Do we age into monotony or does monotony age us?

At the beginning of the year, I set myself the goal of publishing at least 1 blog post per month and this is the first month that I’ve been hit with a proper writer’s block. It always feels like everything wakes up and accelerates in spring, and May has been a busy, fast-paced month with lots of work events, new neurotic energy and too many things on my to-do list. It is therefore no surprise that I’ve had a hard time focusing on any activity that requires some peace and reflection, so it’s a good thing that the month at least started off with some peace and calm.

For this year’s 1st of May holiday, my partner and I spent the extended weekend at our family weekend house by the seaside in Croatia. In Slovenia, everyone either has a small weekend house at the seaside within their extended family or dreams of having one. Lakeside cottages, seaside camping trailers, DIY hunting lodges or at least some kind of a garden shed are close seconds, but I’d say the quintessential gen X and boomer aspiration is the seaside weekend house. The weekend house is supposed to be both your biggest blessing and an endless source of mandatory work, consuming most of your free weekends with endless maintenance jobs and lawn mowing.

All this to get it ready for the summer season when you can park yourself there for as many weeks in a row as your work vacation allowance permits, perhaps practising a hobby sport or two, but always complaining about the work that still needs to be done every evening over drinks with your friends and neighbours. If I come across as slightly ironic here, there’s a reason for it – my privileged middle-class ass used to spend every summer like this with my family and I never understood why they enjoyed it so much. It is not my intention to judge what people do on their vacation with this post, because everyone should be free to enjoy their time as they please and because how they spend it is often motivated by financial constraints and whether they have kids or not, but there is just something about the classic seaside vacation that always sparks conflicting thoughts in me. As soon as I was old enough to outgrow games with the other neighbourhood kids where we’d roam around the area like a pack of wild dogs after getting sunburnt on the beach all day, there weren’t enough books I could pack to keep me from getting bored. I can only sympathise with my teenage siblings who are entering the same age now, but with the added burden of being cut off from the 24/7 Internet and PC access that we didn’t take for granted back then.

I love the sea, and swimming and free diving have always been one of my favourite activities, so those were magnificent and mostly happy times to look back on, but the problem was the duration and the monotony. As soon as I was no longer a child, more than a week was simply torturous, because I wasn’t particularly keen on sports and it felt like time was ticking by much too slowly one book a day. I always preferred more diverse vacations, travelling to new places or at least the occasional social events with my friends home in Ljubljana. Then came the student years when I was partying and travelling allover the globe, so much that my head was always spinning and it felt like I was grasping the tides of time with both hands and trying to ride the waves as much as I could, which I think I did quite well and I had a lot of fun. During those years, I didn’t visit our seaside home as much, so it felt like I’d come back full circle when we settled in this year.

Now that I’ve hit past 30, time is starting to pass much faster than expected and although I don’t feel old, it seems like stability and tranquillity are no longer unnecessary and overrated. My father had just recently renovated our seaside weekend house, so my partner and I decided to take full advantage of that and have the very definition of a boomer-style 1st of May long weekend. We got sunburnt on the first day, set up the grill and ate too much food 3+ times a day, went for multiple short walks in our tracksuits like we were strolling around on a Regency promenade, watched all the sunsets and played boardgames by the fireplace until late. It was still too cold to swim in the sea, but it was not too cold for ice cream and we even managed to try out our rollerblades, because he still needs to learn so that we can become one of those couples who randomly rollerblade during the warmer months.

First of May weekend 2026

It was a proper vacation, the type where you just get used to the vacancy in your mind and your nervous system finally settles down just when you realise it is already over. It was lovely and we’d both needed the rest, but 4 days was more than enough. Just as I’d begun to wonder if I was really getting old and proverbially turning into my parents (the horror!), we both started talking about how more than a few days of this would’ve been too mind-numbing and would have required an exploratory tourist visit to a nearby city or an incoming visit from a group of friends. Both my partner and I have too many varied interests; he’s a crafter and I am an explorer by nature and you can’t satisfy either of those callings if you are cut off from your tools or stuck in one place that is as familiar as the back of your hand.

As a bookworm, I was not very fit as a child, so my body is in better condition now than it was for most of my early years and I don’t feel like I am ageing as much physically. Yes, there is now a penalty for staying up all night or drinking a lot of alcohol or not eating enough fibre and protein, I have certain health issues and the wrinkles on my face no longer disappear after a good night’s sleep, but contrary to many of my generation, I don’t feel like I am already old and decrepit. In fact, I am quite enjoying my 30s so far as I don’t think I’ve ever been as close to inner peace as I am currently. However, I am starting to understand the creeping mental need to slow down and the ever extending period of time my body and mind need to settle down and recover from stress during vacation. In other words, I am finally starting to appreciate what my family and everyone else have always enjoyed so much about the endlessly predictable, pleasantly boring, no-pressure classic Slovenian seaside vacation.

I don’t think I’ll ever be the type of person to aimlessly lie on the beach all day for more than a few days per year, but I have forgotten how nice it can be and my partner and I both agreed we should do it more often. Although I cannot hep but wonder: do we really start craving more stability and less excitement as we age, or is staying in a stable, predictable environment past the necessary rest and stress recovery time what ages us? How we spend our free time, which includes vacations, determines how well we exercise our brain and whether we are able to keep our mindset flexible enough to keep learning new things and not fall behind the times.

Staying in one’s comfort zone for too long is never a good idea, but striking the right balance between rest and growth can be extremely tricky. However, life often has a funny way of placing us in exactly the right situations if we let it and there is some comfort in that. If I’ve learnt anything about going with the flow, it’s that it is important to reflect on that and appreciate the quieter times, because the next big shift is always lurking just around the corner. How about you, how do you perceive your own ageing? Let me know in the comments below.