When Is Vacation Relaxing?

It is so nice to get away and relax. To recharge your batteries. To sleep for a few more hours than you usually do. But in the back of your mind are all the things you have to handle in real life, right?

Your bills remain there, waiting to be paid. The garbage trucks still go by your house to get the bins. The email box stacks up. Obligations, plans, meetings, deadlines, priorities. You can forget them for awhile although they are still churning along in the background.

You can be in paradise, drinking margaritas by the pool and ordering tasty burritos. You can wear tanktops in October and avoid the rain that is starting to move-in to the place you call home. At some point you are going to have to go back to reality.

I always wonder how we build in this thought of retirement and what it means to different types of people. Some have to keep going. They need a purpose. The idea of leaving the day-to-day, of slipping out from the workforce can bring a sense of dread. Some people don’t know how to chill. Some people require some sort of daily task and goal-oriented activity. Maybe that’s why Warren Buffet is 90 something and is still making millions every day. There are personalities that can’t quit what they love until they stop breathing.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say. It’s just interesting. Could you really just live in your paradise and wake up each day with nothing to do? I’m a huge fan of getting a break and experiencing a different flow but you gotta go back, man! Even with all the money in the world you have another life beckoning. Another existence that demands your brain space and pulls you back.

Sometimes it can be more challenging to let it go. It sounds douchey but its true. I know people who have to check their emails throughout their vacations because they don’t want to return to 3,000 emails in their inbox. That shit is crazy. It can make it difficult to actually enjoy time away because you know it’s waiting for you.

Maybe that’s why Elon is always on the clock. Maybe that’s why he ain’t lounging by the pool. He has too much to do.

Maybe that’s why I’m in Mexico - really enjoying the humid morning sun - and also worrying about all the kettles on the fire. I find it is easy to distract myself for a little while but then I remember some random shit back home that is not important. The escape can pull my body away but my mind won’t shut it all off. There is some lingering dread that says I have three more days before “real life” asks me for my time. I’m not sure what retirement will be or if I could fully enjoy it.

Maybe that’s middle age. Maybe that’s every age. Maybe that’s the joy of having friends and family and co-workers to rely on you. Maybe that is your brain trying to tell you that you are important. And in the big scheme of things you really aren’t - but right now it feels like it. And I guess you are important to you because you are you. Everything is centered around you because it has to be. Must be some caveman shit buried deep in your brain keeping you alive. Because there is always going to be some cheetah trying to eat you and your family. At many points in history it was an actual cheetah. Then it was cholera, then it was the plague and famine, then an accident in some wretched manufacturing plant in Pittsburgh. Now it’s just a thousand internet transactions that make our life easier and also a lot harder.

We went from running from literal predators to having the stress in our bodies killing us from within.

I’m not really that stressed out and my life is not that difficult. Maybe I just need to drink a few more margaritas.