Often in life, we rage at people. We rage at their foolish actions and annoying habits and apparent inability to understand basic words. It’s exasperating, frankly. What we mistakenly forget, however, amidst the bestial excitement of our rage state, is that, more often than not, others’ folly is the byproduct of ignorance—of unpretentious, innocent, exasperating ignorance.

You clicked on this piece almost certainly because of its title, halfheartedly hoping for some meager sliver of intrigue. The truth is that there isn’t, of course, a universal “solution” for ignorance. Some might point to education, and that is certainly a key part of it. But education only gets you part of the way there, allowing you to think and know of something. It lacks the kind of bona fide feeling or experience that changes minds, hearts, and lives, as cliché as that sounds.

And so, my proposition (and likely one that has been many times over elaborately laid out by people far more intelligent than I, but nonetheless) is simple: traveling.

So far in my life, I’ve had the tremendous privilege of traveling to all different places. Each one, whether fantastically astonishing or plainly banal, has opened my eyes to a world formerly unbeknownst to me.

Parisians spending hours lounging on brasserie patios, drinks in hand. People talking with different accents—of Appalachia or New York; of Texas or Minnesota. The way the crisp air feels up in the mountains of Colorado. The warm sound of a virtuoso violinist’s strains at the doorstep of an archaic Firenze church.

And, also: the eeriness of driving past an abandoned ghost town. How trash bags smell after they’ve been lying out on a city street for days. The lonely faces of train passengers scrolling through their phones, longing to finally get off after a long day of work.

All of these memories I’ve been able to experience on trips to different places, and, besides presenting another individual cool (or rather “unique,” in some cases) moment, each one has allowed me to broaden and deepen my perspective of the world. Each has allowed my worldview a certain quality which I just would not, and could not, obtain from an online video, even if I were to decide to search up “the warm sound of a virtuoso violinist’s strains at the doorstep of an archaic Firenze church” on YouTube.

And, of course, I entirely understand that for some, travel isn’t exactly a feasible luxury. That said, I do think that the wholly transformative, profoundly wondrous quality of the experience is often undervalued in contemporary American discussion and even everyday subconscious thought. We save up for thinner and thinner TV’s or those shiny, new Meta Glasses, forgetting that more dust collectors for our homes won’t, in the long run, fill our gaping holes of emotional emptiness.

Traveling will. And, what’s more: it will help you avoid the next fight with your spouse over your underappreciation of their ideas. Because the allies of ignorance are anger, vitriol, and revenge. And so, when ignorance is rejected, the world feels more as it really is: beautiful, extraordinary, and never to be taken for granted.