I admit, I almost fell for Web 2.0. But this morning I had a rude awakening.

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My article on Newsvine was censored. Hundreds of Digg articles were censored. Web 2.0 has just shown its huge weakness – its unaccountability.

See, normal news media is supposed to uphold a standard of quality. If news breaks about accounting errors in one of their sponsors, they’re supposed to investigate and report. But with social media, the crowd doesn’t have the power to stop censorship or accountability. It’s up to the gatekeepers.

And those gatekeepers have a huge interest in keeping their sponsors happy. Web 2.0 allows the gatekeepers unprecedented power to manipulate the news. Just look at hundreds of articles disappearing from Digg in one day. Do you see the Associated Press censoring hundreds of articles in a day?

Web 2.0 is really about the silent destruction of freedom of information on the net. Individuals no longer own the majority of traffic, it all flows through the group votes of Digg and Reddit and StumbleUpon. When we can’t verify the accountability of these, we get what we have now, a bunch of crap.

Social media just destroyed itself today. Never again will I work for someone else’s media network, like I did at Newsvine. Social media is too dangerous, it won’t ever work the way it was supposed to. It was a pretty dream though.

So it goes, another round of censorship on the ‘net. I’ve had it happen to me before, but I just figured it was an isolated incident. With this though, I’m getting over the internet. It started out as an excited medium, but now it’s becoming pure shit. Corporate interests and censorship everywhere. I’ll see you in the real world, where we can still speak our minds and say numbers without fear of lawsuit…

For now.

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In a today’s culture of so much hurry, time for travel is often the first thing to get sacrificed. Why give ourselves the luxury of time to lie around, producing nothing, while the rest of the world continues to move, change, and leave us behind? In this competitive world, it seems ridiculous to opt out of participation for an extended period of time.

It doesn’t matter what stage of life you’re in, either. For kids graduating from high school, there’s the real economic benefit of college. For kids graduating from college, there’s the need to get real work experience. For the experienced, there’s a need to pay college tuitions back. And so on till death. Excuse after excuse for never taking the time to stop, and take a step outside.

No matter where you start from, creating the time to travel is going to be a difficult task. That’s where its reward lies.

A common problem with Americans these days is a love of the easy. Every other advertisement is promoting an “easy” solution to difficult problems. Overweight? Just call us, and we’ll mail you meals to slim you down. Unsatisfied with your life? Just take these pills and your brain will be fixed.

Only, these “easy” solutions never solve the real, underlying problems. You aren’t physically active enough because you don’t take the time for fitness. Your lifestyle bores you to death because you haven’t taken the time to figure out what wouldn’t.

The solution to these problems is challenge.

It’s easy to put off working out or changing your lifestyle. It’s very difficult to take a step back, look at your life, and decide significant parts of it are just plain wrong.

This is where long term travel comes in to help.

It’s impossible to get a full perspective on yourself while on the hamster wheel of daily habit. Travel shocks you out of these habits and gives you time to reflect. These two simple changes start a chain of events that lead to personal growth and understanding.

Just starting the process of planning for a trip leads to personal growth. You can’t leave for six months at a time with an unhealthy financial situation. If you’re in debt, travel is a real motivation to get out of it. How quickly can you turn around your financial situation so you can see the world?

If you’re not in debt, the prospect of saving for a few months of travel can be just as intimidating. How difficult would it be to save $10,000 for a full year of travel, and what changes in my lifestyle would be necessary to make that possible?

Either way, you’re forced to simplify your life into what really matters. Is buying that new computer really going to improve your life, or is it going to mean another month’s worth of delay for the trip? This little mental shift puts things into focus. You work and spend more efficiently. All of these mental shifts before you even stepped foot on a plane.

But then what about once you’ve left?

Will you really learn anything meaningful while drinking Margaritas on the beach in Thailand?

Without hesitation, the answer is yes. If you’ve worked hard and sacrificed to be able to sit on a beach and drink margaritas for a few weeks, then you deserve it. I think you’ll realize how quickly you can get sick of lying on a beach and drinking margaritas.

Because, once you’ve started challenging yourself to become better (in your own eyes) you get addicted to the process. You’ll realize that sitting around on a beach getting sloshed for years isn’t going to make you a better person, and it definitely isn’t going to lead to a life you’ll be proud of.

So you’ll look to the next challenge: What does a life you would be proud to live look like?

This is such a huge, fundamental question that it blows me away no one asks it at school. Even if we’re put on this planet for no other purpose than procreation and gene selection (hah!), this question is still of the utmost importance. What kind of a life do you want to live?

Of course, culturally we’re programmed to have a similar response as everyone else within our culture. For Americans, it would be a big house, a nice car, a great job, and a happy little family. But once we shock ourselves outside of our immediate culture, we realize how relatively unimportant that big house and nice car are. What matters universally takes over instead.

And those universal things include a great job and a happy family. A great job matters, because regardless of what we do, we have to continue working, to continue producing. There is no way we can get to the point where we can cease to produce meaningful contributions to the world. It’s flawed logic to stay at a job just because the pay is good. Ultimately, the pay is not nearly as significant as the portion of your life you wasted not living how you wanted.

The biggest spiritual lessons from travel are universal truths. No matter what religion you follow, it’s become popular because there is some universal truth to it. No religion has ever encompassed every universal truth, but all of the big ones address them in their own way to their own audience. A few months of travel and reflection will give you at least a few universal truths, and that alone is worth the price of entry. Discovering that Jesus’ words are actual, testable truths, that the Buddhist’s eightfold path is a testable design for a meaningful life, or that the Hindu concept of being here now is really the most profound concept you’ve read, you’ll find the spiritual gems of wisdom that have been handed down from generation to generation. Wisdom kept in the hands of those brave enough to seek it.

And that wisdom is what society needs most. Now and forever. So step outside and ask yourself if you’re willing to seek it yourself.

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