Martin Hähnel

Vacation Results 2025

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I wrote a slightly weird post when I was traveling: Observations While Traveling. It was an attempt to think a little bit more interestingly about my internal world. Reading it now, it seems to me that I was still on my way mentally to "vocation mode", as can be seen by the first point I made:

  • There is a side to my personality that is extremely grating, I am just very rarely informed of it and can forget it exists.

I am not sure if I would sign "my personality [...] is extremely grating". That was clearly written while under stress of traveling. I am not great at traveling (although I'm not that bad either, I just don't enjoy it as much). I mean, listen to this: We had to get a car train from Oulu to Helsinki and then a ferry from Helsinki to Travemünde, make it to my Mom in Husum. Continue to Lübeck and then make it in time to Berlin to meet my Dad, my Brother and my Grandparents. Hope that the 90th birthday of my grandpa goes well (as well as other interactions with family members throughout the whole vacation), decide on where to go after Berlin, before going back from wherever we end up to (Wernigerode in the Harz Mountains btw.) to Travemünde and make it back in time to the ferry and then to Oulu. All of this was happening over the two weeks or so we were gone. It was stressful and exhausting. My Oura Ring (which I mainly use for sleep tracking), showed elevated stress and bad sleep for basically all of my vacation days.

At the same time I enjoyed my time immensely: Most of the vacation was a success and was spent doing interesting and enjoyable things (as the daily dog pics hopefully document). When we arrived back home yesterday, I was happy to be back, but this point here made me wince re-reading it:

  • My most toxic trait is that on a deep level I find humans and their passions, emotions and hang-ups deeply suspect.

I mean... it's not untrue, strictly speaking, but calling it "my most toxic trait" freights it with more negative connotation than is warranted: I actually like that I am a curious observer and explorer that can at times conjure an orthogonal take.

I am not going to comment on all of the points in that post, but I would frame most of these slightly differently and in general more positively.

I guess I would now say that this vacation in particular included a lot of logistics, coordination and worries about interpersonal relationship stuff that made me feel pretty overwhelmed. In that sense it felt good to be able to have an outlet for slightly weird and/or negative thoughts without having to worry too much about what people think.

I needed this emotional outlet, a place in which I could be somewhat more openly authentic (with all my contradictoriness and less agreeable sides) even before the vacation and I see my Im Ascheregen post - in which I decided that I wanted to be more independent again - in line with the travel observations post. I left OMG.lol (a great community with great people!) because the entanglements with the community - shallow as they were - started to resemble my real-life relationships all too much - which is not what I wanted at all from this.[1] I also somehow managed to cause incidental harm, which sucks. And to be completely honest: I didn't want to explain myself again and again that I indeed didn't harbor any bigger negative thoughts against anyone in particular, so leaving was the simplest way. My real life just needed a counter weight in which I could be a little bit more emotional, a little bit louder and even a little bit less sympathetic (weird that this comes from me, who gave another person a somewhat hard time about something similar (although distinct) a while ago...).

  1. I think I came to that realization somewhat in a backwards way: By relating to the community as if these were real-life relationships myself, hence causing the whole hubub for myself. ↩︎