By Dina Aldabbagh

There’s a certain blasé-ness to a vacation, isn’t there? Nothing is very serious, nothing is urgent, you’re bolder than usual, you feel the impermanence of the moment so you don’t care so much about anything. You’re really just living to have the most fun possible — and that’s my advice. When you’re on vacation, you’re light. Plans change? No biggie. Get rejected? Onto the next. The point of every day is to enjoy it as much as you can. Yet…we don’t live real life like that. 

“Real” life — this is serious. Everything here is consequential, unlike on vacation, where nothing is. That’s our misperception at play. We think that “real” life — aka our day-to-day life — is permanent, but it’s not. It is actually just as temporary, in many ways, as a vacation. In “real” life, you meet people who you don’t hang out with forever and you go places that you’ll also never go again. However, we think we have so much time. This, in turn, makes us less driven to take advantage of the time we have in our daily lives, unlike how we are on vacation — where we want to fill every day as much as possible with the things we love. 

So my proposition to you is that maybe it’s not being on a vacation that makes you so happy, but rather who you become and how you spend your time. In our daily lives, we can also choose to fill our time with things we love. We can also choose to not stress about circumstances we don’t like, since they’re temporary. We can also look at everything that happens as inconsequential, and the core goal of the day to be to enjoy it. 

There’s also another life-changing aspect of the vacation effect: presence. When you’re on vacation, you’re so occupied with the day you’re living that you don’t have time to think and think and think about things. In our daily lives, we think too much. We run the past over in our minds, getting super clear on all the details that happened in our stories. We try to predict the future in an attempt to mitigate any danger that threatens us. We live in a state of the mind, rather than of the moment. We get sad about what has or has not yet happened and we get anxious about what could go wrong in the days or years or decades to come. 

This doesn’t happen on vacation. On vacation, you know “I’m here for 10 days, this whole experience ends in 10 days.” It’s temporary; you’re not stressed about anything that happens there. Can I challenge you with something? Your “real” life is just as seasonal as a vacation. The friends around you now may move next month from your city. Your job can fire you tomorrow or you can get an offer somewhere else. Your landlord may not renew your lease. And then, suddenly, life as you knew it has to change. And that whole time, you spent it feeling stuck.

Life was never stuck. It was always in motion; you just weren’t. You were spending a whole lot of time doing nothing because you assumed you’d have so many chances. Then, suddenly, without being warned, the things changed, and therefore so did your life. You thought that this time was permanent so you didn’t appreciate the transience of it all — unlike a vacation, where we are hyper-aware of its ephemerality. 

I’ve learned that happiness comes from being fully present. From not thinking about your life too much. From skewing away from presence bias (the belief that what is right now is forever). From taking initiative to see and do things and talk to and connect with people. From taking every chance you have to do something — whether that be hangout with someone, go on a hike, see a famous sight, try a new activity. That’s the key, and it mirrors a vacation remarkably. 

When you go on vacation and you have plans to go see X thing or do Y activity the next day, you feel the excitement of looking forward to something. It’s funny, as a 24 year old woman today, I realized I still remember the exact dates of a trip I took when I was 15 years old. Nine years ago, and yet every year I pass that weekend and I remember that trip fondly. Why? It seems kind of insane, doesn’t it? But in reality, I just thought about it so much beforehand. I was so excited about the trip back then, and looked forward to those dates so much so that even the memory of the excitement stuck with me.

You can live everyday not looking forward to anything, thinking you’ll get a lot more chances to do something with your friend or in your city, but eventually the circumstances change rapidly and these days just turn into non-memorables. Your current life is just as temporary as a vacation, and I wish you’d treat it as such. I wish you’d value its impermanence in your life. I wish you’d spend as much time as you can with the people you love, because things do change. Today can be a great memory in your story or it can be one of the many days that blend with others. 

Do you realize how that one-week vacation, or parts of your childhood, are so memorable in your life experience and an integral part of your story, yet years go by and you can’t really name a thing that’s happened? It’s something that happens with adults a lot. We get comfortable and stop trying to do new things; we save those experiences for the week-long vacation out of the year that we get, if we even take one. So then years go by, and life feels vacant, unmemorable. 

That’s why today I tell you: live life like you’re on vacation. Go and do the things. Let your schedule be busy. I know you have responsibilities, but you’ll handle it. Dare I suggest, you’ll actually have more energy the more you do other things that fuel your life. 

And in that advice to live like you’re on vacation, here’s the important part I want to harp on: know these things are inconsequential. Yes, even the things that look serious. Yes, even the internship you need to get. Yes, even the date you’re going on. Yes, even the business you’re building. That doesn’t mean “they don’t matter” or won’t affect your life, but that whatever happens with this specific thing in this particular moment in time is not a prophecy. It’s not permanent. It’s far from decisive. Regardless, everything will eventually work out, and anything that doesn’t work out in this moment is overall inconsequential to your life as a whole.

We know that on vacation. You can get rejected by someone you like at a bar in another city and it’s nothing, but let that same event happen in your city? Suddenly it means something huge in the grand scheme of your life. No, baby, it doesn’t. You’ll meet more people and have more opportunities and also move cities. None of this is permanent, it’s just now. Just enjoy it as much as you can. 

I was just in Australia for a long time and noticed a few things. For one, something that was on my mind constantly before going out there just…stopped mattering to me. Why? I wasn’t thinking about it anymore. After just a week of no longer thinking of this problem of mine, it stopped mattering completely. I no longer felt pain or anguish about it. Therefore I came to understand that when you’re actually present in your real life and not living in your head — reviewing the problem over and over — the things you think you care about don’t actually impact your life. They only matter to us because we keep thinking about them. 

Further, I had a task on my to-do list that I thought I was going to get to while I was there. Considering I was there for so long, I assumed I would take a few days to work on it. However, something happened while I was there: I just kept putting it off. Not because I didn’t care about that thing, but because I understood that it didn’t matter to that moment. That, actually, there wasn’t any urgency to that thing and I would have time to do it when I got back. 

I kept thinking to myself, “I’m only in Australia with my family for so long. I don’t want to take a day away from this experience.” Obviously, it’s one thing if there is, in fact, an urgency to the task — but what grounded me was that in regards to this thing, there was no urgency. My cousin kept asking me, “Don’t you have to work on that thing?” and I oh-so casually said, “…yea, I do” with shrugged shoulders and zero immediacy. Why? Because although I did have to do that thing in the general sense of my life’s timeline, it didn’t actually need to be done then. 

May I bring to your attention, your real life is Australia. This exact moment in which I write this blog is just as valuable as my vacation in Australia. I can certainly take away from my experience of today by thinking of all the life things that still need to “come together” or I could realize…there’s no urgency. When the time comes for me to do that thing, it will be clear and the move will be swift. But for this moment, I don’t have to do anything. 

That task I mentioned? That’s exactly what happened. The moment I landed on US soil, I set what needed to be set into motion and 2.5 weeks later, the entire loop was resolved. I did the work I needed to, when I needed to. 

Yes, I like things to be taken care of and resolved fast. My instinct is to charge ahead and make things happen — and that’s all well and good, but not at the expense of myself. Don’t make yourself the expense of false-urgency and not fully living the moment you’re in.

This isn’t your rehearsal life, this is your real life. And no, it’s not as consequential as we convince ourselves, but it does matter infinitely more than I think our behavior suggests. To waste time is…disrespectful to your life. Just like when you go on vacation and want to “get your money’s worth” so you live every day to the fullest, in that same way we must recognize how valuable this day is — and how expensive it is to not care about. This day is something, even if you’re sleeping in your own bed.

Not to be morbid, but rather to offer perspective: you could lose your legs tomorrow. Any number of things could happen to cause that. Don’t wait until you’ve already lost your legs to say “I wish I could just go for a run” — no. While you still have your legs, go for a run today. And if that day ever comes, then you’ll be able to say, “I couldn’t have expected this and it’s not what I want, but I’m glad that for as long as I had my legs, I used them meaningfully.”

I hope you’ll see that today is just as meaningful — and yet simultaneously as unserious — as a day from your favorite vacation. And I hope you get your money’s worth and really enjoy it.