Don’t Give Up On Your Hobby

Relaxing on the beach on a comfy lounge chair with a cold beverage?

Backpacking through Europe seeing the sites?

Immersing yourself in a new culture?

Exploring all that South Africa has to offer?

Yes, please!

If you’ve been reading my blog and haven’t realized this yet, my wife and I love to travel. At any point in time we have at least our next two to three vacations planned. As I’m writing this, I can tell you we know when and where our next four vacations will be. We religiously plan out how we want to use our coveted vacation days off from work. The only thing holding us back from traveling more is that little thing called our jobs.

One part of traveling really stinks and that, of course, are the airports. There are long lines, cranky people, TSA security checkpoints, and a lot of waiting around so you can board a plane.

Not long ago my wife and I were going to spend a long weekend in San Diego. My wife lived there for a couple years and enjoys going back to visit her favorite coffee shops, restaurants and being next to the ocean. 

Our flight was scheduled to depart around 8pm so the airport wasn’t very busy. We breezed through security (if you don’t have TSA PreCheck yet, just get it. Seriously) then got to our gate and sat down to relax prior to boarding our plane.

At that point I noticed two couples sitting near us talking to each other. You could tell that they didn’t know each other, but they struck up a conversation as they waited for their flight.

Then I overheard one of them say:

“Us too, we gave ourselves one year to travel before having kids.”

Well that’s depressing!

You gave yourself one year? Do these people have a bunch of money stashed away and no job? If not, I don’t think these people will be doing a lot of traveling.

They made it sound like they have one year to complete a task and then they can move on to popping out children. This isn’t like taking a year to study for the bar exam to become a lawyer. Or taking a year to learn a new language. I look at traveling as a lifelong hobby. My wife and I have a huge list of places we want to visit in our lifetime. Not in one year! You simply don’t have the means or time to travel to as many places as you want.  

But here’s the point. These couples have already decided that they will have to make compromises to have kids. Traveling might not be a huge hobby for them like it is for my wife and me. But if it was they likely won’t be able to travel much (or at all) after having children. The fact of the matter is that children take up a lot of time and it forces your priorities to change with them as they grow. No matter what their hobbies are, they won’t be able to allocate time towards them since they’ll have to be changing dirty diapers and getting thrown up when the baby comes.

Now I will say that it’s fine if having children is a priority in your life. I really don’t have anything wrong with that if you’ve put a lot of thought into it and made the conscious decision it’s the right thing for you. If that’s the case then that’s great. But what happens if you don’t like being a parent? What happens if you don’t like that you can’t spend time on your hobbies? What happens if you grow distant from your partner since you have to spend all of your time and energy on your kids? What if that perfect family you see in the movies isn’t what happens for you? Then what?

It all comes back to your priorities and what you want out of life. There are those that feel the need to have a child because of pressure from their friends and family. (Even though they wouldn’t admit that.) Then there are those who have decided to live a Child Free Lifestyle. My wife and I decided that traveling is an important part of our lives. We know that we wouldn’t be able to travel if we had a child. We’d be knowingly taking something that we love to do and saying we aren’t going to be able to do that for the next 18 years. Instead, we chose to do things that make us happy, and really, isn’t that what life is all about?