Who's it For? What's it For?

Who is it for? What is it for?

These are the foundational questions of design. Making something, for someone, on purpose. Thanks, Seth.

We’ve been sitting with these questions about Unplugged from the beginning.

Unplugged field trips are not vacations, but they are about time, very well spent. And these trips are open to anyone but they’re certainly not for everyone. So who, and what are they for?

I think it starts with the question- what does it mean to live well? It depends on who you ask. If you ask us, we’ll talk about time and health, two of life’s most valuable aspects, in our opinion.

First, time.

When I ask the question, “Hey! how have you been?!” You already know the answer I get ten times more than any other… Say it with me- “Busy.”

I cringe at this answer. It’s not their fault, it’s the default response. But is it serving us?

What is the opposite of busy? Board. Who wants to be on board? Anyone? ….Bueller?

Nope. Crickets. We don’t want to be busy or bored. What we want is a balance. We want time to pass in ways that feel fulfilling to us. We want to start our days feeling rested and then move to feeling engaged in our activities. Then, we want to relax, feeling excited about the things we have coming up, we can rest easy. No stress. No anxiousness. Butterflies, maybe, but only the good kind.

Next is health.

We all want it, but what does being healthy mean? A big question with 1,000,000,000,000 different answers. But I’m putting myself on the hook here so, I’ll give it a crack.

First and foremost, humans want to feel good and avoid feeling bad. Period. This game ends up looking all kinds of ways and the only real expert on what that looks like for you is you.

But if you’re like me, then you have a whole list of ways you consciously or unconsciously go about seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. It forms the outline of our days and leads to who we believe ourselves to be. It’s the story we tell people (and ourselves) about who we are.

Until we recognize our patterns and invent belief systems, we’re slaves to them. But the problem with seeing them is that some part of us doesn’t allow ourselves to unsee them. Ignorance is bliss until it isn’t.

So back to health. What does it mean? Let’s start with some fairly universal pillars. There’s physical, mental, emotional, social, and probably a long list more but we’ll start with these. All of us have different ‘strengths’ and ‘weaknesses’ when it comes to these pillars but hopefully, we can agree that having more ‘strengths’ across these categories leads to more overall health. We’ll call it ‘whole health’

Unplugged is aimed at helping people experience more ‘whole health’ in their lives. Why? Because to our core, we believe that more ‘whole health’ is better and we bet you do too.

So we have this four-day format. It’s still very much being tweaked and dialed in. But as we said after Trip 0, she’s got legs. We’re getting geared up for our third field trip, Unplugged Harvest Edition in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont over the first week in October. It’s peak season for leaves, the riding, food, and company are going to be off the chain. Honestly, we dare you to have a better four days. Here’s to hoping you can join us.

Questions? Holler at us: tripsunplugged@gmail.com and follow us on Venmo.