The Top Travel Destinations with Kevin Flanagan
Oct 1, 2026 · 13 min · 7 segments
As the world seems to verve from one disaster to another people ask me more and more: how can I get away from the mayhem. What is the ideal destination for a bit of peace and tranquility? I have one…
All the research is indicating that people, particularly young people, are feeling they are living in a world that's on the edge.
It seems to be fracturing under our very feet and it's having a profound effect on people's sense of well-being.
And people often ask me now, increasingly, where can I travel to, if I'm actually going to travel, where can I travel to get away from all of this? 24-hour news cycle.
Where can I travel where I'm going to get a sense of peace? Where am I going to travel where I can sort of rebalance? I've really no doubt in my mind in recommending a pilgrimage.
Now, what was a pilgrimage? A pilgrimage was something that people did in order to find peace, both in this world and the promise of peace in the next.
And we've dropped the sense of the next world, particularly in Western capitalist society.
The church disgraced itself in so many ways with clerical abuse and people threw out the baby, I believe, with the bathwater, very understandably.
But the problem is now that as the world teeters, as it always has done if you really look at history, many of us do not have the succour of a religious foundation.
There's further evidence that the right sphere of our brain, where we do deliberate on things like love and death and why we're here and what's the point in my life, because we're using so much screen time and so much distraction, that the right hand part of the brain that looks at wonder is slowly atrophying.
You can imagine if you underuse any part of the body, whatever that is, a muscle, a sphere of the brain, then it stops functioning effectively and you get a consequence.
And the consequence for this obsession with screen time is increased lack of meaning, which is very dangerous.
When you have lack of meaning, people are vulnerable to all sorts of populism and mental distress, mental unease and emotional, psychological unwellness are on the increase, particularly among young people.
All the research is indicating that people, particularly young people, are feeling they are living in a world that's on the edge.
It seems to be fracturing under our very feet and it's having a profound effect on people's sense of well-being.
And people often ask me now, increasingly, where can I travel to, if I'm actually going to travel, where can I travel to get away from all of this? 24-hour news cycle.
Where can I travel where I'm going to get a sense of peace? Where am I going to travel where I can sort of rebalance? I've really no doubt in my mind in recommending a pilgrimage.
Now, what was a pilgrimage? A pilgrimage was something that people did in order to find peace, both in this world and the promise of peace in the next.
And we've dropped the sense of the next world, particularly in Western capitalist society.
The church disgraced itself in so many ways with clerical abuse and people threw out the baby, I believe, with the bathwater, very understandably.
But the problem is now that as the world teeters, as it always has done if you really look at history, many of us do not have the succour of a religious foundation.
There's further evidence that the right sphere of our brain, where we do deliberate on things like love and death and why we're here and what's the point in my life, because we're using so much screen time and so much distraction, that the right hand part of the brain that looks at wonder is slowly atrophying.
You can imagine if you underuse any part of the body, whatever that is, a muscle, a sphere of the brain, then it stops functioning effectively and you get a consequence.
And the consequence for this obsession with screen time is increased lack of meaning, which is very dangerous.
When you have lack of meaning, people are vulnerable to all sorts of populism and mental distress, mental unease and emotional, psychological unwellness are on the increase, particularly among young people.
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