IF YOUR only reason for travelling in your gap year is to build up your CV, you’d do better to spend the time and money on a good therapist — you need help with your exaggerated wish to please parents and future employers and pathological incapacity to be yourself.

You have been under tremendous pressure to conform for 15,000 hours of your life — that is how long the average person is at school. In our crazy society, your gap year is often the one and only small window of opportunity to explore what you enjoy. Once you are at university the need to justify the expense and peer pressure to compete will soon blot you out; once you have embarked on your career, the need to pay off student loans and save enough to take your first step on the mortgage ladder will do the same.

I know of which I write. In 1973, in a sanctimonious outburst of do-gooding, I spent my gap year on a struggling new housing estate on the edge of Manchester setting up a play scheme. While my friends were swanning around America getting stoned and getting laid, I was living out a George Orwell Road to Wigan Pier fantasy of making the world a better place. Sure enough, when I went up to Cambridge for my first year I went completely bananas, catching up on my lack of a misspent youth.

In considering where to travel and what to do when you get there, ask not what you will be doing for your CV (parents and employers) but what you will be doing for yourself — your real self, not the confection that you are under so much pressure to present as yourself.

Our society encourages you to be a Marketing Character, treating you as a commodity that can be bought and sold. Such people constantly search to increase their value in the marketplace, through skills, looks or personality.

Your gap year is a chance to forget about all that and consider what you really enjoy. You may struggle to do that, perhaps having to go all the way back to your early childhood to recall the last time you did something because you really adored being lost in it, rather than because of peer or educational pressure.

The issue is not how to choose a place that will sound impressive and exciting when you regale others with your exploits and photos. Cameras tend to become a way of providing the material proof that you were there, but in many cases, although you are in the photo, the real you is missing.

The truly intrepid trip is not geographical at all. The real battle is to allow yourself to live in unstructured time, just as you adored doing when you were 5. At first it will be very difficult because you are so used to externally imposed goals and deadlines.

So, whether you are in Mozambique, Thailand or Ecuador is of no importance. What matters is that you actually see, hear, smell and taste what is around you in this different environment. Fine, listen to your iPod, read as many novels as you can, keep in touch through e-mail. But, as much as possible, make it your task to discover who you are over and above the role that was scripted for you in your family and what your society says someone of your class and gender should be — otherwise known as adolescence.

It could be the time of your life.

Oliver James is the author of They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life, Bloomsbury, £7.99.

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