Days 37-38: Anti-Vacation

It was at this point that I realized there wasn't much more I wanted to do or see in Singapore. Sure, there are theatres and concert halls and art galleries and (theme) parks and aquariums and zoos, but just about every big city in Asia has those. And the ones in Singapore are perhaps twice as expensive as everywhere else (though, I admit, they're probably a bit nicer here as well).

And so I spent these two days mostly at the National Library. The weather was overcast, windy and occasionally drizzly. Despite being a degree from the equator and temperature in the high 70s to low 80s, in my t-shirt and shorts I felt on the cusp of being cold.

I'm beginning to feel like I need an anti-vacation. While some people may be able to never tire of sightseeing and going out to restaurants, art galleries, museums, etc. day after day, to me it starts to become routine rather quickly. I like the idea of being able to balance "work" (i.e. books you want to read, classes you want to take, things you want to learn, or even an actual business) with more typical travel leisure activities. Don't feel like going out? Then spend time working. Don't feel like working? Then go out and have some fun. This goes against the grain of the more rigid, traditional work philosophy of having set times for working and the rest for leisure, but in the solo traveler case (or the remote worker / self-sustaining entrepreneurial business case), those constraints don't apply as much and you are able to strike a better, more efficient balance between work and play.

I think the rigid, traditional work schedule of Mon-Fri, 9-5 operates partially on the assumption that "work" is something that you should enjoy less than "play" and left to their own devices, an employee would spend the vast majority of their time playing and hardly any time working. Of course, there's other, probably more convincing reasons from a business perspective to have everyone on the same schedule, notably overall company efficiency and predictability. But that's a thought for another time.