I Planned a Year of Doing Nothing – I Took 19 Flights Instead [Summer Read-Aloud]

  Sam Vander Wielen: Hey there, and welcome back to On Your Terms®. So for the next couple of weeks, I’m gonna be doing something a little bit differently as part of a little summer series of sorts. For the next few weeks, I’ll be reading you a few of my essays that I’ve written on my Substack. My Substack is just called Sam Vander Wielen, because as you can probably tell by now, I’m really, really good with coming up with creative names for things.

But I have a Substack called Sam Vander Wielen, where I share personal essays and behind the scenes, a lot about grief and loss, coming back from that grief and loss, and learning to, I don’t know, uncouple myself from overconsumption and overworking, and really learning how to be more present in my life.

So all you have to do for the next couple of weeks is just kick back, put in your headphones, maybe even go for a walk, and listen to my reading of this week’s essay from Substack. If you’d like to subscribe to my Substack so that you can also read these on Substack or on the app, go ahead and just click the link down below. It’s completely free.

My gap year was supposed to be boring. I planned a year of white space. I got a full calendar and my biggest smile in years. I slipped my go-to blackout sleep mask over my head before our plane even left our gate. I wasn’t on an overnight red-eye to Europe. I was boarding a midday flight back home to New York City from a 48-hour trip to see friends in Nashville.

It was my 19th flight of the year, and it was only June. As I slipped the mask over my eyes to catch just 45 minutes of shut-eye, I feel a wave of gratitude wash over me. I’ve got incredible friends living in cities all over the world who are interesting and driven and a joy to spend time with. My business runs smoothly, and my funnel brings in sales daily.

It’s operating like what I’ve built it to be, and it allows me to do one of my favorite things in the world: travel, meet new people, and experience new cultures. I feel really fulfilled and full in a good way.

It’s hard to believe that a steep, sudden drop somewhere 30,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean 11 years ago was the catalyst for me leaving my corporate law career and becoming an entrepreneur. If you would’ve told me then that I’d be having so much fun as an entrepreneur or that I would be so relaxed that I could fall asleep before takeoff, I would’ve told you that you were crazy.

Going into my entrepreneur gap year this year, I said I wanted spaciousness. My idea was that spaciousness would look like lots of blank space on my calendar. Like I’d be able to wake up each day and go to the beach if I felt like it, or bop around my favorite coffee shops to write for fun without any pressure and stuff like that.

I didn’t wanna feel the weight of so many obligations, performance, and having to be productive all of the time.

And after a 2025 full of outward appearances and lots of travel, mostly for the release of my first book, When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy, I thought 2026 would basically be one long cozy night in. But what started out as a gap year to run away from being chronically online and busy has become a year full of being chronically offline and busy instead.

But is that a bad thing? I’m honestly not sure. I’ve written a lot about how my entrepreneur gap year has been going on Substack. It’s meant to be a year of taking the pressure off of myself and whatever comes next. But I never said it was a year of taking off off either. Yet what I don’t think I realized until I got off of that 19th flight of the year was just how busy I’ve been, yet how full I feel.

What I’m working really hard to move away from is keeping myself busy by being chronically online. Online plus busy is not a great combination for me at least.

When I spend more time online than off, I feel disconnected from my own life.

I can’t follow conversations with friends without letting my mind wander. I can’t make it through an entire episode of Running Point without opening Instagram 12 times. I see everything in terms of tweetable moments and pictures for the ‘Gram. During my peak onlineness, I wasn’t playing tennis, taking pottery classes, or chatting with friends. I did everything for the ‘Gram

Maybe it’s just me, but the more online I am, the more impossible it feels to turn that part of my brain off. I’m jumpy, I’m agitated, I’m not nearly as grateful for what I have because I’m so busy seeing what everybody else has. It completely distorts my sense of reality and what’s real and normal.

If I’m having a bad day with my husband or a friend, my brain fills itself with stories I project onto everyone else’s shares. “See? Her relationship is perfect. I bet they don’t fight about the dishwasher. She has so many friends. They go on all these incredible trips together. I don’t have a big group of friends like that.”

I even see what people in my own real life assume about me when they follow me online. “Everything looks like it’s going amazing,” they say to me after creeping my Instagram stories. Funny enough, I’d spent most of that day crying and watching YouTube because the grief pain I felt deep in my chest was so bad I couldn’t stand up.

It’s funny how people you actually know stop checking in on you because even they fall prey to thinking that what they see online is the whole or the real picture.

I could go on, but I think we all know what being online does for us in our own ways. When I originally wrote this piece, it was actually about overcommitment, about how I say I want white space, not just in my calendar, but in my day and in my life, and then I go and I overcommit to things I thought I just had this complicated relationship with over-commitment and was allergic to being bored. But when I stepped back, I realized over-commitment isn’t necessarily or always my or a problem.

I realize in stepping away from the piece for a week or so that what I’m actually feeling is judgment. I’m judging myself for not laying in the grass, staring at the clouds, deciding whether that one looks like a whale or more like a dolphin. I’m judging myself for signing up for swim classes when I’m already taking tennis lessons.

“See? You’re doing it again. You’re doing too much. You should just be bored. You can’t be bored,” I’ll think to myself. Yet when I hop out of the pool or step off the tennis court, I’ve got a bigger smile on my face than I have had in years.

Somewhere along the way, I decided that the only way to, quote-unquote, “do this year right” was to do so with blank space.

Of course, I think blank space is important, and I still want it, but I’ve also realized that what I was actually craving a bit of this year was non-performative fun. Traveling so much has not only let me have the fun I was craving, see all of my Tower of Terror pics from my solo trip to Disney World below, but also to savor the quiet blank space moments I have had at home in between.

When I step back, I’m really happy with how I’ve spent my time this year. There has been more blank space than I give myself credit to. I just haven’t been writing about it or capturing it, which I think is exactly the point. Sure, I might have filled some other potential white space time I would have had with trips to see friends or going to see my in-person mastermind people that I love, or to hike the mountains of Peru, but I’d say that’s a big improvement over what I would have done before, like fill it with time scrolling, posting more on social media, or probably coming up with some big new business idea to keep me busy and constantly striving.

So is being busy and offline better than being online and busy? I’m not sure, All I can tell you is that it feels different on my end. I get to the end of my week after swim lessons, tennis classes and lessons, meeting friends for coffee, visiting local shops, sitting on the beach, going to the farmer’s market, reading my book without picking up my phone, and I feel full of gratitude and energy.

I come home from trips or in-person events tired, but like the good kind of tired. The kind where you know you’ve really given it, but now you’re just ready to throw on sweatpants and binge Netflix’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders docuseries, which I already finished

I’m not sure there’s an objective right or wrong. No one is handing out awards for being more on or offline. I’ve written openly about how important I think it is to go through a hustle period as a new entrepreneur. My current schedule or way of working or taking so much time off wouldn’t have built the multi-seven-figure business I have today.

I understand that. The hustle I did then, though, freed me to be flexible now. Honestly, I think I’m just finally coming around to savoring what I’ve built, and seriously, for me, that’s huge. So maybe I’ve ended up with a more colorful calendar than I originally imagined, and I’ve definitely racked up more airline miles than I thought I would.

But so far, being offline and busy feels a heck of a lot more fulfilling to me than endlessly scrolling past everyone else’s curated projections of their lives. Before, I was just busy. Now, I’m just busy living. Thanks for listening. Click the link below to subscribe to my free Substack, Sam Vander Wielen.

Thanks so much for listening to today’s essay. I hope that you liked it. I would love to hear from you over on Substack, so make sure you come and subscribe to my Substack below, and go and comment on the essay that you just heard me read. I’d love to see you there. With that, I’ll talk to you next week.

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