It is a common complaint of veteran long-term travelers everywhere. You return for a visit to your home town, excited to tell friends your tales of hiking the Camino de Santiago or the amazing oysters you sucked fresh from the sea in Cancale, France; and no one cares. You expect your friends would be excited about how you witnessed the Abu Simbel Sun Festival in Egypt or rode a boat through the Beagle Channel in Patagonia but, although they may listen politely and nod their head while they resist the urge to look at their watch, you quickly realize, they would rather be talking about almost anything else.
I thought I was alone, but this is a rather common phenomenon, and there have been scientific studies that discovered why. It turns out; it isn’t (primarily) about jealousy; the problem is about context. Your adventures are unrelatable. Most people are simply more interested in talking about familiar things than they are curious about the new things that you want to introduce to the conversation. Yes, there is a social cost associated with leaving the herd and having unique experiences.
In their paper, “The Unforeseen Costs of Extraordinary Experience,” Harvard Psychologists Gus Cooney, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson discuss how exceptional experiences makes us both “alien and enviable.” As the authors observed, “At worst, people may be envious and resentful of those who have had an extraordinary experience, and at best, they may find themselves with little to talk about.”
In an experiment, the researchers divided subjects into small groups. From those groups, one person was given a funny video of a street performer to watch alone, while the others were given a crappy video animation to watch together.
Before they watched the videos, the researchers told everyone which they were going to see: the entertaining street-magician, or the crummy cartoon.
Immediately after watching their assigned footage, the participants were asked to rate how happy they felt at that moment.
