Is this really it?

“Escaping the rat race” is a phrase often heard within the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early). The idea is simple: people do not want to spend their entire lives working until retirement, only to finally have the time and freedom to do the things they always wanted to do.

The strange thing is that I do not feel trapped at all. We have a good life. We are happily married, have two wonderful daughters, everyone is healthy, and we both have jobs that give us a lot of freedom. We can work from home, plan our own schedules, and spend a lot of time together as a family. By most measures, life is exactly what we hoped it would be.

Yet something has been bothering me for a while.

Over the years, we have become very good at routines. The mornings run smoothly. The evenings run smoothly. The weeks run smoothly. In fact, one week often looks a lot like the next. There is comfort in that, but there is also a downside.

A few months ago, I was visiting family. At some point, the conversation turned to what everyone had been up to lately. I realised I did not really have anything interesting to tell. Nothing was wrong. Nothing bad had happened. But nothing memorable had happened either.

A similar moment happened at home. Every evening when I put the girls to bed, I ask them what the best part of their day was. One evening they asked me the same question. I remember thinking about it for a moment and not having a good answer. Not because it had been a bad day, but because it had been exactly the same as so many other days.

That happens more often than I would like.

Maybe that is part of getting older. Maybe it is just what life looks like when everything is running well. But it made me wonder what I will remember when I look back on this period of my life in twenty years.

There is a big world out there. Places, cultures and experiences that are completely different from what we know. Our daughters are only young once. We only get one chance to show them the world through the eyes of a child.

That, more than anything else, is why we decided to take this trip.

Not because we want to escape our lives.

But because we want to make sure we are really living them.