It’s been four days since opening day of Backrooms and on opening day, I invited my mom and stepdad to watch one of my most anticipated movies not only of 2026, but of the past several years. And you’re probably wondering, why am I talking about a horror movie on my travel blog since it doesn’t seem to have any connection to world voyaging.
Well what if I told you that the Backrooms have played a pivotal role in how I navigate just about everything that I do. From traveling to storytelling to the very quiet moments at home where the gears are still in motion.
Allow me to explain!
What Are The Backrooms?
If I could summarize what the Backrooms are in my own words, it is a world created from a single image on 4chan back in 2019, starting as an internet creepypasta of a mustard-yellow walled office space, that quickly turned into one of the most popular pieces of internet lore. The added details could send me down a rabbit hole.
So I’ll jump forward to 2022 where a teenager named Kane Parsons took this lore and created his own universe based on that image. What started as one Blair Witch-style found footage video expanded into an entire YouTube series that has had me hooked for more than four years.
But you see, it’s not the yellow walls, loud light fixtures, and creepy entities that got me hooked. It’s something called liminal spaces, which is essentially what the Backrooms revolves around.
What Are Liminal Spaces & How It Changed Me
There are many definitions of what liminal spaces are and I’m not one to define them strictly by the textbook meaning. But liminal spaces are familiar places and settings that are devoid of humans that give off an unsettling but comforting vibe and feel. This can range from empty shopping malls to empty hallways that invoked a certain feeling of calm and comfort. Hell, most of these familiar settings come from childhood memories.
For me, the feeling that liminal spaces give me is a massive sense of calm and peace. After discovering Kane Pixels’ series on YouTube, I found myself going down a rabbit hole of what these liminal spaces are. But more importantly, I found something for the first time in my life that brought me peace two years after Covid, while living a chaotic life of multiple jobs and trying to plan out my travels.
How This Began During a More Intense Era of Voyaging
I found that the world of liminal spaces, and the feeling it invoked in me, allowed me to regulate my life with a kind of balance I had never experienced before. Going down a deeper layer into the world of liminal spaces was the music. Øneheart, Antent, Daniel.mp3 and many more to name. One would call it atmospheric music, but I would rather call it ethereal music because it carries the flow and sound that I deeply connect to with liminal spaces. The calm of empty, endless pool rooms and hallways, and even that office space shown in the Backrooms, became a daily thing for me to reset. It became a place for my creativity to rest and thrive.
How This Became a Part of My Voyaging
As mentioned, this whole journey into liminal spaces and how it became a part of my life happened in 2022 right in the middle of not only my time in Hawaiʻi, but also one of my first trips since Covid: Palau. A journey onwardto American Samoa, Samoa, Tokelau, and, at the time of writing this onward to Fiji, Wallis & Futuna, and beyond.
Interestingly, the music I mentioned before has become so integral to what flows through my headphones. It’s the music that plays while I’m editing, building nonprofits from scratch, and even taking long ferry rides across the ocean to the islands of Manu’a and Tokelau. It’s the music I use in establishing shots and images posted across my social media where I feel a spiritual connection to a place or a thing. Liminal spaces are everywhere in my voyages.
The World of Liminal Spaces is Part of My Life, Forever
Coming out of the Backrooms movie with my next voyage just around the corner reminded me that this world has become much bigger than a film, a YouTube series, or an internet concept. It has become part of the way I move through life itself. It shapes how I create, how I travel, how I reset, and how I find my way back to center when everything around me feels too loud or too fast. In a strange way, liminal spaces have become one of the quiet backbones of my voyaging, storytelling, and the inner balance that keeps me going.
