On my second-to-last fishing day of the trip, I woke up to a day of fishing ahead of me, and felt a bit of dread rather than excitement. That bothered me for reasons much deeper than just the dread. This was the message I sent to ChatGPT on the car ride to the fishing spot in an attempt to figure out what I was feeling:

I’m feeling weird about my vacation, getting a ton of tiktoks about how 10 years from now I’m going to miss being 25 and to just do it and enjoy my day and whatnot. I’m going fishing today in Hokkaido which is the dream, but honestly I’m tired. And all these tiktoks are on more beautiful footage than my action camera. I wish I took more shots on my camera. Feeling pressure to do that later in trip when not fishing. What do you think

I used to write (actually these very same blog posts) to help think through situations and figure out what I was feeling and what I should do about it. But those ended up being very long, targeted sessions. It’s a bit interesting that I’ve replaced that exercise now with ChatGPT, with the convenience of typing out my thoughts combined with the insight of a reasonably intelligent response. Part of me can’t help but feel that some of the independent thinking/problem solving that I used to pride myself for gets a bit rusty as a result, and I have noticed that ChatGPT does come to a lot of conclusions that are not optimal or worse than what I might’ve come up with by myself had I done my own research and writing to figure out what to do. But the convenience and convincing arguments presented by AI allows me to shortcut most decisions, and I guess shortcuts on a 2.5 month solo trip with multitudes of decisions each day isn’t the worst thing in the world. However, it has been a while since I really sat down and wrote about an interesting thought I’ve had, and this one felt particularly pertinent since I’m living through it right now!

mastery and hedonic adaptation

By this point during the final leg of my fishing trip, I had caught so many giant rainbow trout in a short time period that catching another one had started to feel routine. Recently, I caught 8 giant rainbows in a single day, and I didn’t feel nearly as much excitement as I expected since I was just so tired from a run of housing logistics. But one night, I watched some of my old fishing vlogs, and seeing how excited I was to catch even a regular dace brought a smile to my face. But it also made me a little sad because I remembered my feelings of excitement then for a fish I would probably find uninteresting today. The fish were smaller, my skills were substantially worse, and the fishing was definitely less impressive. But I was happier.

I think a lot about the term “hedonic treadmill” (tendency for previously extraordinary experiences to become familiar), it’s one of the things that worries me the most about me speedrunning special experiences in life. When I’m learning something new, improvement is fast and experiences are novel, so it’s easy to get really excited and have lots of fun. But after a while, progress slows, and previously novel things become familiar. It’s not like I regret becoming a better fisherman–one of the most fulfilling arcs of this trip has been seeing my improvement from those first guided trips until now. Mastery is fulfilling, but it does also mean the loss of that spontaneous happiness that comes during the initial rapid improvement spurt. Some of this loss of excitement is also just from being physically and mentally tired.

anticipatory nostalgia

I get quite a few TikToks telling people to enjoy their life when they’re 25 because one day you’ll be 35 and looking back at this time and wishing you could be there again. Or other forms of content where there’s some aesthetic or nostalgic imagery along with motivational language to go out and live your dream while you can. A lot of these images are of exploring nature, and being out in Hokkaido during the fall, I live those very images in person every day. By any measure, I’m living an incredible life yet, I am not actually enjoying each day as much as those TikToks urge me to do. These TikToks strangely aren’t making me more appreciative but rather a little stressed. I’m feeling quite a bit of pressure to enjoy each day because I know one day I won’t be here, and my future self is going to desperately miss being 25 fly fishing Hokkaido’s rivers for the first time.

This creates a strange paradox: I know one day I’ll experience nostalgia for this period of my life, and the pressure of that future nostalgia is impacting my current feelings. Instead of simply appreciating a beautiful river while wading, I’m suddenly focused on if I’m taking it in enough or capturing good enough footage to remember the moment later. Ordinary mornings where I wake up and I’m not pumped to go ahead and fish make me feel a little bit guilty. Like maybe my future self will be sad to no longer be here, so I should go and try to be happy now for him?

Entering this noncompete, I knew I was going to place a lot of pressure on myself to try to maximize this extraordinary period of my life, and I even set lots of reminders for myself to be okay with suboptimal plans. But actually living it has been a different experience, and there are definitely days where I feel the pain and struggle to be okay with not loving every minute of this trip.

expectations

The main turning point here was when my dream vacation started feeling like a job. Life admin tasks started to pile up, and similarly to when I was working in quant, after a long day of fishing, I didn’t really have much energy and time (or sometimes the internet connection) to sit down and properly handle it. All my booked guiding days turned into full-day commitments that I needed to show up prepared early in the morning for. I started looking forward to the days afterward where I could just stop fishing, explore Japan, and write blog posts like this one! And from this I learned that it’s not really that I didn’t want to fish anymore, but more so the ability to decide whether or not that day I wanted to fish was important to me. Guided days are expensive, and fishing days in Hokkaido are supposedly special to me, so I must make the most of them right? But I think this additional pressure actually sapped a lot of the fun out of it–I wasn’t fishing simply because I felt like it, I was fishing because that’s what I’d planned to do. Emotionally, this difference ended up being a pretty big deal.

I think a lot about the quote, “happiness is the difference between expectation and reality.” And here it is true two-fold. When I was starting out fly fishing here, my expectations for fish and skill were much lower, and catching anything was a truly magical moment. And now, while I am still having lots of fun and exploring, my expectations have been heightened across the board: food/drink (and associated prices), ability to catch higher-difficulty fish consistently, nature scenery, Japanese exploration novelty, etc. One of my guides said this to me, which was a nice message that made me feel better about my expectations starting to rise:

Haha, yeah, I can imagine you are getting accustomed to getting big fish on the line but I’d say, enjoy it while you can! Guides know the right spots, right time, right flies. Approaching a river cold, by yourself, is going to be harder. Your skills at casting , presenting, handling, etc have gotten much better so you’ll catch big fish more than the average guy you see out there on weekends and holidays, but not everyday and some days hardly any fish if at all. So, unfortunately in some ways, I think that expectation will reset but that’s good too. Big fish are cool, but they aren’t everything. Great days on the rivers, enjoying the weather or company or exploring a new stretch can be very rewarding.

Thinking about this reminded me, I keep a journal of fishing and I haven’t been really good about doing it this year, but in previous years most of my outings I kept track of what the weather was like, what fly I used, where I fished and what I caught. Here is one entry from a few years ago to illustrate a day catching pretty much nothing, but learning.

“I went to __ and started above the falls with a pheasant tail nymph. Nothing at all biting. I then went below the falls and switched to egg pattern. I got one dace. I then switched back to a dry fly hoping for a rise since it was warming. There was almost nothing biting, nothing big. The water did look weird. Sluggish and really clear which was odd considering that it had rained about 5mm at midnight the night before. I wonder if the dam upriver was holding back rainwater, but I can’t figure why. Temps started around 15, got to 20. Water wasn’t cold or warm. Sky was clear with some clouds. Water was very clear. 5hrs at __ and NOTHING REALLY WORKING. “

I know you are a keen learner and as you know, a lot of learning happens through failure or making mistakes or just not knowing any better. Sometimes on your own can be hard. If you ever have a feeling like, why didn’t this work? or something, I’m all ears. We can try to figure it out.

This was nice since it turns what I’ve been feeling from “oh I’m experiencing too much progress too fast and I won’t be able to enjoy the learning curve” to “you’ll have to start the learning process again in the future in many other aspects.” And that makes me pretty excited about fly fishing again.

next chapters

After this trip, I’m realizing that my next stint will probably not entail weeks of nonstop movement every few days. I think the plan will be to just rent a longer-term apartment or cabin for one or two months, hunker down, and see what life would be like there. Basically larp-ing as a fly fisherman in a small fishing town. Some days, maybe I’ll go out and DIY a stretch of river. Sprinkle in some guided trips, explorations, and life admin days and that sounds like a much more sustainable life. And I think larp-ing in itself is going to be a lot of fun.

I still have two weeks left in Hokkaido, so I’m just going to take it slow and plan next steps while reviewing a lot of my footage/logs from previous days. I started looking into rod making as my next hobby, and I’m honestly getting pretty excited! There’s a bunch of other projects I have in mind next, looking forward to sitting down somewhere in one place and cranking them out.

An ordinary day during an extraordinary chapter is not a waste :).