Sometimes It's the Destination
“It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” is a phrase often misattributed to the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. But is it ever just the destination?
Say 'it's not the destination, it's the journey' to someone three years into a kidney-transplant list, and watch how it lands. A fine line on a poster; useless to that person.
Key concepts
- Intrinsic Versus Instrumental Value
- Something has intrinsic value when it is good in itself, and instrumental value when it is only good as a means to something else. The saying quietly assumes every journey is the first kind, which is true of a hobby and false of a commute, a course of chemotherapy, or a flight from a war.
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Every work — at a glance
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Ralph Waldo Emerson (essayist)
The American essayist at the centre of Transcendentalism, whose 1841 essay Self-Reliance told a young country to trust its own intuition over institutions. He belongs here for something he never wrote: the journey-not-the-destination line appears nowhere in his work.
What to know
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01
Is it ever just the destination? Frequently. A journey with purely instrumental value — a commute, a treatment, a refugee's flight — is valued for its endpoint and nothing else, so telling that traveller to enjoy the road is not encouragement but a denial of how hard the road is.
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Across subjects
Theme connection
"Are We There Yet?"
Practice — a sample
SPCA commute valued only for arriving is to instrumental value as a hike loved for itself is to —
- A Opportunity cost
- B Sunk cost
- C Survivorship bias
- D Closure
- E Intrinsic value
Sign in to answer and see why each option is right or wrong.
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