When I retired early, I assumed the hard part was over.
No more meetings. No more deadlines imposed by someone else. My husband and I began traveling in long arcs, staying at least a month in each place. We would unpack, settle in, and let daily life take over. Some weeks were quiet and local; other times we took short trips before returning to reset.
When we left our jobs in August 2024, our goal was freedom.
What I didn’t anticipate was how tiring that would become — not because anything was wrong, but because freedom came with more decisions than I was used to making.
After about a year and a half of traveling across 14 countries, most of what I learned came in the last six months. Every day required dozens of small choices: routes, weather, how far was too far, when a short trip became too much.
Even rest became something I had to justify.
Nothing was actually wrong
My husband and I were healthy, financially secure, and in beautiful places. This was the life I’d imagined.
But by the end of the first year, something felt off.
What wore me down wasn’t any single experience. It was the accumulation of constant, low-level decisions.
Looking back, part of the problem was overconfidence. Early on, we planned the big things — a cave hotel in Matera, a fast-paced route across England, dive recertification in Mauritius. Later, in places like New Zealand, we assumed we could wing it.
That worked — until it didn’t
In Lake Tekapo, we missed the hot pools and stargazing because we hadn’t booked ahead. We drove around in the dark instead — technically there, but missing the experience we came for.
Moments like that pushed us to move faster, stacking “must-dos” closer together. Soon, the days started competing with each other.
I felt it most during what should have been a highlight: landing by helicopter on New Zealand’s Earnslaw Burn Glacier. It was vast and cinematic, with waterfalls spilling from rock faces and ice carved over centuries.
I’d been looking forward to it for weeks. But standing there, I felt almost nothing.
It wasn’t the helicopter. It was what came before and after: jet boating, Milford Sound, the TranzAlpine train. Each was unforgettable on its own, but together they blurred.
When everything competes for attention — logistics, decisions, once-in-a-lifetime moments — something gets diluted.
I started noticing how often I was deciding. Freedom had quietly turned into constant optimization.
My definition of luxury began to change
For most of my career, I worked in career in oil and gas, making decisions all day. Most of them small, many of them reversible. The structure of work — meetings, timelines, expectations — meant I wasn’t deciding everything from scratch.
At work, when a decision felt urgent, I learned to wait. I’d step out of the room, delay the call, let the day pass. Almost always, something shifted, and the decision became clearer.
Without those guardrails, the decisions didn’t disappear. They multiplied.
What I needed wasn’t more freedom, but some structure. I didn’t need to control everything, but I did want to reduce how much I had to think about.
The difference was immediate when we slowed down. We stayed longer, returned to the same café, let the weather set the pace, and said no to side trips that required too much planning.
The irony is that I’d chased early retirement to gain control over my time. What I learned instead is that control doesn’t come from endless options. It comes from designing your life to require less from you.
The most luxurious thing travel gave me wasn’t adventure, it was fewer decisions.
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