The Trip I Talked Myself Out Of

“Available navigator seat if you’re interested.”

The text was from my brother-in-law, Wesley, who runs a Chicago blacksmith shop called Cityboy Forge. He makes intricate belt buckles, one at a time, each for a particular client, and he had a large custom order due at a fly-fishing event out West that wouldn’t be finished in time to ship with any confidence. So, he was driving them himself.

Chicago to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is about 1,400 miles and roughly twenty hours at the wheel. He was leaving Friday and had to deliver by Monday.

I was interested. A road trip west, no itinerary beyond arriving on time, a few days with Wesley, whom I like very much. There was no good reason I couldn’t go.

So, naturally, I didn’t.

How we get to no

It was a holiday weekend, and we had loose plans. Nothing specific.

I had some work I wanted to finish. Some things around the house. The usual list.

Somehow that was enough. One perfectly reasonable objection joined another, and before long I had talked myself out of something I wanted to do. Apparently, I’m not alone.

Researchers have a name for part of it. In a study published this summer in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, psychologists at the University of California, Irvine and the University of British Columbia studied what they call “leisure guilt,” the unease that comes from spending time on leisure when you could be doing something productive. People reported it during about 14 percent of their leisure occasions, and those most prone to it got less out of the leisure they did take.

I know the feeling. For much of our lives, there were good reasons we couldn’t just go. Jobs and kids and school calendars and rationed vacation days, and people expecting us somewhere Monday morning.

Many of us have more control over our time than we used to, yet we still feel obliged to justify how we use it. We make the trip defend itself. Is it worth the money? Can I afford the days? What won’t get done while I’m away?

What we don’t do

A few nights later, we were at dinner with our friends Sean and Jennifer, talking about upcoming trips. Sean said the hard part was never finding somewhere to go.

“We find somewhere we want to go and then find all these reasons to talk ourselves out of it.”

He thought other people had the same problem, and I should write about it. Later that evening, in case I had failed to grasp the significance of what he had come up with, he texted me the idea again.

He was right, and research gets closer to why it stings.

Cornell researchers Emily Rosenzweig and Thomas Gilovich examined the regrets people carry about the things they buy and the experiences they pass up. Across five studies, they found a difference: regrets about material purchases were more likely to involve something people had bought. Regrets about experiences were more likely to involve opportunities they had missed.

One reason, the researchers concluded, is that experiences aren’t interchangeable.

That part stuck with me. I can make that drive another time. Wesley and I can take another road trip. There will be other invitations.

But there won’t be that one.

There are good reasons to say no. Money, health, family, work. This is not an argument for ignoring them.

But sometimes we just have things to do. And there will always be things to do.

So maybe the question to ask next time is simple. What is actually stopping me? Not what would be inconvenient, or what might have to wait, or what I could get done instead.

What is actually stopping me?

I said no for reasons that seemed sensible at the time. That is usually how saying no works. Life simply continues.

But somewhere that Friday, an SUV headed west with a load of handmade belt buckles, and the navigator seat was empty.

Next time.