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Rachel Schwartzmann: Welcome to Slow Stories. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann, the founder of CONNECT(ED)ITORIAL and the host and creator of this podcast. For those of you just joining in, Slow Stories is a series that deep dives into the rising slow content movement. In each of these episodes, I interview brand builders, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals who share what slow content means in the context of what they’re building—and why slowing down and creating thoughtful stories is more important than ever.
This episode begins with a special story from today’s partner Ostrichpillow. Here’s more from co-founder Pablo Carrascal, who shares a bit about his relationship with rest and the mission of the company.
Pablo Carrascal: Hola. My name is Pablo. I’m a product designer based in Madrid, but I’m also the co-founder and CEO of Ostrichpillow, a brand focused on enabling self-care through good design. Our products help people rest and find relief. But wellness wasn’t always a priority in my life. My relationship with rest has a lot to do with where I was raised.
I grew up in a small town in Spain, where it was common to nap every day. From two to five, the shops down would pull down their gates, and the streets would go quiet. People dedicated time to rest every single day. It was a really healthy pace of life—as I grew up, I forgot this. After the calm of my childhood, I craved energy. So I moved to London and then to Madrid. The frenetic rhythm and the endless possibilities created supersonic inertia in my life until one day, my partner knowing how tired I felt, sold me a new concept: less is enough. And it saved everything. It’s helped me understand that value could be achieved as a result of quality over quantity. I’ve been applying it in my personal and professional life ever since.
Now, I try to instill this perspective in the Ostrichpillow brand and in my team. We believe in the power of tiny habits to transform us—small achievable things you can do each day to take care of yourself. For me, it’s a design challenge. We focus on the details—on doing less but doing it better. For our customers, it’s about quality of life. So I challenge you: What is one small change you can make today and repeat tomorrow? What can you do less?
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you so much again to Pablo for sharing. You can shop Ostrichpillow online at https://ostrichpillow.com/ and follow them on social @ostrichpillowofficial. Stay tuned as we’ve got some more fun things planned with Ostrichpillow across Slow Stories, my personal channels, and their platforms, too. But for now, here’s my conversation with Jon Staff of Getaway.
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Rachel Schwartzmann: This is your sign to take a break. Step outside, and feel the delicate earth beneath your feet. Stretch your arms towards the sky, and put your phone in your pocket. Whether you’re a city dweller or beach-goer, the great outdoors is closer than you think—but no matter where you are, one idea endures: when we disconnect from our devices, the world opens itself up to us in magical ways. And for Getaway Founder and CEO Jon Staff, this idea has gradually become second nature.
Founded on the principle that “free time should be a right and a ritual for everyone,” Getaway cabins offer visitors the chance to escape, replenish, and slow down. But as the leader of a business whose mission is to help others ultimately do nothing, Jon has been putting everything into creating a brand that embodies its values—inside and out, online and off.
With over a dozen Getaway outposts across the country, Jon contends that reclaiming free time—in an age constantly placing demands on our time and attention—begins within our own backyard. And in this interview, Jon shared more about redefining escape, his relationship with writing, what technology gives and takes from us, and the magic of doing nothing.
Jon is truly down to earth, and his thoughtful approach to life, work, and creativity permeated every part of this conversation. But I won’t give too much more away. So, on that note, here’s Jon Staff, Founder of Getaway.
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Jon Staff: I grew up in a town of fifty people, about five hours north of Minneapolis, where the Mississippi River actually runs north before it turns south to Louisiana. I grew up around a campfire and in nature. I know I’m not meant to connect that to my professional life, but it feels pretty connected to what I do as a living. I live with my partner in Brooklyn now, and we’re pretty active in LGBT causes and in that community.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That’s amazing. I’m curious to hear when you were a child, what did “getting away” mean to you, and how did nature play a role in shaping that definition?
Jon Staff: The outdoors was so connected and integrated to my childhood—it’s hard to disconnect the two. My parents built this house I grew up in out of lumber they made from the trees on this plot of land they bought. It was meant to be their actual cabin, so it was meant to be their escape. But they owned a bar in this one-street town I grew up in, and the bar burned down. And my mother had already begun working at a wood products factory. And when the bar burned down, there was no insurance and obviously less income, so they made the quick decision to turn this cabin into a home to make ends meet. So that’s the house I grew up in—this house they built that was meant to be a cabin on a lake with four other houses where you couldn’t see any of the other houses.
And so, I never went to summer camp. I think part of what I’m doing now is trying to make up the fact that I didn’t go to summer camp, which I heard so many great things about. But to hear my parents tell it, it was because life was summer camp. And I think they were right, like after school or on weekends or the summer, or just in-between moments, we were around the campfire, or we were swimming in the lake, or we were wandering in the forest. And, you know, the premise of your question is sort of about escape—and I haven’t had this thought before—but thinking back on my childhood, there was so much less pressure to escape. There was less I felt I needed to escape from, and of course, part of that was I was a kid, and I didn’t have adult pressures. But I do think it was also: I was surrounded by nature, and I was in a culture that more valued nature and more valued free time and more valued disconnection.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Is your family still in Minnesota?
Jon Staff: Yeah, everybody’s at home besides me.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Except when they’re at a Getaway outpost, maybe?
Jon Staff: I took my whole family to Getaway. My niece just graduated college, which makes me feel old. She graduated in Duluth, Minnesota, and Getaway just opened a location near there. And so I took my whole family for the first time. It was really incredible because—you think about this stuff and talk about it, as do I—I watched my two twelve-year-old nephews fight at lunch, have difficulty pulling themselves away from their cell phones, and get snapped at by their parents. And then we went to Getaway—and it had very little to do with Getaway or the cabins—but as soon as we got there, they laid down in the gravel around the Getaway cabin and started picking through the gravel, looking for agates, those special little rocks that [when you] polish them are striped. And they did that for like three hours, maybe longer, and it happened to be the night of the lunar eclipse. So we went from looking for agates to staring at the moon as a family. And none of that required any instruction. It just happened to be where we were when that happened. And it was rewarding for me to see that unfold. The family decided it needed to be a family tradition, so that was validating to me.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That’s really, really special. I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot about youth and childhood lately, especially given all of the challenges that are ahead. Do you ever get any feedback from children or young people about their adventures or their stays when they get away?
Jon Staff: That’s a great question. I hear it from the parents a lot. The parents are funny because either their kid loves nature, and that’s why they’re going, or their kid loves screens, and that’s why they’re going. And so the kids are either pushing for this trip or kicking and screaming, but fortunately, at least what gets back to me is they loved it and got value out of it. What I hear from parents that is meaningful is something along the lines of… I’ve got a close friend—we actually met through Getaway, but we’ve become close—and she said: “I’m with my daughter almost every day, but don’t talk, and the older she gets, the less we talk—about real stuff. And we went to Getaway for the first time and during a particularly difficult family moment, and we reconnected. Now we go once every three months.” Which I think is powerful.
That’s not just to parents and kids but to all of us. The ability to connect is so much easier in nature and when the distractions are cleared away. And I don’t think many of us can tell ourselves—I sometimes tell myself— “okay, tonight’s going to be the night when I go back to my apartment and have a deep, meaningful conversation.” And now, of course, the apartment’s become the workplace for a lot of us, and the apartment’s full of all sorts of triggers of stress outside of work, in my experience, and I think the experience of many parents and others is changing context really matters in our ability to strengthen our relationships.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I also think there’s a lot of pressure in terms of actively making space to do those things; it almost feels like another thing that has been added to our to-do list. So to be able to kind of find some sort of instinct that encourages you to make that choice—not because society is saying it and you feel ready to kind of get away and get back to yourself. It’s interesting just to think about what getting away meant to me when I was younger versus now; I actually moved around a lot and had exposure to a ton of different environments before ending up here in New York. But I think what’s remained a through-line in my own life and story is getting away toward solitude. It’s the way that I recharge and feel the most connected. So what role does solitude play in Getaway’s mission?
Jon Staff: My team still rolls their eyes occasionally when I say it, but what we want you to do at Getaway, most ideally, is nothing. And then I get more eye rolls when I say, you know, be bored. Because boredom, you know, is obviously an unpopular concept. It’s the thing most of us tried to escape when we were teenagers, but it is so rare now. And the science shows—like boredom is actually bad, watching paint dry is not enjoyable—but what the science shows is that if you can endure some boredom, you can reach different thoughts in different parts of your brain on the other side of it that you’ll never get to if you don’t go through the pain feeling a little bit bored.
And I connect that to your question about solitude: I noticed I sort of reject this introvert-extrovert thing. Like I’ve felt strongly each of those things at different moments of my life—sometimes on the same day, sometimes for stretches of months or years at a time. What I’ve really noticed in myself is the extent to which I’m using other people as a distraction, as a salve to avoid feeling bored or sitting with feelings of discomfort. And I’ve tried to be more mindful of that. There are obviously times when I want to be present with other people and interact with them. There are times when I think what I most need is to be alone. And I hope and believe that Getaway is a place where that can happen.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It’s definitely interesting to kind of navigate that desire, living in a place like New York. I’ve found that there’s a way to do it, to kind of simplify and slow down in a city that seems to always be demanding more of you.
Jon Staff: What are your tips and tricks? Do you have anything that I should adopt?
Rachel Schwartzmann: It’s tricky... I think it’s just kind of removing the distractions of what “city life” is supposed to be like and finding a way to make it work for you. Ask me again on another day; the answer could be completely different. [Laughs] Did you have anything that you learned during the last couple of years?
Jon Staff: A handful of things. I came out with this book—this is going to be the book plug part—it’s [called] Getting Away: 75 Practices for Finding Balance in Our Always-On World, and it came out right before the pandemic. So actually, it came out in June 2020 but was written before the pandemic. And some of the things were really helpful, and some of them became obsolete very quickly. But ones I’ve adopted into my own life that have really helped are number one: take a bath. If you’re fortunate enough to have a bathtub, it’s much harder to take your electronics into the bathtub. It’s a literal physical barrier between myself and most of the things that draw me in for the worst. And there’s a ritual to it: get a book, a candle, and a bubble bath. It really helps for those of us who are especially working from home to create a separate space between the workday and the not workday.
That’s another one of the tips: announce the end of your workday out loud. It sounds super goofy, but I actually do it. It does help because when I reach into my pocket sort of mindlessly and go to open my inbox—or whatever it is—if I’ve said out loud that I’m not working anymore, I’m more likely to catch myself than if I’m just sort of petering out for the day.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It’s kind of like your own human alarm clock.
Jon Staff: Yes, one hundred percent.
Subscribing to the print edition has been huge. The print edition does not pop up with push notifications telling me I need to think about something else. You know it’s easy to take in nature and Prospect Park wherever you want to go. Some of this stuff, I guess as a general statement, can feel so absolutist, right? Like you need to meditate every morning for an hour in nature. And, you know, if you don’t do that consistently every day, you haven’t figured it out yet. I’m of a different mind: any improvement you can make to your health and your well-being and the life you want to live is better. For me, the newspaper is like a little bit of a crutch. I can feel productive because I’m learning, and I’m entertained, but not scrolling on Twitter or Instagram. So those are a few that stood out.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I’m curious—do you still have a writing practice, or did you have one before writing the book?
Jon Staff: I love writing, and I do try to write still frequently. I had a mentor who taught me that there’s never a good time to write. There’s never a time when it feels like, “today’s the day I’m going to have a long stretch of time to sit down and unspool my thoughts.” That’s been helpful, too, because I’ve just tried to fit it in wherever I can and save time blocks to write. And when I do, you know, I find myself being sucked in—not always, you know, sometimes there’s writer’s block, and sometimes I’m not happy with what comes out—but usually, I can get going on its own that kind of clears away background thoughts because I focused on writing.
In a way, I used to—way back when never professionally—but coders talk about this a lot, and that code and coding just draw you in. Time will pass, hours will pass without you really thinking about anything else. There’s that book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—whose name I cannot pronounce—about flow states that talks about this; it’s a very different experience. It’s both work—like coding and answering emails, they both feel like work, but they’re very different in the way our mind approaches them, and that’s for me in writing as well.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It’s like developing your own language for what story you’re trying to tell.
Jon Staff: Yeah. And you know, writing is thinking. I don’t really know what I think until I commit it to paper.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Sometimes, it’s a really interesting lesson to learn. [Laughs] If there was a practice that you’d add to the book today, in 2022, what would it be?
Jon Staff: Never go anywhere for one night only is one I’m building into.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh, interesting.
Jon Staff: I’m doing a terrible job living up to it, but a fancy problem to have. I end up traveling a lot for work travel, not work, to friends’ weddings and family reunions. And we’re so in and out that we never really experienced the place. We end up—we, I guess in this case, mostly being my partner and I—never really see the place, and we end up totally exhausted changing time zones and being in and out of the airport. I want to slow down that part of my life. The hard part about that for me is going to be that it’s going to force me to be more selective about the places I go, the things I participate in. You know, when I do it, I feel so much better about being present to whatever I’m trying to participate in and not exhausting myself in pursuit of doing that thing.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It’s tough. I mean, some circumstances don’t really allow for that, but as you kind of learn how to do that, how would you describe your relationship with pace?
Jon Staff: Oh, a constant battle. Sometimes people think I do what I do because I’ve figured it out. And it’s exactly the opposite—[the] kind of standard startup thing is find a problem and try to solve it. We’re kind of a funny company in this regard because some people might think the problem is that people need a place to stay in nature. Obviously, that’s a purpose we serve, but the mission and the vision of the company is to make free time a right and a ritual. And that’s in part because that’s the problem I’m trying to solve is a lack of time, or inconsistent free time, or free time getting invaded by so many things.
I’m now seven or eight years into this company and chipping away at that problem, chipping away at it hopefully in the lives of our guests, chipping away at it, hopefully, in the lives of our employees where we’ve tried hard to be a company where the inside matches the outside, but also chipping away at it in my own life. I genuinely think I’ve made progress, and we’ve made progress on all of those fronts, including the personal front, but it’s not a consistent trajectory up and to the right. It’s been fits and starts and times that I’ve done better, and times when I’ve done worse, and times when I feel like getting it figured out, and times when I haven’t at all.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think it’s interesting to navigate those challenges against the backdrop of our—often volatile—digital age, which can kind of warp our sense of what free time is and why it’s valuable. What do you think technology’s biggest impact has been on how we define free time?
Jon Staff: I think technology has destroyed free time. I will absolutely risk—
Rachel Schwartzmann: No redeeming [qualities]?
Jon Staff: I think there are redeeming things about technology, for sure. The ability to like FaceTime my parents or my partner’s parents—his family’s all over the world—and we can connect instantly is huge. And I’m not gonna say that’s not beneficial to our lives and bordering on a miracle, but technology has done so many other things to rob us of our attention, and our presence, and our focus that we almost don’t know, I think, what it is like to not have a constant stream of inputs into our lives and a constant stream of requests for our attention. Most obviously: push notifications, texts, and incoming emails. Even if you turn all that stuff off, which I’ve done, I still know at any second I can pick up this black square and consume something that will get me out of this feeling of I don’t know what do, or I don’t want to think about what I need do right now, or I don’t want to sit with this feeling.
I think just knowing it’s there, even if we’re really good about not succumbing to it, is a step-change in what it is like to live compared to twenty or thirty years ago. Now saying all of this sounds so cliche because we’ve been talking about it for a while, societally. But it is so new in the sweep of history—like we are the frogs in boiling water over the last twenty-five years. The iPhone came out in 2007, and I think it is tempting but wrong to say: Can we quit talking about this? We’re also bored about it. It’s basically brand new in the scheme of history. It’s a massive shift in how we live and how we feel. And so it’s right to think about it and question it, and to your point, try to think about ... is there a way to keep a part of the good while getting rid of the bad? But it’s seismic.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, you really can’t put words to it. You mentioned we have to keep talking about it. And I think that’s so true because even though it’s so much in our conversations, I don’t know how much we’re learning.
Jon Staff: Yeah. A hundred percent ... gosh—almost six, seven years ago wrote a piece called “Too much screen time is today’s smoking,” and I almost didn’t publish it because it felt so ridiculous. And it’s different, obviously, as far as I’m aware—looking at your phone too much doesn’t cause cancer, so I don’t want to minimize what people go through when they’re experiencing the downsides of tobacco. But it doesn’t seem so farfetched to put that headline on a blog post these days; you know, it really is an addiction.
I went to my school reunion two weekends ago, and we were having a conversation about apps that you’ve tried and failed to delete from your phone. And for some people, it was Twitter, like me. For some people, it was slack. For some people, it was Instagram, but everybody in the conversation, which was a bunch of us, had the experience where we could not get rid of it. We tried and failed; that is alarming. And if I have some hope, it’s fewer people smoke now than they used to. The government got involved, nonprofits got involved; how do we deal with this thing that’s harming children in particular? And so I’m hopeful that we are on the cusp, that moment of people locking arms—including industry, by the way—who have made some steps to say: here are real externalities to this thing that had good intentions when it was invented and has some real benefits today, but there are externalities that need to be addressed, and we need to work together to do that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, I think the travel space is ripe for all of that change. I think so many people over the last couple of years, especially, saw just how much they might have been missing when we were all looking down at our phones until the world called our attention.
Jon Staff: I also think the pandemic taught us—as difficult as lockdown was—a lot about ourselves, slowing down, having solitude. And now that the world has changed again, I think we might be further ahead thinking about: How do we want to spend our time? And how do we want to spend our lives having had that experience? That forced experience of we can’t do anything. A lot of that feels bad, but some of it feels good, and some of that I want to carry forward.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think those things have to coexist: the fast and the slow, the good and the bad. And the article that you wrote, is there a passage that you think might resonate with listeners that you’d be open to reading?
Jon Staff: Oh, it’s funny. I wrote this in 2017, and it starts with a graph. It says, “This is a graph that gives me hope,” and it’s U.S. cigarette consumption, from 1900 through the early 2000s, going way up until 1960 and going down. There’s a lot of data in it: “laptops in class are worse for academic performance when a screen is in view of children and parents, parents spend less time with their kids, even if they don’t look at the screen, half of the people surveyed say a mobile phone is spoiled a key moment in their life. “It’s very sad to think about. The conclusion is: “Given the amount of time we spend on cell phones and the more and more we are expected to be always connected, turning the tide and finding balance again might seem like a pipe dream. But the same feeling might have been felt by tobacco cessation advocates in the middle of the last century. And look how they turned the tide—it gives me hope that we can, too.”
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, it’s the work of our lives disconnecting, especially now. I recently interviewed Ashley Merrill, who’s the founder of Lunya. Are you familiar—
Jon Staff: Yeah, I know Ashley a little bit.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh yeah. She was great, but she kind of summed up that tension of, you know, even though she’s an advocate for rest and finding that sense of well-being, she basically said that it’s hard to make something meaningful without just straight-up time and energy, which can often run counter to slowing down. So yeah, that just made me think of that because we do need to be putting some level of urgency into making these changes.
Jon Staff: Yeah. These changes, for sure. In some ways, there’s no way around that. And I’m a big advocate of naming tensions. Like, it’s intention to slow down and to build, to slow down and change. In our company, it’s intention to be a growing company where everybody has free time. I think you have no hope of resolving the tension if you don’t say the tension out loud. And so that’s what I’ve tried to do in our company.
But I also think that—I guess to use perhaps the overused word—boundaries really matter. I think about the Sabbath a lot where those who adhere strongly to the Sabbath are just offline for a day, a week. No negotiation and there’s no breaking rules, and there’s no, “but this week it’s really important that we hit this milestone.” It’s, “I’m offline. That’s how I live my life, and that’s the most important thing.”
There’s a lot of important work to be done, but we will benefit from those sorts of boundaries. But I also think we find—we can find, I’ve found—that you can do a lot while still having free time in your life more than people think. I’m in this world of, at least in part, venture capital and private equity and New York City finance, which is like around our company. There are still a lot of people where this conversation would be quite foreign because the culture is fully: “I’m always on, I’m always connected, and that’s what’s expected of me.” And it blurs between that’s what I really need to do to get my work done, and this is what others are going to notice me doing—or not doing. That’s how my career will be built.
But I think it’s way more often than the opposite—the: we think we need more time than we actually do to accomplish what we’re going to try to accomplish.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Is it difficult to move between those spaces of finance, Getaway?
Jon Staff: I’ve benefited from: “this is what I’m about, and this is what our company’s about,” and it’s been true since the beginning. I purposefully wove our mission and the fact that we actually believe in our mission into every early conversation with every important stakeholder. And I remember having some conversations, where it wasn’t even asked of me, like: “John, are you really, do you really care about this?”... offhandedly like “well like yeah, of course, you’re to work 24/7 to make this come true.” And it was my needing to take the opportunity to say: “Well, no. We’re going to be thoughtful, and we’re going to work hard when we’re working, but we also need to set an example.” Because I think it’s the only way we can build a movement, a brand that matters, and retain great talent. I don’t think we can do that if we’re not for real about this.
It’s kind of actually analogous in a funny way, too. I also make sure I come out early to potential investors and partners and so on and so forth. I didn’t start the company that many years ago but was told by some [people], “you should hide your sexuality if you want to maximize your ability to raise money for the company,” which I rejected—and the same with being a company about free time. Then people can opt-out, right? Fortunately, I haven’t had that happen on either of these fronts, but the worst-case scenario would be you invest in the company and don’t understand who I am or what we’re trying to do, and now you’re a partner forever. That’s the worst outcome.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Have there been instances where sharing your story has led to unexpected initiatives or narratives arising within Getaway’s storytelling? How much do you like to kind of draw the boundary in terms of injecting your own voice into the company?
Jon Staff: I think there are appropriate moments to do so, like in the past on Pride month, I’ve some pretty personal stuff to our audience that I think that makes sense, but I didn’t want to make the company about met. I believe in this stuff and can be a good spokesperson for it, and I’ve taken opportunities to do that, but there are a lot of other people who believe in it, too. And there are a lot of other groups of folks who are part of what we’re trying to do. I don’t represent them all and shouldn’t and can’t represent all.
So I just think it depends on the moment, but I’m a strong believer that companies can’t be neutral. That’s another one where I think a lot of folks believe what I believe, which is: we have power, we have a microphone, we have a platform, and we have an audience, and our words matter, and our lack of words matter. But there are a lot of folks who come from a different world where companies were meant to make widgets and sell them and not wade into “politics,” wade into “issues.” I don’t think that’s an option, but there are still people out there that believe it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you think it’s coming from a place of fear for those people?
Jon Staff: I mean, I think there was a time period in which it was viewed that if you take sides, as some might say, that you’ll alienate half your customers or quarter of your customers—whatever it is—maybe that’s still true. But many more [people] have spoken up and said: We want to know who we’re buying from. We want to know what your values are. We want to know that your actions match your values. We want to support companies who are on the right side of what I don’t think are political issues, but I think important societal questions. It’s through those folks speaking up that people that run organizations—like me—have had the confidence to say, “okay, we’re going to tell you what we believe, and we’re going to do our best to live up to it.”
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. It’s almost like a practice. It’s something that you have to work at day by day, just chipping away at some of those things that you have to unlearn. I’m just thinking that it’s probably interesting for you to think about movements that are being born on trips to Getaway. That might be something to think about asking your community.
Jon Staff: I try to make sure the expectations for what happens at Getaway or what comes out of Getaway are set at like almost zero. [Laughs] ... All these things do happen: new ideas for a nonprofit or people decide they’re going to change their job or have some breakthrough with their kid, or whatever. But also the more frequent experience is you just had some time, and you didn’t have to do anything. You didn’t have to come up career shift or whatever it is. We don’t offer any amenities, and we don’t offer activities. It’s now been like years and years and years of people—usually investors or coworkers—saying, “but can’t we offer yoga or fly fishing?” Or whatever it is. And I think yoga’s great, and I think fly fishing is great, and maybe someday we’ll figure out how to do these things. But I just want to make sure we get through that nature is amazing, and having your time completely unscheduled is amazing.
I’m so crazy that I want to make sure you’re not setting an alarm clock to get up at whatever time it is to go fly fishing—even though fly fishing is disconnection in nature—because so many things get turned into that, right? It’s if you do this—even to this conversation, if you slow down, if you meditate, if you whatever, then you’ll make all the money you’ve ever dreamed of, or then your activism will really break through.
I’m inspired by Oliver Burkeman’s book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. I can’t recommend it more. I bought literally eighteen copies of it to give to people I care about. And the book was just super good, and it just says we’re never going to get to this stuff. We’re never going to get it all done. We might be able to chip away at one or two things in our lifetime, and that’s worth doing, but we’re never going to get to all this stuff on our to-do list. We’re never going to get to all this stuff on our personal list. We can’t be all the things we want to be. We can’t be incredible activists and be great parents and have a great job, and a side hustle and have a variety of hobbies that we maintain. We can’t do it all. We hang onto the fact that we can because it’s comforting to think: “One day, I’m going to figure it out! I’m going to figure out how to do all of these things, and won’t that be glorious when I’ve finally done that?” And so we buy all these productivity books and try all these different wellness practices. Burkeman says that once we admit that to ourselves, we’ll be released of the guilt of: Why haven’t I gotten into it yet? And maybe we’ll make a little bit better decisions with the little bit of time we do have, which I connected pretty strongly with.
But he talks about hobbies, too. Hobbies are these things that, if we’re going take it on, most of us want to do it amazingly well! Like I’m going to take up pottery, and I’m going to make this beautiful stuff, and I’m going to give it to everybody for the holidays, and they’re going to think, “boy isn’t John talented?” And then what do we do? We never take up pottery because we’re afraid we’re going to be bad at it! And so his push on hobbies is: just do it now and do it poorly. This is a long monologue in reaction to your prompt. But I identify with that, and I want to say to people: it’s okay to not start the next thing or do the next thing and especially not to do those things perfectly well.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I completely agree. And I only said that because, at least for me, when all the distraction is stripped away, I’ve had the most breakthroughs, and I have been able to kind of show up more fully—but I’m not saying go to Getaway to do that. [Laughs]
Jon Staff: That is the irony, right? Like when I go hiking, I want to be away from it all, especially away from work. And when I go hiking, I have all of these wonderful ideas that I get really excited about. Sometimes they’re about work, and sometimes they’re about life, and I’m happy it happens, but it’s ironic. And if I start saying to myself, “I’m going to go hiking so that I can come up with a great idea or solve this problem,” I think it would probably quit working.
Rachel Schwartzmann: When you’re in those moments when you’re in nature, do you find yourself feeling more gratitude towards the busyness of life? How do you kind of see life from that vantage point?
Jon Staff: I mean, I think I have an incredible life, and all of the things I’ve been able to do—from being able to grow this company and the community around it to everything we were talking about, all the friend reunions and weddings and so forth. It’s a wonderful life to get to live. But it’s usually that moment in nature when I’m away from all that, that I can appreciate it more.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And so for those listening who might not have arrived at the moment where they feel like they need to disconnect, but they’re getting there, what would be your first step for reframing escape or getting away in a positive or nourishing lens?
Jon Staff: Take a walk. It’s as easy as taking a walk. I bought this cookie jar where I lock up my phone. It has a timer on it, and you can set the timer from one minute to like ten days. And I put my phone in there, and then I just go out wandering. I take in the city, and I notice things I wouldn’t notice otherwise. I come back feeling refreshed and renewed. And it doesn’t require getting on a plane. It doesn’t require renting a car. It doesn’t require being away from home for very long. And this is grandiose, but it makes me feel more human. It makes me feel like I’m part of the community, part of the world, simply by getting away from the distractions, even for a couple of hours.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And I would add to that, take your walks during golden hour. That’s something that has brought me so much joy. Just seeing the way the light kind of changes everything. I don’t think that’s grandiose at all. I think that’s why we’re here to notice those things.
Jon Staff: There’s that great quote: “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think for me, a big part of my life, something that I’ve really worked into it, is learning how to ask questions again. For so long, I was running driven by external validation, productivity, all the things that I think both of us seem to have been slowly unlearning. There’s probably so much more that we could cover, but I want to close things out by asking if there is a particular question that you hope people will start asking you more often?
Jon Staff: One that comes to mind is: “What good have you done lately?” “What good are you doing now?” I think it relates to what I was saying about brands not being neutral and being involved inside and outside our work lives. Taking care of each other and the world is incumbent on all of us, and we’ve fallen from feeling that way. Maybe this is a kind of a New York, coastal thing. I don’t know. But I think we all need to be doing some good most of the time. I think it’s fine—even great—if those acts of good are small. But I think it’s helpful for it to be a community expectation. And I don’t mean the question in a critiquing way, but how often do we get asked: What’s going on at work? How’s your family? Why can’t we add to that a soft expectation that we’re all doing something once in a while that is good for the world and each other?
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Rachel Schwartzmann: That was Jon Staff, founder of Getaway. You can learn more about Getaway at https://getaway.house/ and follow them on social @getawayhouse. You can also purchase Jon’s book Getting Away: 75 Practices for Finding Balance in Our Always-On World anywhere books are sold—though we recommend supporting local and independent bookstores if you can. Stay tuned, as we’ll be sharing highlights from this episode on our own channels @slowstoriesofficial on Instagram and @slowstoriespod on Twitter. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann, and you’ve been listening to Slow Stories. Thank you so much for tuning in.