Serious Question: post hunt/vacation letdown and depression

[2rocky]

Does anyone deal with this on a regular basis? You have a great week-10 days with friends and family chasing critters in beautiful places without a care in the world. Then you get back to your daily grind and wonder why in the HELL you are putting up with all the BS that is your daily life. Then you realize you rely on that daily grind to pay for just existing. It's really thrown me in a funk.

 

[MTHunter1321]

You’re not alone. Always takes me a couple days being back at work after time away to readjust to what unfortunately is the norm.

 

[brocksw]

Does anyone deal with this on a regular basis? You have a great week-10 days with friends and family chasing critters in beautiful places without a care in the world. Then you get back to your daily grind and wonder why in the HELL you are putting up with all the BS that is your daily life. Then you realize you rely on that daily grind to pay for just existing. It's really thrown me in a funk.

I try and remain grateful. I am so lucky it's unbelievable. I was born at a good time, in the right country, to a good family. My wife and kids are healthy, I'm healthy, we have nothing to really complain about. I do my best to make good decisions so I can get out of the grind as soon as possible but still try and balance it with having some fun. Somebody always has it worse.

Stay motivated, Be grateful, stand up for what's right, and follow your passions man.

 

[shannerdrake]

Does anyone deal with this on a regular basis? You have a great week-10 days with friends and family chasing critters in beautiful places without a care in the world. Then you get back to your daily grind and wonder why in the HELL you are putting up with all the BS that is your daily life. Then you realize you rely on that daily grind to pay for just existing. It's really thrown me in a funk.

100% get where you are coming from. It used to be so bad that I'd miss out enjoying the last day or two of a trip. Last year was weird in particular. With COVID messing life up, the one thing I set my heart on was a CO elk/mule deer muzzleloader hunt. I shot my biggest bull (by a lot) and my biggest deer ever on that trip and stood next to my buddy when he shot his nice mule deer. I remember the week after I got back, sitting in a basement bedroom wading through a mountain of missed emails and all day Zoom calls (ie my job) feeling very down and disconnected. I should have been riding high!

I think among other things, talking about it is really good. So good on you for doing that and starting that conversation. I ended up talking to my hunting buddy about it and found he felt exactly the same way and opened a new dialogue between us. I also discussed it with my wife and found out that she struggled with that on family vacations.

I've worked over the years to rewrite the narrative in my mind - my job is NOT what I escape from on hunts and vacations. My job is the blessing that allows and affords me to the opportunity to got on hunts and vacations. That was a big shift in my mind and has helped me a lot.

One more thing - since I grew up extremely poor, I frankly "went without" most of my first 20 years. This created in me an extreme scarcity mindset. I saw opportunities as limited and fleeting. Over the years I have worked with family and friends to celebrate the future opportunities on the horizon instead of morning the lost opportunities of the past.

Drop me a PM if you every want to share hunting stories and talk about future ones!

 

[noharleyyet]

As per hunting I'm always ready to get back to home and family, but post family vacation doldrums are a real thing for me.

 

[stealthy_bowman]

I hear you.
What helps a lot for me is coming back to the local whitetail opportunities. That certainly does wonders to ease the blues. Luckily here in NJ we can hunt them until mid February.
What also helps a ton is getting right into planning for the following year out of state big hunt.
Lastly, as for the daily grind question, my North Star since forever has been to retire early and to that end we live well below our means and we save and invest half our income. I really don’t care about keeping up with the Jones’ as the price for that is essentially a lifetime of servitude… and that’s definitively not for me.

 

[winmag]

Yes, absolutely. My company gives tons of PTO so that we can "recharge". But taking time off just makes me want to take more time off.

I keep a hunting calendar out for 3-4 years into the future so I've always got something to look forward to and something to train for. This helps me a lot.

 

[406dn]

My brother has had to deal with that. It took me a while to see the pattern, but it's there.

I think it is fairly common.

 

[geetar]

Usually at the end of a week long western hunt I’m wondering why in the world I even live in the east and then I remember I have a wonderful wife that lets me go west as much as I can afford and two beautiful children back east to go home too. I don’t have a great relationship with my side of the family but she does with hers and I tolerate living close to them out of respect for her. It balances out but to answer your question I definitely feel this. I wonder at times if we aren’t sort of selling ourselves out to jobs and living in areas we don’t love for money and coping with it by doing things like vacations and hunting trips. I’m not gonna sit here and complain. By the global standards I’m blessed beyond beliefs but these thoughts and feelings do run through me from time to time and after our last elk hunt together my brother had it pretty bad for a while too.

 

[cedahm]

Does anyone deal with this on a regular basis? You have a great week-10 days with friends and family chasing critters in beautiful places without a care in the world. Then you get back to your daily grind and wonder why in the HELL you are putting up with all the BS that is your daily life. Then you realize you rely on that daily grind to pay for just existing. It's really thrown me in a funk.

Constantly since I entered the grown-up workforce a lot of years ago. It's worse when you're not super-jazzed about your daily grind/job, too.

I saw opportunities as limited and fleeting. Over the years I have worked with family and friends to celebrate the future opportunities on the horizon instead of morning the lost opportunities of the past.

The planning, research and anticipation of any 'vacation' - hunting, fishing, family, whatever - to me adds some number of enjoyable days to the front end as well. If I don't have some kind of interesting upcoming trip/activity on the books I get depressed.

Case in point - I leave for MT next week. I've spent hours a day digging into river flows, maps, old articles and books, etc. I have a running list of potential places to see/fish, but in practice, I am most likely just going to hit a handful of my favorites in @Bambistew 's old stomping grounds, have a lot of local beers on the porch, and unlikely to even go to most of the outlying places I've researched, but it's sure been fun learning about them and the list will just roll over to next year when the cycle repeats.

 

[WyoDoug]

I retired because of situations like this. I thought retirement would give me time to do the stuff I could not do because of work. However, I now find retirement boring and had to find things to do during the "off-season" period where hunting and fishing is not done normally.

 

[DouglasR]

“Sunny days wouldn’t be special if it wasn’t for rain”
- 50 Cent

 

[3855WIN]

I’ve worked shift work for 32 years. This has allowed me the freedom to hunt at least a part of every day over a four month season. Now I never hunted every day, but some seasons I hunted parts of 60 days.
Just remember that work pays for those Western big game tags.

 

[Wind Gypsy]

At the end of a strenuous week in the mountains I typically feel super refreshed and motivated to get back to work and crush things. By the time I’m actually back at work I frequently feel some doldrums and struggle to get out of a funk for a week.

I like the sentiment others are sharing to have gratitude for the opportunities you have. It’s something I overlook all too often.

 

[BirdManMike]

I get this at the end of falconry season. It doesnt matter if it has been a good or bad season. And if bad it doesnt matter how bad, how much of a struggle its been (last season!). After 6 months of running dogs and flying birds nearly every single day, the week or 3 after I hang it up for the year are always tough. I feel melancholy, a sense of loss, like I have no sense of purpose, or something. Difficult to describe.

 

[geetar]

“Sunny days wouldn’t be special if it wasn’t for rain”
- 50 Cent

The wisdom of the Fitty. it’s good and true though.

 

[Shangobango]

Does anyone deal with this on a regular basis? You have a great week-10 days with friends and family chasing critters in beautiful places without a care in the world. Then you get back to your daily grind and wonder why in the HELL you are putting up with all the BS that is your daily life. Then you realize you rely on that daily grind to pay for just existing. It's really thrown me in a funk.

I get exactly where you are coming from.

I hate the feeling of logging back on for work after I have been off living the good life for a while.

The reality is that I couldn't afford to live the good life for that time if I didn't put up with my job all of the rest of the time.

 

[rwc101]

Vacations taken alone, not so much. Hate leaving family though.

 

[glass eye]

We homeschooled our 2 kids and we traveled a lot for hunts and adventures. When my daughter was a teenager she would usually get in a bad mood as we were getting close to home.
Poor thing, she married a guy who doesn't like to camp. She's always telling me how she misses camping.

 

[Cammy]

I don't even have to take a vacation to feel the dread of going to work. LOL!

Seriously though....I retired the first time at 40 and was fortunate to have a hobbies that filled most of my time. For most of us here fishing and hunting make up the majority of our wish list. Given that seasons and weather play a huge role in how often we get out, my suggestion is have a back-up hobby. I work with an older guy who is retired but is here 2 days a week as an inventory manager. The rest of his week he volunteers at the local hospital or at the Salvation Army. He doesn't hunt fish or travel (exotic vacation or multi day interstate type of travel) but he is content.

I look forward to pulling the plug here and spending more time in my garden, fishing and planning those out of state hunts along with some travel to fill my time. It is almost cliché on here to quote Big Fin but the statement of you will run out of health before you run out of money never has made more sense to me than this point in my life.