The Laptop That Came on Every Holiday

For a long time I ran a manufacturing business with a team. It was reactive by nature — the kind of work that doesn’t really pause because you’ve gone to Spain. So my laptop came with me everywhere. Every holiday, every trip, every bit of time away. I didn’t feel I could stay at home and actually switch off, because home meant work was right there, waiting. The only way to get anything close to a proper break was to physically leave. I loved Christmas because we closed for over a week and no one emails you wanting something.

Travel was my permission slip to stop at any other point in the year. It was the only thing that put enough distance between me and the business to let me breathe a bit. Not completely — the laptop was still there — but enough.

So when I say I used travel as an escape, I mean it literally. It was the mechanism I’d built to cope with a life that didn’t have a natural off switch.

The Year I Fell Out of Love With Travel

I’ll be upfront with you — this isn’t the blog post I expected to be writing. I joined a travel-based business last year because I genuinely love travel and I’m the sort of person who recommends things constantly. It made sense on paper. Travel plus talking about things I love? Sign me up.

And then, somewhere along the way, I fell out of love with it. Not the business. Not the people. Travel itself.

Jesus, I wasn’t expecting that either.

It wasn’t one thing. It was the creeping dread of airport queues that move at the pace of cold treacle. And it was the lottery of passport control — breezing through in Lanzarote one trip and staring down a five-hour wait the next. It was missing a flight last year because the gate was announced so late that running through an airport with a four-year-old in tow became a full-blown event. It was the dehydration, the recycled air, the rubbish food, the endless queueing, and the anxiety of wondering which version of the journey you’d get this time.

I have also been managing my energy levels for a while now, and the cumulative toll of travel — the disrupted sleep, the time differences, the physical and mental load of it all — started to feel like more than it was worth.

But, even as I was listing all those reasons. I knew they weren’t the whole story.

The Unexpected Problem With Loving Life – Your Actual Life

The real reason I stopped feeling the pull of travel is one I’m almost embarrassed to admit, because it sounds either smug or strange depending on how you look at it.

I built a life I don’t want to escape from.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been quietly testing a set of practices around what it means to genuinely love your everyday life — not the highlight reel version, not the curated Instagram life, but the actual Tuesday morning, school run, cup of tea going cold version of your life. And it works. That’s not me being boastful, it’s me being genuinely surprised. I love life, my actual boring life. On the whole, I really do.

And when you love your life, you don’t feel desperate to escape it.

Which is wonderful. It really is. Except that it threw a rather large spanner into my enthusiasm for encouraging everyone to book their next holiday. Or to jump on board my travel team and talk about jetting all over the place. The impact it can have on the planet we get to call home doesn’t help either.

Why Most of Us Travel (And What That Says)

I don’t think we talk honestly enough about why we travel. We talk about adventure, discovery, making memories. And all of that is real and valid. But underneath a lot of holiday bookings is something quieter — a need to press pause. To step off the treadmill. To have a legitimate reason to stop.

If your everyday life feels relentless, grey, or just a bit too much, a fortnight in the sun isn’t just a nice trip. It’s a lifeline. It’s permission to breathe.

I’ve been that person. I understand it completely. And I’m not here to tell you there’s anything wrong with it — a good holiday can be genuinely restorative and there are few things better than proper time away with people you love.

But what I’ve been sitting with this year is a different question: what if you didn’t need the escape quite so urgently? What would change? What would travel become if it were about exploration rather than relief?

I nearly slipped up at Easter on my loving life journey

This Easter just gone, I nearly talked myself into booking a few days away. The kids were off school, the house felt busy, and there was that familiar pull — the idea that I should be doing something, going somewhere, making it count. I caught myself mid-scroll on accommodation sites and thought: hang on, do I actually want this, or am I just filling a gap out of habit?

So I didn’t book anything. And do you know what we did instead? We pottered. I went to the tip more times than is probably reasonable for one household in a fortnight. The kids played with their mates, helped out around the house, and had the kind of unstructured time that children don’t get nearly enough of. We did a few proper days out — and one of them, I’ll be completely honest, was the food shop followed by McDonald’s for lunch. The kids thought it was brilliant.

Nobody was bored. Nobody felt short-changed. And I didn’t once wish I was somewhere else. That, for me, is the marker of something having genuinely shifted.

Following Your Intuition Looks Odd From the Outside

I’ll be honest — going quiet on travel content when you’re in a travel business goes against pretty much every piece of advice you’ll ever be given. Post consistently. Stay visible. Keep the momentum up. I know all of this. I’ve ignored all of this.

Because the alternative was to keep posting content I didn’t feel behind, and that felt worse. Performative enthusiasm is exhausting and people can smell it from a mile off. So I chose authenticity over output and let things be quiet for a while.

Does that mean I won’t hit every target I once set? Probably.
Does it mean I’ve done it wrong? I don’t think so.
Or does it mean I’ve lost faith in what I’m doing? Not at all.

I’m still supporting my team. Still helping people earn money back on their own travel or build something of their own. I’m just doing it at a pace that feels sustainable and honest, rather than one that looks impressive but feels hollow.

Sometimes the path you chose starts asking something of you that you’re not prepared to give. That doesn’t mean the path is wrong. It might just mean it needs walking differently.

So Where Does That Leave Travel?

I have a trip to Italy coming up, which I’m genuinely excited about — flights booked, the rest to follow (I really must get on with that). And I have a big birthday coming next year, which was the original reason I joined a travel business in the first place. When I realised I could potentially earn enough from one trip to fund another, I was completely in. The logic still holds.

The why shifted. I’m not booking trips to escape anymore. I’m booking them because exploring the world is genuinely one of life’s great pleasures, and I’d like to experience more of it from a place of joy rather than desperation.

That feels like a better way to travel. And honestly? It feels like a better relationship with life in general.

The Practice That Changed Things

If any of this resonates — the feeling that your everyday life is something to get through rather than get into — that’s exactly what the Love Life More approach is about. Not grand gestures or massive life overhauls. Small, consistent practices that quietly shift how you experience the ordinary.

Gratitude, mindfulness, looking honestly at your health and your environment, finding things to be curious about. None of it is complicated. All of it adds up. And the result, over time, is that you stop needing to escape quite so much — not because life becomes perfect, but because you become more present in it.

Which, as it turns out, is both the most wonderful outcome and a mild inconvenience if you’re trying to sell holidays.

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I’d love to know — do you travel to explore, or to escape? Or a bit of both? Let me know in the comments below.

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