Missed the Beach Last Year? How to Really Plan Your Trip This Time

The travel FOMO isn’t real because you actually missed something. It’s real because you never really tried to go in the first place. We didn’t miss the beach last December; we committed the far more subtle crime of vaguely wanting it, and then prosecuting ourselves for our own lack of concrete action.

We are both the lazy defendant and the overzealous judge in the courtroom of our own Instagram feeds. And the sentence is another year of watching other people’s stories, feeling that familiar, sour pang that isn’t quite envy, but the hollow ache of a personal promise broken. Again.

We have mastered the art of the phantom plan. It lives in the group chat, a beautiful, shimmering mirage. “God, we should totally get a beach villa this New Year’s.” “Yes!” “I’ll look at flights!” The messages are punctuated with sun emojis and exclamation points that feel like tiny, desperate prayers. And then, silence. Not a dramatic silence.

A slow, logistical fade-to-black. One of us gets a work deadline. Another has a cryptic family thing. The person who volunteered to look at flights discovers that flights, in fact, cost money, a shocking revelation we are confronted with anew every single holiday season. The villa remains a phantom. We remain on our couches, watching the same Netflix special as last year, but with a new, deeper layer of self-loathing.

This isn’t about money, not entirely. It’s about a specific, modern failure of imagination. We can imagine the aesthetic of the trip, the golden hour photos, the toes in sand, the artisanal cocktail, with crystal clarity. But we cannot, or will not, imagine the scaffolding required to build it.

The scaffolding is ugly. It involves spreadsheets, calendar alerts, and the emotional labor of actually deciding something. It means texting back, “Okay, but seriously, are we doing this?” and risking being the annoying one, the needy one, the one who actually wants to follow through. It’s safer to live in the realm of potential, where the trip is perfect, than in the realm of reality, where the Airbnb has weird stains on the sofa and your friend snores.

We have weaponized our own self-awareness. We’ve absorbed just enough therapy-speak to pathologize our desire and then absolve ourselves of action. Observe the internal monologue, a masterpiece of self-sabotage: “Do I even want to go to the beach, or am I just internalizing capitalist, heteronormative constructs of leisure?” “Spending that much on a flight feels irresponsible with my debt anxiety.” “Maybe my yearning for sunset pics is just a trauma response to my childhood dreams.” We therapize ourselves into a state of absolute paralysis. It’s a brilliant, if depressing, magic trick. We turn a simple want into a sprawling psychological crime scene, and then we stand over the body, scratching our heads, while the last cheap flight sells out.

The external dialogue is even worse. It’s a ballet of polite, weaponized therapeutic language that ensures nothing ever happens.

“I’m feeling a need to prioritize my financial boundaries this season.”

“Totally, I honor that. I’m also trying to sit with my own discomfort around imposing on people’s energy for planning.”

“Your journey with that is so valid. Let’s just hold space for the idea without attachment to outcomes.”

“Yes. Manifesting gently for us.”

What we have just said, translated from the spiritual, is: “I’m poor and you’re lazy, so let’s do nothing and call it enlightenment.” We’ve dressed our inertia in the language of wellness, making it not only acceptable but seemingly virtuous.

To plan is to be attached to material outcomes, to be demanding, to have expectations. How gauche. How spiritually unclean. It’s better to be a Zen ghost, floating through life, gently manifesting a vacation that will never come. The influencers sold us mindfulness, and we used it to anaesthetize our own agency.

So, how do we plan this year differently? We must start by admitting that the dream is a lie. The dream is the photo. The reality is the six-hour layover in a depressing airport. The dream is the laughter. The reality is the inevitable, stupid argument you will have with your best friend because they’re a slow walker and you’re hungry.

Planning differently means falling in love with the shty parts, or at least making peace with them. It means recognizing that the memory is not the golden-hour snapshot, but the collective groan when you realize the “charming” rental has no hot water. That’s the stuff that actually bonds you. The perfect trip is a sterile postcard. The messy trip is a story.

Concrete action is violently unsexy. It means, right now, opening a note on your phone. Not a Pinterest board. A note. Title it “Beach 2026” and write three things.

1. A realistic budget range. Not a fantasy number, but the amount you could actually save if you skipped eight fancy coffees a month.
2. Two potential weekends. Not “sometime in December.” The weekend of the 12th, or the weekend of the 19th.
3. The names of two people you will text this to, with a deadline. “I am deciding by July 1st. If you’re in, send me $50 as a non-refundable commitment to the bit.” The $50 is key. It transforms the phantom plan into a financial artifact. It makes it real.

We must also redefine “beach.” The algorithm has convinced us that “beach” equals “Maldives or bust.” It has erased the entire concept of the driveable coastline, the slightly crummy hotel with a pool, the overcast afternoon where you just read a book and listen to the waves. Your soul does not need a private plunge pool. Your soul probably just needs to see a large body of water and eat a fried clam roll. The ambition is the enemy. Scale it the .... down. Look at a map. What’s within four hours? That’s your beach. That’s your victory.

This is about time, not money. The brutal math of adulthood is that time is the scarcer currency. We treat our vacation days like rare diamonds, hoarding them for a “perfect” trip that never materializes, then blowing them on a “mental health day” that we spend doomscrolling. We need to block the days now. Open your work calendar in July and put “BEACH” on three days in December. Make it an immutable object. Defend it against the creeping dread of year-end deadlines. That block of time becomes the container you then pour a plan into. Without the container, the dream just evaporates, same as last year.

Ultimately, the planning is an act of rebellion against the part of you that would rather be disappointed than disappointed in. It’s easier to be the person who was let down by circumstances than the person who tried, genuinely tried, and maybe still failed, or maybe just had an okay time. Trying is vulnerable. It admits desire. It opens you up to the critique of the thing itself. “You went to all that trouble for this?” says the voice in your head, as you shiver on a windy shore. But “this” is life. The messy, imperfect, slightly-too-cold, real life.

What if the point isn’t to get the perfect picture, but to prove to yourself that you’re still capable of wanting something and then, in your clumsy, broke, anxious way, actually going out and getting it? The beach is just the beach. It’s sand and water. The magic isn’t there. The magic is in the act of moving your body from point A, your depressing apartment, to point B, literally anywhere else. The magic is in the decision. The follow-through. The claiming of your own time and your own joy, however imperfect it may be.

So we make the plan. We save the $50. We book the weird hotel. We endure the six-hour drive. We get there, and maybe it rains. Maybe our friend is annoying. Maybe the seafood gives us mild food poisoning.

Was it worth it?

The contradiction, of course, is that we spend all year cultivating a curated, controlled interiority, our skincare routines, our curated playlists, our meditation apps, all in the name of self-care. But true care might be the violent, disruptive act of throwing yourself into an uncontrolled external world. It might be the saltwater, the sand in your shoes, the unexpected detour, the minor hardship, the real laugh that comes from a ruined plan.

We build a perfect, comfortable cell and then wonder why we feel so trapped. The escape isn’t just a geographical shift. It’s a jailbreak from the meticulously constructed prison of our own lowered expectations.