We Were Doing All the Things — But Actually Enjoying Almost None of Them

There was a Saturday last spring where we did everything right, at least on paper. Farmers market in the morning, a new hiking trail in the afternoon, dinner at a spot we'd been meaning to try for months. We got home, scrolled through the photos, agreed it was a good day — and then felt weirdly flat about the whole thing.

Neither of us said anything at first. We just kind of went to bed.

But a few days later, Benny brought it up over coffee. "Did you actually enjoy Saturday, or did you just like that we did all that stuff?" And honestly? The question hit harder than it should have. Because when we really thought about it, we couldn't quite separate the two anymore.

That was the moment we started what we now call the adventure audit.

The Checkbox Problem Nobody Talks About

Here's the thing about living an adventurous life — and we say this as people who genuinely love doing new things — it's really easy to slip into a mode where you're accumulating experiences rather than actually having them. You start building a mental list. New restaurants. National parks. Weekend road trips. Concerts. Ski towns you've been meaning to visit. And before long, you're not choosing things because you want them. You're choosing them because they're on the list.

We didn't even realize we'd fallen into that pattern until we were deep in it.

The farmers market thing is a perfect example. Katie used to love going. It was slow and sensory and genuinely fun. But at some point it became a thing we "do on Saturdays," and then it became a box we checked so we could feel like we were being intentional with our weekends. Same with hiking. Same, honestly, with a lot of travel we'd done in the previous year.

When you're running through experiences at that pace, you're not present in them. You're already mentally filing them away.

What the Audit Actually Looked Like

We didn't make this complicated. We sat down one evening with a notepad — yes, an actual paper notepad — and went back through the last year of things we'd done together. Trips, day adventures, weekend plans, recurring stuff we'd built into our routine. And for each one, we asked ourselves three questions:

Did we look forward to it beforehand? Were we present while it was happening? Did we talk about it afterward — not to recap for other people, but just between the two of us?

That last one turned out to be the most revealing. Because there's a real difference between retelling an experience for an audience and actually processing it with each other. The things we genuinely loved? We'd still be referencing them weeks later, bringing them up randomly, laughing about small details. The checkbox experiences? We'd basically stopped thinking about them before we'd even gotten home.

The audit wasn't about judging the things we'd done. It was about getting honest about which ones actually filled us up versus which ones just looked good in the rearview.

What We Found Out About Ourselves

Some of it was predictable. Katie already knew she preferred slower travel to jam-packed itineraries. Benny already knew he got more out of one really good meal than three okay ones. But the audit surfaced some things we hadn't fully named yet.

For instance: we both get way more out of experiences that have some kind of learning curve. Not extreme stuff — just things where you're figuring something out as you go. A new trail where we had to navigate. Cooking something unfamiliar. Visiting a city neither of us had been to before. The slight discomfort of not knowing what we're doing seems to keep us present in a way that familiar, comfortable plans don't.

We also realized we'd been dramatically undervaluing low-key local stuff. Some of our best recent memories were just wandering around a neighborhood we didn't know well, or spending a full afternoon at a bookstore, or driving somewhere with no real destination. None of that is Instagram-worthy in any obvious way. But it kept coming up in the audit as genuinely enjoyable — and a lot of the "impressive" stuff didn't.

The Part That Was a Little Uncomfortable

Let's be real for a second. Part of why we'd been chasing experiences was external. When you share your life online — even a little bit — there's a low-level pressure to have things to share. Cool things. Visually interesting things. Things that make it look like your life is full and intentional and worth following.

And we'd let that bleed into our actual decision-making without fully realizing it. We were sometimes choosing experiences based on how they'd land rather than how they'd feel. That's a weird thing to admit, but it's true.

The audit forced us to separate those two motivations. And once we could see them clearly, it got a lot easier to make choices based on the right one.

How It Changed What We Actually Do

We said no to a lot more stuff. That's probably the biggest practical change. Things that used to feel like obligations — events we felt like we "should" go to, trips we felt like we "should" take — became a lot easier to pass on once we had a clearer sense of what we were actually optimizing for.

We also got more intentional about building in unstructured time. Not every weekend needs a plan. Some of the best ones are the ones where we just see what happens.

And we started talking more specifically about what we're looking for before we commit to something. Not in an overthinking way — more like a quick gut check. Does this feel like something we actually want, or does it feel like a box? That question alone has filtered out a lot of stuff that would have left us feeling flat.

The Bigger Shift

At its core, the adventure audit wasn't really about adventures. It was about paying attention. To what we actually enjoy. To what we're doing and why. To the difference between a life that looks full and a life that actually feels full.

Those aren't always the same thing. And for a while, we were so busy filling the calendar that we didn't stop to check which one we were building.

We're still figuring it out. But we're figuring it out together, which — if we're being honest — is the whole point of this thing anyway.