Mini-Vacations
July 26, 2023
Current location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Reading: Your Brain On Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross
Listening: Talk To Me Nice by Tinashe(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status via email or in the comments)
Mini-Vacations
Over the years, I've often waxed poetic about my love for slow-paced, long-term travel, but I'm also a big fan of what I've come to think of as "mini-vacations" as both alternatives and supplements to deeper, more involved explorations of the unfamiliar.
I use this term for a wide variety of adventures, ranging from three-day holiday-weekend jaunts overseas, to two-day roadtrips to nearby cities, to half-day expeditions across town to check out something or several somethings that’ve caught my interest.
Whatever the specifics, the terminology is important: these are vacations, so they should be relatively stress-free and should recharge my psychological battery, not drain it.
These trips should also be affordable in the monetary sense, and in terms of time and energy.
That will mean something different to each of us based on our financial situations and how many days or hours we have available in our schedules to spend on such ambitions, and how much of both we can spend without violating the aforementioned "stress-free" policy.
But for me this typically means cheap hotels or Airbnbs, inexpensive activities like parks, museums, and strange little local oddities (lighthouse tours, getting lost in labyrinthian used bookstores, attending experimental theatre productions), and transport that doesn't break the bank (driving my fuel-sipping old Prius, or hopping a bus or train).
It's sometimes possible to make the transportation and/or housing a component of the adventure: cute little roadside inns, oddly decorated Airbnbs, niche train lines, rented bike-based explorations—all may be worth incorporating into one's plans and expounding upon as warranted.
It’s also possible, at times, to convert responsibilities into opportunities by adding side-excursions to a business trip, or incorporating little segues into a family reunion-focused journey.
In these circumstances you’ll typically either have part of your travel expenses covered, or will already have committed to paying for housing, food, and transportation for other purposes—so why not double-up on benefits from those covered or sunk costs by also leveraging them for other ambitions?
The low-stakes nature of mini-vacations means it’s easy to tweak plans on the fly and go with the flow, finding value and enjoyment in whatever happens, even if the outcome isn't particularly extraordinary or Instagram-worthy; this isn't a honeymoon trip, it's not a family vacation to Disneyland, so if a mini-vacation fails to serve up life-defining experiences, that's okay, there's another one on the horizon (and you didn’t spend much on it, to begin with).
It’s also easier to take advantage of opportunities as they arise and work them into your schedule when your ambitions are moderated, in some cases even replacing all of your original plans with new ones after stumbling upon something interesting while in-transit to your original, intended destination.
Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of this type of travel, though, is that it’s feasible to weave it into one's routine without having to radically recalibrate one's life around the concept of perpetual perambulation.
That means you can take a lot of these sorts of trips, and you can do so without having to change anything else about your life.
It normalizes travel, basically, maximizing malleability and increasing the rate at which one is exposed to new things, while over time reducing the myriad (understandable) stressors to which many of us succumb when planning trips of any size.
If you can set aside a little time each month to look for unfamiliar, potentially interesting things on a map—things located within an easy travel radius for you and whomever you may want to bring along for the ride (there's value in traveling solo, but these sorts of trips can also evolve relationships in interesting ways)—you can travel more frequently and work-out the muscles that make this sort of activity more accessible, enjoyable, and growth-oriented over time.
This, in turn, allows us to intentionally break our stride, upsetting our rhythms and rituals, which helps us view our typical lifestyle from an arm's-length distance, granting us holistic, big-picture context and helping us make more informed decisions about what we prioritize and how we live, moving forward.
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Video Essay
This week’s video essay is an Ask Colin segment in which I answer a question about which careers might be safe from AI and talk about how the artificial intelligence space might evolve (positively and negatively); I also demonstrate past efforts to AI-clone my voice.
Likes, shares, and subscribes are welcome and appreciated, and if you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future video, drop me a YouTube comment or email :)
Interesting & Useful
“Textile artist Alicja Kozlowska's Embroidered Ordinaries series recalls the the pop art of Warhol & Lichtenstein and Andreas Gursky's 99 Cent II Diptychon while also being firmly contemporary. There's maybe a Duchamp/readymade something something riff in there? I dunno, I'm not an art critic, just a fan. Anyway, I love how detailed these are — remarkably true-to-life for objects that are embroidered.”
Six Barbie Dreamhouses that Chart the Evolution of the American Home
“The homes themselves range from contemporary influencer houses all the way back to the mid-century bungalow of the 60s. In this way, the book establishes the Dreamhouse as an early example of homes turning from private domains into a means of expressing and performing our personality for others – alongside the Eames house, the Playboy apartments and Jackie Kennedy's televised tour of the White House in 1962. "We think today that we're always performing your domesticity as a way to say who you are," Mallett explained. "But Barbie was already doing it in 1962."”
Cult Cinema Classics (YouTube channel)
“CCC is the first stop for cult film freaks, mad movie misfits, cinema aficionados, and all round tv addicts. Our film archives dive deep into all moving images the 20th century.”
Something Else I Wrote
Outro
I’ve landed on a sustainable routine for making video essays (a relief! I worried about incorporating this into my lifestyle) and am planning to knock out some rough cuts on a pair of videos that I recorded yesterday later this afternoon, alongside some random artsy things (colored pencil-related!) that I’ve been meaning to indulge in.
It looks like we might have some rain today, too, which will be a relief from the humid heat we’ve been suffering here in Milwaukee the past several weeks; the air quality still isn’t great (those wildfires up in Canada are casting impressive, wide-ranging plumes) but I’ll probably try to make it outdoors for a sunscreen-slathered walk, after I get this newsletter out the digital door.
What are you up to at the moment? Take any mini-vacations recently, or have any on the horizon? Using any AI tools? Worried/excited about robo-replacements? Reply directly to this newsletter or send an email to colin@exilelifestyle.com and tell me your thoughts—I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you!
Prefer stamps and paper? Send me a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication at: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211
Or hit me up via the usual methods: Instagram/Threads, Twitter (X? I don’t even know what we’re doing anymore), Facebook, YouTube, or list of English collective nouns.
Other things I make: Aspiring Generalist / Brain Lenses (podcast) / Climate Happenings / Let’s Know Things (podcast) / Never Not Curious / Notes On the News / One Sentence News (podcast) / You Probably Don’t Need
Loved this piece. Being in Colorado there are innumerable opportunities for this yet somehow I struggle to pull the trigger.
Thanks again for your writing