Post Archive


Here you can find every post from Jack's Journal, even the ones I've hidden! 

Jack finishes the Camino de Santiago—315km, new friends, lessons, and loss. Reflections on the journey, Spain’s fires, and what comes next on the road.

Europe resists air conditioning in the name of virtue, yet heat deaths outpace US gun deaths. Jack looks at the faux morality behind this resistance and preventable death.

Jack tells the story of a date gone wrong with an American girl in London during his first year of world travel.

Spain faces rising tensions over illegal Muslim immigration amid mosque fires and street violence. Jack takes a closer look at what's fueling unrest and growing public concern.

I was disgusted with this policy. I wasn't disgusted with the businesses which used the legal system to lower costs, but with the Communist Part of Vietnam for allowing its people to be exploited by foreign capitalists. It was the very definition of hypocrisy. I was also disgusted with Americans who supported communist ideals back home while simultaneously decrying President Trump's tariff policy.

Poverty, true poverty, was a systemic issue on the international stage. There weren't rich forces at play controlling the world economy like some conspiracy theorists may have believed, but there were real problems out of an individual’s control that caused them to live in poverty. It wasn't simply a matter of moving or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps; when the average income for your country was 4,000 USD, getting out of a poverty-stricken world took more than sheer g

I've travelled around and talked to a lot of people in my two years abroad. Inevitably, at some point in the conversation, I get asked "What's up with your country?" The United States' unique economic, defence, and political position in the world gives us a lot of pull, but it also makes people think about us. Like learning the English language, the more someone tries to learn about the American way of things, the more they get confused.

Border controls like this one are a fact of life for long-term travellers like me. As Americans, we have an idealised view of what international travel looks like as we take our annual two-week vacation to popular tourism destinations. We are often waived through without serious inspection, our tourism dollars more valuable than customs regulations. I wasn't visiting tourism hotspots; I was visiting countries both on and off the beaten path.

In the post-October 7th world, the term "Zionist" became a widely-used, poorly understood slur. Anyone who condemned October 7th or affirmed Israel's right to defend itself was labelled a Zionist whose opinions should be wholly discounted.