“Hard work is its own reward.” That’s the sort of thing you hear a lot if you grow up around working class people. Probably a lot elsewhere too, but that’s my point of reference. It’s a lesson that is as much about the meditative quality of dedicating yourself to miserable labor as it is to losing yourself in the joy of creation. I’ve worked hours away with a smile on my face in a bait shack, tied to a bench, kicking around in twenty-five foot swells in 17° Fahrenheit, just as I’ve spent hours interpreting theoretical computer science papers in a climate controlled office.

It’s not that it wasn’t pleasing to see a pile of well coiled tubs of baited gear ready for a set, or to watch a pathfinding algorithm work seamlessly in a 3d map of polygons; but if you asked me what I did at the point in my life when I was longlining for grey cod, I wouldn’t tell you I was staring at neatly stacked tubs. If you asked me what I did when I wrote pathfinding code, I wouldn’t say that I sat around and watched it work. Though, to be fair, with the longlining thing I would probably talk a lot about tendonitis and hook scars too.

Nearly eight months ago Laura and I set out on a long adventure. Most people, when we told them, heard “year long vacation.” At points it’s been a bit like that. A few days in one place or another before finding a bus or a train to the next town. Negotiating with locals over the price of fruit or booze or trying to find out exactly how illegal weed is in their country. (Answer: super illegal, don’t fuck about, kid.) Normal travel stuff. But you know how after like three days at the beach, after you’ve read that dumb spy novel, how you kinda start to miss work? Like not really miss it, but sort of miss the office a little? And shooting the shit with your buddies? And hiding raw shrimp in the hollow leg of the new guy’s chair? That stuff? Vacations have an expiry date.

You know what Laura and I did for the last two weeks we were in Vietnam? We went to (wonderful) coffee shops and we plugged our laptops in and we worked. I wrote thousands of words of fiction. Laura has been furiously developing and marketing products. We’ve been working. Now that we’re in Thailand the first thing we’re going to do after we rent an apartment is find a co-working spot so we can keep doing the same thing. Well, that and find a Muay Thai gym so we can get super sweet abs and fully transform ourselves into well-oiled killing machines. In other words, we’re going to just kinda live here for a bit, doing a lot of things that are not very vacation-like, such as working and going to the gym.

Don’t get me wrong, running around for months on end treating countries like huge restaurants with their own languages and currencies is a fucking great way to spend your life if you’re Anthony Bourdain or something. Then again, it’s his job, so he’s working all the time, too. Huh.

Travel is one of the most amazing things you can do. The opportunity to live life in new places and brush up against new cultures is something that I am profoundly grateful for. It has its hassles at times but I’d be lying if I said that this wasn’t a BALLER way to spend a year—that said, if I couldn’t work, well, things would get dark pretty goddamned quickly.

So yeah, it’s not a vacation.