Travel

I truly believe in this phrase: "Eat well and travel often." Sometimes it is great to forget about your phone and all of your bills and just get away for some R & R.  How do you plan your trips?                                                                                 

Image via Pinterest via http://notesondesign.tumblr.com

I haven't actually been on a trip since 2007.  I always intend to make something happen, but man, life can be expensive, right?  Moving back in with my parents, yes at the age of 28 (my older brother and his wife think I am crazy), has given me a little bit of flexibility moneywise and I think I am finally going to be able to make a trip happen in 2013.

In the past I have traveled with friends, I've traveled with my younger brother with a tour group, and I have traveled by myself.  Geez, it sounds like I have traveled a lot, but I really haven't. Each way to travel works and has it's pros and it's cons.  Honestly, I prefer traveling with a friend/family member and a tour group.  Let me tell you why:

A different tour group at Abu Simbel, Egypt via http://www.thegobus.com/Egypt-Tours/Pyramids-and-Beaches 

My brother and I went on a 14-day tour of Egypt with about 8 other people.  It was a trip of a lifetime honestly. Not only are you and your friend/family member having a fabulous vacation, you are automatically with a group of like-minded people of similar ages (from all over the world) and it is just a blast.  In addition, all you have to do is get up and walk out the front door of your hotel in the morning and everything is taken care of.  You have a tour guide that tells you all of the information you need/want to know about each site you visit (who wants to research everything so you know what the heck you are looking at?) and the guide can also fill you in on the local culture, which to me is just as important as the sites.  All of the hotels and food and transportation are lined up for you.  Tours relieve a lot of the pressures of trip planning and you don't have to iron out any of the hiccups that might pop up during the trip. 

Photo via http://www.thegobus.com/Egypt-Tours/Pyramids-and-Beaches 

We went on this tour in 2007, which by the way, back then the tour was only $500/person (Pyramids and Beaches Tour through Go Bus), and we are still friends with the people we met on the tour to this day.  Some of the perks of meeting these people were that we learned more about other countries and....now had people to go visit in these other countries!  

A couple years later, my brother got a work visa for New Zealand.  When he first moved there he lived with one of the couples we met on the trip....apparently the guy is a famous singer/song writer in NZ, on billboards and the like (Nathan King.)  He is the biggest sweetheart and such a good and fun person, I completely adore him.  Check him out if you're into pop rock music.  After that he flew to Australia and was able to visit every major coastal city since he knew someone that lived in each city.  Nice to have the hook-up, huh? Well, they all showed him a good time and he came back with some hilarious stories! 

Touring Egypt, seeing all of the amazing landmarks, sailing up the Nile in a sailboat for three days, scuba-diving in the Red Sea in Dahab, just wouldn't have been the same without all of the amazing people we met, not to mention our phenomenal tour guide.  My brother and I have decided that India is our next destination and now I just have to figure out if we are going to do the trip solo, which my brother would prefer as he thinks we can plan a trip that would be much cheaper than what a tour would charge, but I'm not sure if I want to iron all of the plans out and it might be more fun touring as a group...stay tuned.... 

XO Arie

Happy

The 2011 Documentary that explores human happiness through interviews with people from all walks of life in 14 different countries, weaving in the newest findings of Positive Psychology

Have any of you seen this documentary? I just happened to notice it was newly added to Netflix and gave it a shot. I was a science major in school, Neuroscience actually, and despite all of the many available elective Neuroscience courses I was able to choose from, there wasn't a single course that taught about human happiness. The science of Happiness seems to be a newer science that is becoming more and more the rage these days, which makes sense, as it seems a lot of people are struggling with happiness.

Priorities

In our society there is a lot of push, push, push to make more money, be more successful, drive better cars, be more thin, etc. and I think that keeps us from enjoying the things that we have accomplished and instead, leads us to feel the pressure and stress to keep pushing to the next level or the next goal. That is not happiness.

I am not saying I am not guilty of this, because trust me I am. I did get my degree in Neuroscience and after school I got my first job, which paid about the same as I would have been making had I not gone to school, had I not put four years of work into getting a degree, but in this instance I now had to kick a lot of the money that I was making back to the Government to pay off a small fraction of my student loan debt. This was in no way sufficient.

After three years, I switched to my second job and fortunately with that switch came a bump in my salary...honestly at a time where I really needed it. And now I feel I make a pretty fair salary, fair would be a bit more, but I REALLY just want more. I am not comfortable and I want to feel comfortable for the point I am at in life, and by comfortable I mean that I can pay all of my bills and still have some money to put into savings and hell, enough to go on a vacation. 

Photo via Google images

Next stop is going back to school, getting my first job in my "career" which would come with a pay bump, but also higher student loan payments, likely a house, maybe kids? I do have a goal of what my definition of being "financially comfortable" is and it is probably lower than you would think but even then, will I still want more or will I stop to smell the proverbial roses?

Hedonic Treadmill Theory

According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness. So once you make more money, you adapt to that level of lifestyle and then once again, want more money. Can you see this happening in yourself? Affecting your relationships or can you see money and the stress of making more money affecting relationships around you? I bet you can. I can.

Photo via Google images

This documentary counters that other things actually affect your level of happiness:
1. Personal Growth

2. Relationships

3. Giving back

This makes total sense to me.  I used to work as a Nursing Assistant at a Nursing Home and it is the most fulfilling job I have ever had.  Why? People always said things like, "Disgusting, I could never do that," but despite the cons, which I never really thought of or noticed, because they never really bothered me, what I was doing was making a difference.  I was helping people who sometimes were all alone in the world, who had dementia and truly could not take care of themselves, or people who were going through the process of dying and the stages that go along with accepting that they were going to dye.  Now, these people maybe didn't always notice or appreciate me, in fact a lot of the residents hated the staff quite a bit, and there was no other recognition really for caring for these people or for going the extra mile, but it really felt so amazing to me.

Photo via Google images

And of course, personal growth and relationships, those are easy to see how they could so strongly affect your happiness.  I think this documentary is missing another huge factor that affects happiness, or maybe this is part of personal growth, but gratitude. Gratitude reminds you of all of the positive things in your life and can help you change your whole mindset and can turn the things you think are bad parts of your life into good parts of your life. Hate your job? Be grateful that you have a job, some people don't.  Feeling positive about having a job is a heck of a lot better than carrying around the anger of hating your job, right?

Now, I can't say that this information is new to me, because it's not.  Even though there weren't any Neuro courses that involved happiness and the pursuit of happiness available to me in school, there were some excellent Psychology courses that did.  Despite knowing this information, I haven't really applied any of it to my life, even now when my goal this year was to work on my happiness.  So I am grateful that I happened to be pursuing the newly added section on Netflix today and came across Happy.  Check it out and let me know what you think, or let me know what affects your happiness.

XO Arie