Listen to Wesley Warshawer on Pay Me In Plane Tickets Radio

Wesley Warshawer discovered, somewhere in early adulthood, that the life he had been living was smaller than he thought—not smaller in ambition, but smaller in aperture, a life conducted almost entirely within the frequencies of people who already agreed with him. Most people have this discovery once, if at all, and spend the rest of their lives quietly resisting its implications. Warshawer had it early and then, more unusually, kept having it, on a rolling basis, for the better part of two decades.

The first version arrived in India, where he went at nineteen on a study-abroad semester that he now describes, with the mild embarrassment of someone recalling an old crush, as the beginning of everything. The revelations were not the grand kind. They arrived in supermarkets, in the ordinary friction of buying groceries in a system that assumed nothing he assumed. This is, if you think about it, a very unglamorous way to have your worldview rearranged—no mountaintop, no monsoon epiphany, just the slow accumulation of small corrections—but it seems to have worked on him the way it works on almost no one: permanently.

He kept going. A Fulbright took him to Seoul, into a graduate cohort of four hundred and fifty students drawn from sixty-five countries, which is its own kind of bubble-puncturing, a room in which no majority holds. Then came the part of the story that reads, at first, like a betrayal of the theme: a job in Silicon Valley’s semiconductor industry, a return to comfort, a settling in among people who had all arrived at more or less the same conclusions about the world by more or less the same routes.

It was there, oddly, that the second and more interesting epiphany found him. In 2017, he came across a set of statistics—about the electorate, about religion, about guns—that described an America he did not recognize from his desk in California. The dissonance was not political so much as geographic: he had spent years learning to be a stranger in Delhi and Seoul while becoming, without noticing, a stranger to Biloxi and Bismarck. So he did the thing that people who take their own epiphanies seriously sometimes do, which is act on it years later, inconveniently, when a pandemic finally handed him the excuse. He gave up the apartment. He got in the car.

What followed was eighteen months of a version of America that doesn’t often show up in the feeds of the people who might read this sentence—small towns, red counties, conversations conducted not to win but to understand—followed by three more years scattered across Latin America, Colombia among them, and Africa, and Europe, the itinerary of a man for whom home had become less a place than a habit he was trying to break.

The résumé, laid flat, could read like restlessness. It reads instead, in his telling, like method. The bubble, for Warshawer, is not a metaphor to be deployed once and retired; it is a condition that reconstitutes itself the moment you stop paying attention, wherever you happen to be standing. Leave it in one direction—geographic, national, ideological—and it simply re-forms in another, waiting for the next departure to reveal it. This is either an exhausting way to live or the only honest one, and Warshawer, to his credit, seems less interested in litigating which than in proving, trip after trip, that the discomfort is where the information is.

The Discomfort Is the Point