The dry heat of the laptop battery is pressing against my thighs, a steady 105 degrees of digital anxiety. It’s 1:45 a.m. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with sandpaper, a familiar sting for someone like Jax T.-M., a closed captioning specialist who spends forty-five hours a week staring at audio waves and dialogue boxes. I just counted my steps to the mailbox earlier today-exactly 135 paces-and I remember thinking that life was simple when it was just about moving from point A to point B. Now, point A is a flight landing at DIA at 2:15 p.m. and point B is a condo check-in thirty-five miles away that refuses to allow early entry before 4:05 p.m. This is the ‘vacation’ that everyone keeps telling me I deserve. I’m currently staring at forty-five open browser tabs, each one representing a micro-decision that could potentially ruin the entire trip for five people.

I find myself clicking ‘refresh’ on a car rental site for the fifteenth time, hoping the price for a Suburban with a ski rack has magically dropped below the $895 mark. It hasn’t. It never does. Jax T.-M. once told me that captioning life is easier than living it because, in the captions, there is always a clear indication of who is speaking and what the emotional subtext is. In the world of travel planning, the subtext is usually just a low-frequency hum of impending doom. I spend my days ensuring that the deaf and hard of hearing can follow the plot of a sitcom, but I cannot for the life of me ensure that my own family will have a way to get from the airport to the mountain without someone having a complete nervous breakdown. I’ve become a logistics officer without a uniform, a travel agent without a commission, and a mother who is currently calculating the cubic feet of a cargo hold in my sleep.

The Mental Load of Leisure

I’ve realized that the mental load of leisure is the ultimate tax on the modern parent. We are told to ‘unplug,’ yet the very act of reaching the destination requires us to be more plugged in than a mainframe at a tech startup. I have a 15-page document detailing every confirmation code, every dinner reservation, and every backup plan for when the first backup plan inevitably fails. Last year, I spent so much time planning the ‘perfect’ mountain getaway that by the time we actually touched snow, I was so cognitively exhausted I couldn’t remember if I liked skiing or if I just liked the idea of being done with the planning of skiing. I sat in the lodge for forty-five minutes just staring at a cup of cocoa, wondering if I had remembered to set the thermostat back at home to 55 degrees. I hadn’t. I had to log into an app, which required a password reset, which required a two-factor authentication code sent to a phone that had zero service in the mountains.

This is where the ‘yes, and’ of modern travel comes into play. We accept the burden because we think there is no other way. We tell ourselves that this is just what it costs to have memories. But what if the cost is the memory itself? What if the labor of getting there is so intense that we arrive as husks of ourselves? I’ve spent the last 25 minutes trying to figure out if the shuttle service I booked covers ‘excessive’ luggage, which apparently includes anything larger than a backpack for a family of five going to a cold-weather climate. The absurdity of it is that I am paying for the privilege of being this stressed. I am paying for the 1:05 a.m. headache.

The Invisible Labor of Leisure

I think about the physical reality of the trip versus the digital ghost of it. I’ve counted 65 emails in my ‘Travel’ folder just for this one week. Each one contains a potential trap. If I don’t confirm the lift tickets 45 hours in advance, the price jumps by thirty-five percent. If I don’t reserve the equipment rentals, we’ll spend three hours in a line smelling of damp socks and desperation. This is the invisible labor of leisure. It’s the work we do so that others can play, and it’s a job that never has an off-switch. I’m currently looking at a map of the airport, trying to find the exact pillar where the ground transportation meets the weary. It feels like I’m planning a heist, except the only thing I’m stealing is my own sanity.

I should probably just outsource this. There are people who do this for a living, who handle the transitions so that the transition doesn’t become the destination. For instance, booking a dedicated car service like

Mayflower Limo

would effectively delete three of those forty-five browser tabs immediately. It’s the difference between being a driver and being a passenger in your own life. When you’re the one doing the driving-literally or metaphorically-you never actually get to look out the window.

I remember a time when I thought I was being clever by booking everything separately to save $85. I spent fifteen hours researching to save that money, which means I value my time at roughly $5.65 an hour. That is a devastating realization for a professional. Jax T.-M. would never caption a show where the protagonist spends that much time on a car rental site; it’s bad storytelling. It’s boring. Yet, here I am, living the most boring, high-stress plotline imaginable. I’m arguing with a chatbot named ‘Steve’ about whether or not a toddler counts as a ‘passenger’ for the purposes of a car seat fee. Steve is very firm. Steve does not care about my 1:45 a.m. headache.

The Peak of Happiness Myth

I recently read a study-or maybe I dreamed it in a caffeine-induced haze-that said the peak of happiness for most travelers is actually the planning phase. If that’s true, then humanity is even more broken than I thought. If the ‘peak’ is the part where I’m comparing insurance policies for a rental van at 2:05 a.m., then I would like to opt out of happiness entirely. I think the study missed a key demographic: the person actually doing the work. The ‘happiness’ of planning is only for those who are looking at pictures of palm trees, not those who are looking at flight connection times in Minneapolis during a blizzard.

Seeing the Scaffolding

I wonder if Jax T.-M. feels this way when they have to caption a silent film. Is the silence harder to describe than the noise? I find the silence of a failed plan much louder than the noise of a busy airport. When the car doesn’t show up, or the rack doesn’t fit the skis, the silence from the backseat is deafening. It’s the silence of four people who were promised a dream and were delivered a logistical nightmare. That’s why I’m still awake. I’m trying to buy my way out of that silence. I’m trying to ensure that every transition is greased with enough preparation that no one ever has to notice the gears turning.

I’ll keep planning. I’ll keep clicking. I’ll keep counting my steps. I have exactly fifteen minutes before I’ve decided I’m allowed to close this laptop and try to sleep for five hours. Tomorrow, I’ll tackle the lift ticket insurance. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just admit that I can’t do it all, and that a vacation where I have to be the CEO of Fun is no vacation at all. I’ll look for the shortcuts, the professionals, and the moments where I can finally, for once, just be the person who gets in the car and looks out the window at the mountains, instead of at the GPS.