I was in London for work and had the chance to hop a train to Paris for the weekend. A friend with a spare room, a city I love, three hours away. On paper, it was obvious.

I stayed in London. Same hotel. Same room.

And it was one of the best decisions I made on that trip.

the hidden tax

When you're traveling, everything is destabilized. The bed you wake up in, the streets you walk, the food you eat, the way you get around—none of it is compressed yet. At home, your brain has filed most of your environment under "safe and known." It doesn't have to pay attention. But in a new place, your nervous system is on full alert. Not hypervigilance exactly—more like a background process running at all times, quietly draining your battery.

Think about the phrase paying attention. At home, you don't have to pay. Abroad, every moment has a cost.

This is why people spend thousands on guided tours when they could do the same trip for a fifth of the price. I used to scoff at that. Now I get it. What you're paying for isn't the itinerary—it's the decisions. You're buying the freedom to land somewhere and just be open to it, without the cognitive overhead of figuring out metro cards, neighborhoods, restaurant reviews gamed by tourists, and which hotel is actually decent versus which one paid for its ranking.

Stability is a force multiplier. And most travelers massively underrate it.

the maximalist trap

Here's what the optimizer in me wanted to do: go to Paris, see my friend, take pictures, squeeze every drop out of the trip. Then maybe a different hotel in a different part of London. Maybe upgrade the room. Maybe try a new neighborhood.

Every one of those "maybes" is a decision. And every decision costs bandwidth.

I woke up late that morning—late for me, which is about 8:30. I'd been out with work colleagues until 11, back at midnight. I putzed around the hotel room, had a coffee, checked some emails. The maximalist mind would be unnerved by this. You're wasting the morning. You're in London. Go do something.

But I've been learning something as I've gotten older: depth beats velocity. Velocity is fun at 24. Depth becomes increasingly rich as you mature. Not boring—rich. There is a difference.

Muscles can only strain for so long before they break. They need rest before their next rep. There's power in letting yourself have pockets of rest—letting the body recover from high stress, high stimulation periods—rather than mistaking constant motion for getting more out of the experience.

The framing shift is simple. Instead of asking "What is the best possible option?" ask "What option makes me most available to life?"

Staying put made me available to life. Uprooting to Paris would have made me available to logistics.

half in London, half in imaginary Paris

The most insidious part wasn't the decision itself—it was what happened after.

As soon as I committed to staying, my brain started simulating the alternative. What would Paris have been like? I could have seen my friend. Imagine the walk along the Seine. An entire imaginary trip playing out in HD, conveniently leaving out the exhaustion, the three hours on a train each way, the friction of navigating a second foreign city in a week.

Psychologists call this counterfactual simulation—and it's a trap. The imaginary version always wins because it never includes the downsides. Imaginary Paris has no jet lag, no decision fatigue, no missed connections. It's a highlight reel of a trip that never happened.

Reconsideration destroys presence. You end up half in London, half in imaginary Paris—and fully nowhere. The only thing capable of reducing the quality of your trip is divided attention between realities.

High-agency people must learn the discipline of non-reconsideration. Self-trust isn't never questioning your choices—it's not obeying every doubt. Once a decision is made, simulating alternate realities is intelligence misapplied. Don't reopen solved problems.

It's like repotting a plant. When you move a plant from one pot to another, its roots experience real stress—this isn't theoretical. The plant takes time to settle. We're the same. Every time we uproot ourselves, even within the same hotel, we're causing micro-stress that reduces our capacity to engage with where we are.

the go bag principle

This isn't just philosophy. I've built practical systems around it.

I have a general rule: for any flight over five hours, I don't uproot for less than four nights. I may flex this for work, but the policy exists to protect the principle. Stability needs time to set in.

I travel with a go bag—one week of the same clothes, everywhere I go. I know some people need variety in what they wear, and I get it. But for me, eliminating that entire category of decisions is worth the trade-off. No packing stress. No outfit planning. No decision fatigue before the trip even starts.

Exercise is another one. Keeping your habits on the road is hard enough without a decision tree blocking every workout: Which gym? How far? What time? How much? Is it worth it? Too many decisions. I cut it all:

1. I book hotels with a gym. I may not train at the same intensity as home, but I can keep it in maintenance mode.
2. I carry a jump rope and a pad. Fifteen minutes, almost anywhere, no excuses. Low friction, low cognitive load, high consistency.

These aren't personality quirks—they're stability infrastructure. Tiny frictions compound massively on trips. Every decision I eliminate upstream gives me bandwidth downstream. And bandwidth equals aliveness.

stop optimizing, start experiencing

Availability to life beats theoretical maximization. Every time.

Let the high engagement be for the experiences you're choosing and moving toward. There's plenty of it—we're just redistributing where your attention goes. When you can reduce the cognitive load for simple things—sticking with your decisions, keeping your location consistent, letting your nervous system acclimate—you capture so much more. You're open to what's actually in front of you rather than running a simulation of what could be somewhere else.

To travel well, you need stability. You need decisiveness. Those disciplines will make you available to life.