Going somewhere?
How everything became a journey.
Never have so many traveled so much — metaphorically speaking — in pursuit of so many goals.
Do you want to lose a few pounds? Diets are passé; you’re on a weight-loss journey. Getting in shape? That’s a fitness journey. Expecting a baby? Welcome to your pregnancy journey. Need new clothes? Take a style journey. Undergoing cancer treatment? Yep, that’s a journey too.
A religious awakening is a faith journey. A career in cheerleading is a cheer journey. (There even are cheer journals to document the cheer journey.) Software developers talk about the user journey; salespeople refer to the customer journey from awareness to engagement to purchase.
In this trippy world even a construction zone can be a journey.
How pervasive is journey? Since its modest debut in the 1980s, it has been an increasingly popular choice as a baby name. (Check it out in the Namerology NameGrapher.) In 2022, according to U.S. Social Security Administration data, Journey ranked #315 among newborn girls’ names — and an alternate spelling, Journee, ranked #195, ahead of Vanessa, Ariel, Lila, and Elise. There are baby-boy Journeys, too.
We didn’t always talk this way. It’s been only in the last 40 or so years that journey has become one of our culture’s dominant metaphors, a convenient stand-in for experience, ordeal, process, test, investigation, story, and series of events.
The word journey is not itself new, of course. It entered English in the 13th century from Old French journee, which meant both a single day — jour in modern French — and a single day’s travels on land (as opposed to voyage, which takes place on water).
The metaphorical sense of journey — what the OED defines as “the ‘pilgrimage’ or passage through life” — is also old. The dictionary’s earliest citation for this sense of journey is from around 1225, in a guidebook for nuns: “The pilgrim in the world’s way … many things may hinder him on his journey.” English translations of the Bible use journey almost exclusively literally, to mean travel; but in his Sonnet 27, published in 1609, Shakespeare wrote of a figurative “journey in my head.” In the late 19th century, English translators rendered the words of the classical Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu (6th century BCE) as “The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step” — advice meant to be interpreted symbolically.
For many years the metaphor was used sparingly: My 1980 edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations contains only a couple dozen journey citations (including, from 1956, Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night). But that’s precisely when things began to change. Nineteen-eighty was a turning point in journey’s journey: the year the metaphor began traveling into popular discourse.
It was in 1980 that George Lakoff, a linguist, and Mark Johnson, a philosopher, published Metaphors We Live By, which explained how figurative language reflects and shapes our thinking. Journey figured prominently in the book. Our language reveals that we think of love as a journey (“We’re at a crossroads,” “The relationship isn’t going anywhere”) and that, like our medieval ancestors, we also think of life as a journey (“A good start in life,” “He’ll go places”). Metaphors We Live By was and remains hugely influential in academic circles and beyond.
The advent of New Age philosophy around this time, with its Eastern influences and its focus on mind-body harmony, also encouraged journey-ing. The earliest citation I found for “the cancer journey” is in a 1979 issue of the literary magazine Saturday Review ; today, a search for “cancer journey” yields tens of thousands of matches. Thanks in part to The Healing Journey, a 1983 book by Claudio Naranjo — a Chilean-born psychiatrist who wrote widely about spiritual practices — journey became attached to non-cancerous afflictions as well. See, for example, Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction (2009); The Journey of the Heroic Parent (2016),The Journey of Grieving (2023), and Navigating Your Healthcare Journey (2023).
Spiritual journey blends seamlessly into pop-culture journey. The English rock band The Who was a pioneer, performing “Amazing Journey” in the 1969 rock opera Tommy (the journey of the song title is a psychedelic one); Amazing Journey is also the title of a 2007 documentary about the band. The band called Journey, whose original rhythm guitarist, George Tickner, died in early July, has been making musical journeys since its formation in 1973 in San Francisco.
On TV “reality” shows like The Bachelor — which first aired in 2002 and is still going strong — “It’s been an incredible journey” is often the parting summary of rejected contestants. From reality TV to reality: a civil-rights activist’s incredible journey to honor her husband’s legacy; a shark-attack victim’s incredible journey into “normal life”; an athlete’s incredible journey “from near-suicide to Olympic hopeful.” “Once rare and remarkable,” observed journalist Stacey Woods in a 2013 article for Esquire, “incredible journeys have become incredibly commonplace. Most people are either on one, have just completed one, or are between them.”
Then there are the corporate journey-ers who like to portray their business dealings as trailblazing adventures. One of the first to do so was Apple founder Steve Jobs, who was fond of saying (but almost certainly did not coin) “The journey is the reward.” The phrase was even used as the title of a 1987 biography of Jobs. Today the corporate world is abuzz with journeys, most often invoked when a business goes bust. It may be curtains for the company, a CEO will solemnly tell the world, but it’s not “the end of the journey.”
Rochelle Kopp, a consultant to Bay Area and Japanese companies and the co-author of Valley Speak, a guide to Silicon Valley jargon, told me that this usage of journey “pairs well with the Silicon Valley penchant to glorify failure as a way to grow” and suggests “that even though things have not gone well, it’s just a setback on the longer journey, which will ultimately lead to your desired goal.”
Kopp, who is fluent in Japanese, also noted she’s unable to translate this metaphorical journey. To use a Japanese word for trip or travel in a figurative sense, she said, “would be completely nonsensical.” But the metaphor is so irresistible that Japanese businesspeople now use jahnee — the untranslatable English word with a Japanese pronunciation.
And that, you have to admit, is a pretty incredible journey for a shape-shifting, widely traveled word.