to the question—
Is it more meaningful to travel while young?
Yes.
Not because young people understand happiness better than middle-aged, but because much of the joy of travel resides in the body, and once the body starts to decline in a one-way process, you can’t store or recover it.
Money can wait, career can wait, a house can wait, children can wait.
But knees can’t wait.
The day my cousin left, he told me something I still remember.
He said his biggest regret in life wasn’t earning enough money, but that when he was twenty-two, a friend invited him to Western Sichuan, and he said “Later.”
That “later” never came again.