Transcript
Alicia: Alright, Glacier was: hiking…
Brett: Eating food…
Alicia: Kayaking…
Brett: Traveling to Banff…
Alicia: More hiking…
Brett: More car driving…
Brett: Welcome to the Discover Your Wilderness Podcast.
Alicia: Okay, so we’ve talked through framework stuff. We haven’t really talked about the different kinds of trips that we can go on though. What do you think about discussing that tonight?
Brett: This was one of the first ideas that got us kicked off when we were drawing out a quadrant of what we thought personas were going to be and then we realized it was more your trip travel type. So, I’m all for sharing these trip quadrants now.
Alicia: Okay, so let’s go through what we… where we landed on those. What are the different mindsets or the different approaches that you can have and we came up with two different sort of spectra, correct?
Brett: Correct, yeah. So the first one and the reason we talked in the framework about FOMO (fear of missing out) and JOMO (joy of missing out) is that those two are opposites of each other. You either want to do all of the things and you want to get as much in as possible high quantity and JOMO is I’m going to do fewer things but those things that I’m doing are going to be exactly the things I want to be doing. So that’s one spectrum you can rate a trip on.
Alicia: And I like the idea of the spectrum philosophy that we took because you can fall anywhere within that space on a given trip from one trip to the next from one day to the next because some days you want to squeeze a lot in, you want to try and pack everything in that you can and other days it is more about taking it slow, being more intentional, really hitting on a few things really hard and then letting whatever fills the space around those be more serendipitous or spontaneous.
Brett: And then did you want to introduce the other spectrum by which you can view trips through?
Alicia: Sure, and this one is interesting because I don’t even know where I fall on this spectrum at any given time. It’s the level of intensity for those activities. You can talk about going to Hawaii and laying on the beach or you can go to Hawaii and go cliff jumping and rock climbing or kayaking. So there are very high intensity, high adrenaline activities that you may take and there are much more relaxed, much more calm and comfortable or easy activities that you might approach.
Brett: Well, and you said you don’t know where you totally fall, but the whole reason we moved away from personas and actually tagging individual people in these quadrants are because from one trip to the next, you could have totally different expectations for what that trip would entail. So if you are going on a cabin getaway, that might be a lower intensity, lower energy thing where you want to sit, read a book, watch TV, sleep in, relax. But then you as the same individual might go to Hawaii or go to Disney World, Disneyland, or some other theme park and want to wake up early to be there when the park opens, shut the park down and have done stuff straight through the day. So that is the same person, but with very different expectations for the level of intensity or energy of that specific trip.
Alicia: I like the idea to shut the park down. That sounds speaking of intense. It sounds very intense to shut the park down.
Brett: Thanks. Well, and sometimes I can find myself going, well, how is high intensity different than FOMO and JOMO, can you explain kind of where we have come to in our thought process on this?
Alicia: Yeah. So it was fun thinking through the people that we knew, the people we had traveled with and where different trips evolved with those different individuals because we have friends who will go on high-intensity-FOMO trips where they wake up early, like you said, get up early and go, you know, do a 5K in the morning and then go rock climbing. And then in the evening, go hit up some great food place and then stay up late, you know, you can sleep when you’re dead kind of approach. The next morning you get up early again and you go swimming and you go rock climbing and you’re trying to squeeze in all of the adrenaline, all of the activities. You don’t want to hit any or miss any bucket list item for that trip. But then on the other end of the spectrum, our low-intensity-JOMO is I’m going to go on a cruise and sit by the pool and read and eat good food. And that is the entirety of the trip.
Brett: Yeah. I was, we hope to bring her on. You have a co-worker who seemed like the perfect mix of high intensity, but JOMO low quantity of taking a trip to New York. So Red Eye, go to New York, watch a Broadway musical and then come home. It didn’t need to be the whole thing. It was, it was, and maybe that isn’t intense in some people’s mind, right? But it’s high energy. You need a lot of energy to do a quick trip like that. And yet they weren’t trying to do everything in New York that was possible. They didn’t want to see all of the sites and do all of the things, which is more of that FOMO. “Oh, I’m here. While I’m here, I need to make sure that I also visit these things.” It’s, “I’m okay, missing out on some of those. As long as the things I’m doing, I’m getting in the few number of things that I’m doing and care most about, I’m getting in and I don’t care about the energy requirements of doing those few things.”
Alicia: Mmm hmm. And then the other piece of that, so we’ve got our high intensity FOMO. We have our low intensity JOMO. We have a high intensity JOMO. And then we would have a low intensity FOMO, which I think we’ve even experienced some of that on some of our trips where we are not doing anything that takes a lot of rigor, but we are trying to squeeze, you know, let’s go see this thing and take a few pictures of it. Let’s go try this food thing. I think even on our glacier trip, I think we felt a little bit of that will do a lot of little things and squeeze a lot of little things into a very short, relatively short period of time, which allowed us to check a lot of things off with relatively little energy loss.
Brett: The one place I would advise against getting when we did a trip to Italy, and we’ve alluded to this in past episodes, we had to consciously be aware of the fact that we couldn’t do everything and kind of pull back on that FOMO because we were doing so many things already that it would have been unsustainable had we tried to always add something new. There will always be things that you can’t get to if you’re trying to do high intensity because you just won’t have the energy for it and you run into a time constraint. So it’s kind of your energy and your time on the two different dimensions. But I remember when our friend Esther pointed out when you were describing the vacations we go on, and she said, oh, that’s not a vacation. That’s a trip. Do you want to talk about that?
Alicia: Yeah. We were talking about how our family traveled growing up, that dad’s motto was “there’s more to see.” And so we would go and we would explore these places near our homes, near our home. We were campers. We had a great pop up trailer. And so we would go camping a lot, but it was always, okay, we’ll go see this area, see this lake, see this museum, see this historical site, whatever it may have been. And it was always, “okay, there’s more to see.” And we were able to get quite a bit in, but there wasn’t a ton of rest in that space. And Esther’s perspective was that that’s not a vacation. You’re going on a trip. You’re going to check boxes off. And a vacation is supposed to be relaxing, a vacation is supposed to be more spontaneous, maybe a more fluid experience where you get to just really enjoy the moment instead of saying there’s more to see at every turn.
Brett: So I love that because it gives some words. We fear giving too prescriptive of a name to these quadrants besides just saying, high FOMO, low JOMO, high-energy, low-energy, but we have some that we threw around having at least a dichotomy of this is a trip versus this is vacation. And we’ll get into more. What does this look like when you’re traveling with other people? But here’s a start at least for how to consider what this and what your next trip looks like. Do you expect from it for this to be you’re going for one thing or you want to go for a lot of things and the things that you do, are you going to go hard or are you doing it to be more relaxing? And so that kind of splits our quadrant in half at least to say, oh, this is more of a trip versus this is more of a vacation. But we definitely want to get more into what those look like and talk to some people who have the different perspectives on how they travel well because people tend to find themselves in different quadrants, but this is just a little sampling to start you thinking about what these travel types these travel quadrants look like.
Alicia: So we’re going to leave you with that for this week and we’ll circle back next week and start digging more into those concepts. But if you are liking what you’re hearing, if this is bringing value to you, we hope that you’ll pass it along to somebody else, maybe a travel companion, maybe some family that you know that you’ll have a family gathering coming up with soon with the holidays around the corner. Like, subscribe, and we’ll see you next week.
Brett: Shout out to our people across the world, thanks for listening.
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Want to discover more wilderness, or podcasts, listen to episode 12.