Journey vs Destination

Journey vs Destination: What The Brutalist Reveals About Life’s Meaning

Don’t Believe What They’re Selling You

In the closing scene of The Brutalist, a line is delivered with unsettling clarity: “Don’t believe what they’re trying to sell you. In the end, it’s not about the journey. It’s about the destination.”

The line lands with a kind of quiet violence—because it dismantles, in a single stroke, one of the most comforting stories we tell ourselves about meaning, struggle, and becoming. These mantras saturate our culture: it’s all about the journey, not the destination, or its cousin, the path is the goal. These phrases are offered as wisdom, meant to soothe us through effort and uncertainty. But these phrases are not wisdom—they are consolation. What if it’s not about the journey, but the destination? What if the path is not the goal—what if the goal actually is?

The scene unfolds at the Venice Architecture Biennale, where László Tóth—a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor—is finally acknowledged with a dedicated exhibition of his life’s work. His buildings are monuments of concrete and stone, structures that function as both shelter and reminder, bearing the weight of history in their austere, bare forms. In those slabs of concrete, there is nothing ornamental—only presence, weight, and the imprint of memory.

He is old now, frail, seated in a wheelchair. One niece holds his hand; another delivers a short speech on his behalf—perhaps saying what he never could, or what history never allowed him to say.

This moment reframes the journey vs destination question we’ve inherited from self-help culture—a question that promises comfort but may obscure a harder truth about what gives a life its weight and meaning.

When the Journey Becomes Unbearable

There is something almost cruel about telling someone in the middle of suffering that the journey is what matters. Tóth’s journey was not a pleasant walk toward self-discovery—it was survival through the Holocaust, displacement, exploitation, and decades of obscurity in a country that never fully recognized him. His architectural vision was repeatedly compromised, his health deteriorated, his family fractured. The journey nearly destroyed him.

If we romanticize the journey, we risk sanctifying struggle itself. We risk turning pain into schooling, as if every hardship were a lesson designed for our benefit. But some journeys are simply brutal. Some paths are walked not because they lead to growth, but because there is no other choice.

The destination—that moment in Venice, that final recognition—does not redeem the suffering that preceded it. It does not make the journey worthwhile in some neat moral calculus. But it does offer something the journey alone could not: vindication. Proof that the work mattered. That he existed. That what he built will outlast the forces that tried to erase him.

This is why the film’s closing line cuts so deeply. It refuses to prettify suffering. It refuses to tell us that Tóth’s decades of struggle were beautiful because they shaped him. Instead, it insists on the stubborn, uncomfortable truth: what he achieved matters. The destination matters. And perhaps it always did.

When the Journey Does Matter

There are contexts where “it’s about the journey, not the destination” is not consolation—it’s truth. I felt this while trekking the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, three weeks-long walk through altitude, weather, and silence. Each day unfolded step by step, breath by breath. No single moment of arrival could compete with the accumulation of mornings, passes crossed, and the slow recalibration of body and mind. The destination mattered far less than moving through the terrain. The journey was the transformation.

👉 I’ve written about how that trek reshaped my sense of time and presence. How meaning emerged not from reaching a point on a map, but from staying with what the path revealed.

But that experience worked precisely because the context allowed it. The journey was chosen. The risks and challenges were real but held within structure and intention. The destination could wait patiently because it didn’t need to justify the path.

Not all journeys are like that.

When suffering is imposed rather than chosen—when movement becomes survival rather than exploration—the journey stops being formative and becomes draining. In trauma, illness, displacement, recovery, insisting “the journey is the goal” can dismiss what people actually need: an end to suffering, recognition that arrives, proof that endurance led somewhere.

This is why the journey vs destination tension cannot be resolved universally. It depends on context. On consent. On whether the path is walked freely or under duress. The wisdom lies not in choosing one philosophy over the other, but in knowing when each frame serves life—and when it obscures what truly matters.

The Examined Life, Reconsidered

The debate between journey and destination often assumes they are opposites. But what if the more important question is neither? Socrates seemed uninterested in choosing sides. When he declared that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” he was not privileging process over outcome, or arrival over movement. He was suggesting something more radical: that without examination, neither the journey nor the destination holds much meaning at all.

In that light, the question shifts. It is not whether the journey is noble or the destination decisive. Both may matter. Both may coexist. Or both may fail us. What matters is whether a life is lived in conscious relation to itself—whether it is questioned, reflected upon, and held up to the light while it is being lived.

There is an irony here worth noticing. We would not know Socrates at all if it were not for Plato. Socrates wrote nothing. He left no record of his own. His life—however examined—would have vanished into history had it not been witnessed, recorded, and transmitted by another. Which raises an uncomfortable possibility: how many examined lives have disappeared simply because there was no one to hold them, no form to carry them forward?

Examination alone is not enough. Without witness, without some form of arrival or transmission, even the most examined life risks dissolving into anonymity—a journey without a destination, movement without endurance.

This realization is what brings the question home for me: what does it mean not only to examine a life, but to give that examination form—through art, through relationship, through responsibility, through work that can be held, shared, and sustained?

A Form the Journey Can Inhabit

At some point, reflection has to stop circling and begin taking form. The question is not only how a life is examined, but where that examination is allowed to live.

For me, the long tension between journey and destination did not resolve into an answer so much as into a responsibility. I came to see that insight without structure fades, and endurance without witness extracts more than it gives. What mattered was not choosing between movement and arrival, but finding a place where both could be held.

This is what ultimately led me toward training in clinical psychology. Not as a departure from what came before, and not as an attempt to explain or fix a life, but as a way of giving form to what the journey had already revealed. A structure in which examination is not solitary, suffering is not romanticized, and presence is practiced with intention and care.

I don’t experience this as an ending. And I don’t experience it as a beginning either. It feels closer to an arrival — not the kind that closes a journey, but the kind that allows it to endure. A place where the work of being human is met, witnessed, and carried forward, one person at a time.

December 2025