[Tekahera]

Wow, that's a pretty presumptuous article. The OP somehow confuses "extroverted adventure seeker" with "awake". Maybe we're arguing semantics here, but in my experience these are some of the least awake people I know. In my conception, to be awake involves a lot of meditation, enough in fact that it affects your demeanor in ways that can make you come across as reserved, not really there, and even "asleep" to those with bubblier personalities.

Quite contrary to the OP, in my experience the true inner state of a person is one of the hardest things you can tease out, and it's very very easy to be mistaken. To claim that it's fairly easy to distinguished awakened people by way of some light questioning, well, that just seems to me rather hasty, if not even silly.

[rheide]

Wow, your reply is not one I was expecting. I am in fact quite introvert myself and I was certainly not implying that extroverted adventure seekers are what I call 'awake'. If anything, I'd say that introvert/extrovert has little to do with it. I've met some awake extroverts and some awake introverts, but not many. And when you travel you're bound to find (and speak to) more extrovert people than introvert people. I'm sorry I made you think of extroverts, because that's definitely not what I mean by being 'awake'.

[Tekahera]

Hey, don't worry about it, that's just how it came through to me, most likely because of my own experience in thinking about these things. I often noticed how extremely excited my brother gets about traveling and how he tends to evaluate people predominantly on criteria related to it. From there I noticed how other travelers have a tendency to overdo the traveling thing as well. When I read your examples and how quickly and carelessly you labeled these people, you came across as someone like that too. Maybe it was a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing, but when you dismiss people like the first 2 japanese guys as not awake simply because of their attitude to traveling... well, I don't grok that.