After a Career in Tourism, I’m Staying Home

Other mid-life women clamor for plane tickets; I’m choosing to nest.

My first and only trip to Australia, 1998

Scrolling through social media, you’d be led to believe every 40-something woman was preparing to take off on an epic journey – self-empowerment in one hand, passport in the other. After years of working long hours, raising kids, and putting her interests aside, she’s had enough.

It’s time for her choices to take priority, PTA meetings and company gatherings be damned.

This is her chance to hike that trail, take that safari, see that site, have her “Eat, Pray, Love” journey. For years she made sure everyone else got to do what they wanted to do. Now she’s prioritizing herself.

I appreciate that siren call. Travel is the reward after a lifetime of the corporate grind and family obligations. Years of everything that constrains us – our jobs, our kids, our commitments – is loosening, and booking a flight can look like the ultimate, hard-earned finish line.

But you won’t find me building out a mid-life travel bucket list. My ideal version of this era of my life is happening exactly where I already am.

If you’d told me this is how I’d feel at 45 when I laughed with strangers in a dust storm, wings whipping around my back at Burning Man in 2009, I never would have believed you. I didn’t know these people when I pulled my Ford Focus into Black Rock City just a few days before, but between my camp stove and their food, we became fast friends.

A year later, a stranger offered me a ride when I was caught in a rainstorm with my backpack, looking for a hostel in Hanoi, and I didn’t think twice about saying yes. Shortly thereafter, when I got stuck in Costa Rica for 48 hours after my plane broke down, I ate cookies and sang songs with the other passengers to pass the time, because … what else were we going to do?

For nearly 20 years, I’ve worked in tourism and been consumed by travel. When I’ve not been traveling, I’ve been writing, thinking, and conversing about travel. As a travel writer, I always had a full schedule ahead of me, and in the downtimes between work trips … well, I traveled. In fact, all three of these trips I took purely for fun.

At the time, these moments simply dropped into my trips around the world. Today, I see them for what they are: Pivotal memories that would never happen in our hyper-connected, overly curated world.

Something fundamental has changed in society – and, therefore, about the way we travel too. As an insider in the tourism industry – and as a frequent casual traveler – now in my 40s, I have Big Feelings on how the magic of travel has gone sideways.

In fact, those of us who grew up in the “feral” age of the Oregon Trail Generation – and went on to build careers inside the tourism machine – are experiencing a collective, quiet disillusionment. As kids and teens, we got bored, got creative, tried and failed and tried again, and ventured unknowingly (even naively) into situations and spaces, knowing we could (mostly) trust our gut feelings. Our early days of travel were similar to our childhood: untethered, serendipitous, full of chance encounters and unexpected moments. We occasionally tore pages from the dog-eared guidebooks left behind at hostels, but for the most part, we made our own plans and said yes to invitations from strangers. Many of these experiences weren’t documented at all in photos but live deep in our bones as transformational moments.

Mid-lifers working in tourism came of age as 20-something travelers in the early days of social media, where people may have dropped their thoughts but certainly didn’t curate their feeds. We didn’t chase aesthetic photos, navigate online reviews, and plot our path on Google Maps. Occasionally we scribbled a few notes in ink on the back of our hands before venturing out (left by tree, long walk, right). But for the most part, we didn’t know where we were going or how to get there; we just pulled up a stool in the alley way to eat ramen with a wrinkled old woman.

Today, tightly curated experiences and fine-tuned algorithms have pushed aside the weird and unconventional – and the opportunity to stumble into the unexpected. Tech within tourism is designed to help people “discover” more of what they think they might like based on previous decisions and interests. With tighter, more controlled algorithms, places have become diluted and dulled of the vitality that once made them interesting and legitimately unique. We’ve lost the ability – and desire – to not know, to get lost.

The lack of always-on connectivity – and minimal social media, documentation, and curation – gave us freedom. We didn’t feel compelled to go where others had gone, do what others had done, capture the moments others had memorialized. Without a blueprint to follow, we each built our own journeys built on our own expectations. We booked trips at the last minute with only a return ticket but no plans about what to do with the free time in between. We grappled with language, got lost, broke down, made mistakes, felt desperately alone, were deeply vulnerable – but we made it out the other side.

Every day within the tourism space, businesses ranging from startups to international brands tinker with tech to create “solutions” meant to address the “problems” of (often unfounded) fear, friction, and discomfort. The harrowing travel experiences we had helped us become better, well-adjusted people while also distinctly defining key experiences in the places we visited. The hyper-curation integrated into tourism today has taken away the moments that allowed people to find the courage, strength, cleverness, and tenacity needed to struggle and solve problems on their own.

In all fairness, there are those in the tourism industry that recognize the sad ways in which travel has changed so quickly. The tourism industry has successfully optimized the magic out of travel in order to sell predictability and comfort – but now the same industry is trying to package and resell manufactured chaos back to consumers. Many responses are attempts at engineering what no longer exists: phone-free spaces, itineraries built with unplanned time and “room for the unexpected,” AI platforms that connect strangers, online maps to unusual spaces, apps with quests for discovering new places, platforms curating under-the-radar experiences.

But it doesn’t matter what is built or how it’s marketed; Google Maps, Airbnb, and Instagram are only a swipe away to ensure we know exactly where to go, where to stay, and what to do should we falter.

The truth is we can never go back, and I think it’s why mid-lifers who traveled early in their lives prefer to stay home – or at least be far more selective in where and how they travel. While comparison can be the thief of joy, it’s also given me reason to reflect on how I want to spend my time in the next era of my life.

Recently, my friend and colleague, Beth, wrote about the tension of loving to travel while also wanting to be at home. “For so long, settling felt like the thing we avoided, rather than wanted. Perhaps we believed that when we stopped moving we would stop growing. But in a funny way, it’s been the opposite,” she writes. “Sometimes, when I stop moving, I’m able to actually take a look around.”

Among my friends and family, I’ve always been known as the person with an upcoming trip. And when someone asks me about my upcoming travels now? I am practically giddy by the fact there are none. Like Beth, I’m actually able to look around – to pause, to breathe, to fully embrace today and tomorrow and the day after within the small sphere of my own community. My neighborhood is teeming with places to walk, things to do, food to eat, and experiences to have. I don’t need to go far to find the high travel once offered.

I’m thrilled for the women whose eyes eagerly scan the horizon for their next destination, but I’m spending mid-life stepping back. And while many women are clamoring for the next available flight, I’m choosing to nest instead. Step aside distant locales, fancy hotel rooms, and jam-packed itineraries; my dream day looks like coffee on the balcony, a leisurely walk through the neighborhood park, and a book paired with hot tea in the evening.