Yesterday I saw on my Facebook feed some downtrodden posts from travel bloggers about a fellow blogger who had taken her life. I clicked through to the link leading to her page and saw that she had done the deed on her birthday. I visited her blog and read her last post, which was about a difficult breakup. She cited the central conflict to her defunct relationship being that her partner supported neither her travels nor her blog. It was eerie to read knowing that shortly after she wrote it, she took her life.

Prior to reading about her on my feed, I had not heard of her blog nor had I met her. Some say that suicide is the ultimate act of selfishness, since it tears gaping, irreparable holes in the hearts of everyone who loved the person who departed at their own hands. That’s true in one sense, but who wants to judge someone who was so broken inside, whose vision for the future was such a stretch of darkness that they felt the only way to end their pain would be to end their one shot at life?

I read about this in an Internet café off Guatemala’s Lake Atitlán, and as I walked at dusk along the shore, it put me in a reflective mood. Not knowing the woman, it did not affect me personally, but the incident led my train of thought to thinking about loosely related subjects of—selfishness, travel blogging, and selfishness in the travel blogging world.

In a previous post, I’ve already written about why I was reluctant to join the world of travel blogging. Even today, I feel uneasy about the term, “travel blogger” being applied to me, though this very blog would seem to suggest it’s an appropriate one. I prefer to think of myself as a sometimes serious writer, who travels a lot and has a blog which happens to be mostly travel related, but is also sometimes, as readers know, about hamsters and squirrels playing the banjo.

Full disclosure: Some of the most outrageously, awesome and intrepid people—the kind who make you want to river dance and learn the fiddle—are travel bloggers.

And though these are not the majority, some of the most selfish, narcissistic, look-at-me-my-life-is-way-awesomer-than-yours type people I have met are also travel bloggers. And I don’t think every member of the latter category all started out that way. Along the road, there are many holes one can fall into.

So to my fellow travel bloggers, we walk a fine line and should be every wary of falling to the dark side. Two questions we should never stop asking ourselves:

Question 1: Why Am I Traveling The World?

Based on a recent experience I wish I was not thinking about, I can tell you straight up, it’s not for the bathrooms. Honesty dictates that part of this answer is that traveling is all about us. It’s about our own self-actualization—doing things that make our adrenaline pump, our sense of wonder grow and gets us bounding out of bed in the morning like a hungry bulldog seeing his dish is full of meat.

Howard Thurman had a good one on the subject, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

But what should we do with that aliveness the world has given us? We can paraphrase JFK here and proclaim, “Ask not what the world can do for you, but what you can do for the world.”

Especially when traveling to poor countries: Are we doing more than enjoying their discount cervezas, beaches, parties and ziplines? Or are we also dedicating at least some time volunteering in NGOS, supporting worthwhile causes, using our time, talent, treasure or typing to do something that matters in a meaningful, sustainable way?  Are we coming as guests in another’s home or spring breakers who leave wounded soldiers, unflushed toilets and Twix wrappers around the house?

What we do does not need to be anything specific—but everyone fortunate enough to be flying in planes surely has it in them to do something worthwhile—and these are the guys and gals’ blogs that I tend to want to read.

Question 2: Why Am I Keeping A Travel Blog?

For some (and I’m insanely jealous of you) the answer is, “it pays my rent.” This is fine, and actually quite wonderful (show me your ways!).

I believe we all write in the hopes that someone, not our mom, is paying attention to our words—as I imagine it is with TV commentators, radio talk show hosts, newspapers columnists, novelists, screen play writers, graffiti artists etc. And an audience gives us both opportunity and responsibility.

For those intrepidly awesome travel bloggers I love who I hope get free beer for life, their blogs are a means to inspire others to also come alive. There is no such thing as meaningless words, as everything means something to someone. That something could be boredom, ambivalence, irritation or even anger. But the other side of the coin is that it could mean interest, engagement, inspiration or wistful enthrallment.

For the worst among us, I’m sorry to say the answer to this second question is, “Because I’m awesome!, my life is awesome!, and I would like the world to worship, or at least nod, to this awesomeness.

These guys and gals are not hard to spot, as their average post contains 5 photos of them, usually in a bathing suit and on a beach, taken with the self-timer of their camera. First of all, yawn, second of all, really?, put your love handles away!

Like boats rising or falling together with the tide, I believe that from the stranger next to you on a bus, to someone across the world you’ve never met, that we’re all in “this” together. There’s where the nobility in the blogger resides.

When I fail to live up to that in my own life, it’s usually because I’m caught up in some self-interest, or preoccupied with a future that has not yet come, or rephrasing the lines I wish I had said at the bar last night. In these moments I hope we can remember to pause and reflect on what’s important and how what we are doing furthers that. Because when we take a step outside of ourselves, both we and the world grow larger.