Last week I flew to Playa del Carmen for a close friend’s wedding. Three nights at an all-inclusive resort on the Riviera Maya — organized entirely by a wedding planner, which meant I had nothing to coordinate. I just had to show up.
I came back with more energy than I left with. That sounds like it should be obvious. It is not always the case.
This post is about why this trip felt different from most of my recent breaks, what I noticed about my own state while I was there, and the one small thing I am trying to carry back with me.
There is a line from Through the Looking-Glass that has been living in my head for months.
The Red Queen tells Alice: “Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
That is not a metaphor for me right now. It is a description.
I work on the Engineering Enablement team — Developer Experience. Using and promoting AI is one of our core offerings. On paper, that is a good position to be in during a period of enormous disruption. I have thought about this. I know the tools. I use them every day.
But knowing you are positioned well does not make the pace feel slower. If anything, it makes you feel like you have even less excuse to slow down.
What the Stress Actually Looked Like
Before this trip, I was running on something I did not have a clean name for.
There were concrete stressors:
- I was in between teams, which carries its own ambient uncertainty
- The broader tech industry noise — job security, AI disruption, questions about what the next two years look like
- Days so dense with work that most other things had been crowded out
- Nights full of anxious, half-awake dreams — a recurring one where I am back in college and cannot graduate because of missing credits
Then there were the quieter signals. My body was ahead of my awareness. The left side of my face started tingling. Not pain — more like a persistent hum. I attributed it to stress.
I also noticed something harder to name: my body was present in conversations, in rooms, in interactions. But my mind was somewhere else entirely, running through task lists, unfinished threads, things I needed to follow up on.
The system had too many open loops, and it was starting to show.
For someone with ADHD, this is a particular trap. Stimulating work provides the dopamine my brain craves. The hyperfocus kicks in. You can push through a lot. But pushing through is not the same as recovering. You can stay functional while the debt compounds.
A system that appears to be running can still be degraded. The absence of visible failure is not the same as health.
Why Most of My Vacations Were Not Vacations
I have taken vacations. But if I look at them honestly, most of them were a different kind of work.
When I travel, I tend to become the host. I manage logistics. I research restaurants, coordinate timing, make sure everyone has what they need. I care about the experience being good, which means I am always slightly in planning mode, slightly on.
That kind of effort is different from my day job, but it is still effort. It still requires context-switching, anticipation, and output. It is not rest — it is work with a different domain.
I never quite named this pattern until it was absent.
Three Days Where I Was Not in Charge
This trip was different because I had nothing to manage.
A close friend got married in Playa del Carmen. The wedding planner had organized everything. I showed up. That was the job.
No logistics. No restaurant research. No coordination overhead. I was a guest — not a host, not an organizer, not a responsible party for anyone else’s experience.
I did not fully realize how long it had been since I operated in that mode until I was already in it.
The first thing I noticed was how different it felt to be present. Not because I tried harder or used a technique, but because there was nothing else pulling on my attention. The task list I usually carry around had nothing to attach to.
I hung out with friends. I met new people. I had real conversations — the kind that go sideways and end up somewhere interesting, where you say things you did not plan to say.
My most real and authentic self surfaced when I was not managing anything.
The Illusion — and What Is Real About It
I know the resort is not sustainable. I know that.
A few days in a controlled environment where logistics are handled for you is not a scalable life strategy. I cannot live at an all-inclusive in Playa del Carmen. The pressures are still there. The team transitions, the industry noise, the open loops — none of those changed while I was away.
I do not want to pretend otherwise.
But I think there is something real underneath the illusion: the state itself is accessible, even if the environment is not.
The relaxed presence I found there was not manufactured by the resort. The resort just removed the obstacles. What was underneath — the version of me that could actually land in a conversation, be curious, be at ease — that was already there.
The question is not how to live permanently in a resort. The question is how to create the conditions for that version of yourself to exist in ordinary life.
I have started calling this an inner sanctum — a special place, not physical, where I can reconnect. A practice for breaking the Red Queen loop before it compounds.
I do not have that fully designed yet. And I am deliberately not designing it — that is the trap. If I architect the inner sanctum, I will have turned rest into a project.
So the smallest possible experiment: one window each day, 10–15 minutes, where I remove the obligations.
Not a meditation practice. Not a journaling system. No app, no tracker, no ritual to maintain. Just a window where I am not available for anything — including my own task list. Coffee before I open a laptop. A walk without a podcast. Sitting somewhere without reaching for my phone.
The resort worked by removing things, not adding them. The experiment should follow the same logic.
What I Came Back With
I came back from Playa del Carmen with more energy than I left with. That alone was notable — I can remember trips where I needed recovery time after the vacation.
But more than the energy, I came back with a clearer read on my own state.
The anxiety dreams, the face tingling, the sense of mental absence while physically present — those were not random. They were signal. A system emitting events because something needed attention.
I missed some of those signals while I was in the middle of the cycle. They were only visible in retrospect, once I had enough stillness to look.
That is the cost of running too long without stopping — your own telemetry becomes noise.
Key Takeaways
- Your body logs events before your mind catches up. Physical symptoms under sustained stress are worth taking seriously — not just explaining away.
- Vacations as managed projects do not reset the loop. If you are the host, organizer, or logistics brain, you are still working. The domain changes; the mode does not.
- Presence is not a technique. It is what happens when the obstacles are removed. You do not need to manufacture it — you need to stop blocking it.
- The inner sanctum is portable, not geographical. The goal is to find what the resort removed, and find a way to remove it regularly, without the ocean.
- Running fast is not the same as moving forward. Sometimes the highest-leverage move is a full stop.