Post-Vacation Depression

Since returning from the beach my motivation is so low it’s underground. When I had a “proper” job it always took awhile to reacquaint my brain with the drudgery it had been freed from while on vacation. In fact, the amount of time it took to recuperate was directly proportional to the time I’d taken off. It would take about half the time I’d taken off to return to my previous working conditions, my level improving a bit each day until a hundred percent. So if my vacation was one week it would take a few days before my motivation levels returned to normal. If my vacation was two weeks, it would take a week and so forth.

We do a bit of self-brainwashing in order to commit ourselves to doing dumb shit, like waking up at five in the morning after only get five hours of sleep. Like sitting in traffic for a total of two hours everyday so we can do something that we hate. Like sitting in front of a computer for eight hours or standing on our feet for ten. Our brains must adapt to these unusual circumstances we put ourselves in, otherwise we wouldn’t work.

So, when we get some time away from work our brains have time to break their programing. Weekends are too short to completely break the brainwash, but long enough that the first couple of hours on Monday suck. When we get significant time off, get to relax, do the things we enjoy doing, spend our time with people we want to spend time with, our brains return to normal function. They go, “Ahhh, that’s better. This is the way it should be.” So, when we return to work our brains resist in the beginning. They say, “What the fuck are you doing? That other stuff was way the fuck better!”

But slowly, overtime, we begin to retrain our brains to accept the crazy shit we do in the name of a salary and survival. Since I love what I do now I didn’t think returning to it after a break would be so difficult. I was wrong. Then again I guess it makes sense. After all, novel writing isn’t exactly the most sane job. Oh well, back to work.