Useful amnesia: a slow week in DC and the case for doing less

I went back to DC for a week and did almost nothing, and it took me a while to admit that was the point.

Trip taken in 2023.

The trip I thought I was taking

DC is a chaotic city and I know it well, which is its own kind of trap. You land somewhere familiar and you immediately start building an itinerary out of obligation: the people you should see, the places you should get to, the side projects you’ll finally catch up on because you’ve got a week and a change of scenery.

I made none of that happen.

What I actually did was see friends. Connect with people I love. Eat a lot of sushi. Walk around a city I used to live in and notice how different it feels at almost thirty than it did at twenty-two.

And underneath all of it, the whole week, was a low nagging hum that I wasn’t doing enough.

Where that hum comes from

I’m a freelancer now, and freelancing does something specific to your head: every hour has a price on it, so every hour you don’t sell feels like a loss. Stack that on top of years as a burnt-out full-time employee and you get someone who genuinely cannot sit still without feeling like she’s failing at something.

That’s not a personality. That’s a habit you pick up from work and then carry into your own time, where it does absolutely nothing for you.

I’m working on it. Slowly, and badly, and in public apparently.

Useful amnesia

My friends and I have a running joke: useful amnesia.

It started as the thing you invoke after a dumb purchase, or after someone says something a bit too candid about a past lover. Useful amnesia. We simply don’t remember that. Moving on.

By the middle of the week it had quietly turned into the theme of the whole trip. I conveniently forgot the tasks. I let the side projects slip. I stopped opening the list.

And on the last night, the four of us sat around eating chips and watching reruns of season two of Sex and the City, which is not an experience, not content, not a memory anyone would put on a pin. It was just four people in a room not achieving anything.

It was the best part of the week.

Why I’m counting this as a travel post

I’ve written about trips that cost seven thousand dollars and trips that cost a hundred and thirty-seven a head. This one barely cost anything, and not because I found a deal.

It’s because I went somewhere I already knew, stayed with people I already loved, and deliberately did not shop. One of the reasons for the trip was to get a grip on some spending habits, and staying out of stores turned out to be most of the plan.

Nothing about that is a hack. But if you’re looking at your calendar trying to figure out how to afford a break, that combination, familiar city, people you actually like, no agenda, no retail, is the cheapest real rest available to anyone.

What I’d tell you to try

• Pick somewhere you already know. The novelty tax is real and you don’t always need to pay it.
• Say the plan out loud before you go, even if the plan is “nothing”. Otherwise you’ll spend the whole trip negotiating with yourself.
• Notice the guilt and keep going. Mine showed up every single day of that week and it was wrong every single time.
• Let the best night be the boring one. It usually is.

The trips that cost the most are not the ones I think about most. That keeps being true and I keep being surprised by it.

If rest feels unaffordable rather than just unfamiliar, that’s usually a money problem wearing a time-problem costume. The checklist below is where I’d start. #bigsisenergy