Dismantling the Barriers to Presence – Why Are We Still Doing That?
No Vacation Required
Tough Choices and True Belonging: Dismantling the Barriers to Presence
We often say we want more time with the people we love, but we fill our days with chores, emails, and doomscrolling. In this episode, we talk about why we actively resist the connection we claim to crave. This episode breaks down the barriers to true presence, from the myth of "politics-free" spaces to the mental health toll of maintaining online personas.
From an embarrassing (and mispronounced) trip to Miami to the tough choices required to align your life with your values, learn why building a life you don't need a break from requires radical honesty. Whether you are struggling to find "your person" or feeling exhausted by social media algorithms, this conversation offers a roadmap for reclaiming your attention and your authentic self.
Onward and Inward,
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CHAPTERS:
(00:00) Why are we still doing that?
(01:00) Mind Share: The "Politics-Free" space myth
(07:38) Mind Share: Living the Brickell (or Brickle) life in Miami
(12:47) The growth series: Finding presence
(14:33) The loneliness epidemic: Do you have a "person"?
(16:47) Barriers to connection: Social media and "YouTube face"
(20:25) Persona vs. Reality: The mental health of influencers
(24:10) Making tough choices: Dismantling success to save a relationship
(31:10) Worth the Time: The case for a social media detox
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
The Politics of Personhood: Demanding a "politics-free" space often means asking people to hide their authentic lives and identities.
Persona Fatigue: Constant curation of an online "character" makes real-world connection uncomfortable and fuels mental health struggles.
The Cost of Connection: Deep relationships often require making difficult trade-offs regarding money, promotions, or traditional life paths.
Audit Your Attention: Tracking your time is the first step in realizing what is actually stealing your presence from those you love.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Kent
We all say we want more time with the people we love, but our days get filled up with chores and emails and doom scrolling. It feels like everything wants a piece of us, and there's nothing left for the people who matter most. Today, we're deep diving into where our focus actually goes. We're examining why so many of us wish for more time with our people, but then actively do things to keep that from happening.
Caanan
Welcome to the No Vacation Required podcast, where we break down tired traditions and outdated thinking by asking the question, why are we still doing that? It's all about building a life you don't need a break from, being more present and fulfilled, and showing up in a complicated world that needs your voice and unique talents. It's mindshare time.
Kent
Caanan, I've got one that I'm excited to, I've got a mindshare, but I'm going to let you go first.
Caanan
Okay. Yeah, because I have one I'm excited about, but I'll try to keep it short, I promise. We won't make a whole episode out of mindshare.
Kent
And then you start with, so when I was in fifth grade, let me back up.
Caanan
No, my mindshare today is this desire I'm seeing every once in a while for politics free spaces. Okay. So I was, I think it was on Reddit where somebody was saying like, I want to go back to the days of no politics or sexuality or religion, you know, at the dinner table, essentially meaning like, just talk about the things that I'm comfortable with in this subreddit or wherever this was. I don't remember. I have to say like, listen, honey, I get the exhaustion. We are all tired of politics. But I think people who want this, they're not thinking about how everything is politics, right? So if you want a space where it's politics free, where we're not talking about sexuality or religion or whatever, what you're really saying, whether or not you know it—and I hope it's because you don't know it—is that you don't want people to talk about their lives or their sexuality or whatever, because everything is politics. Kent, if you and I at a table of people talk about going to dinner together, all of a sudden we're talking about gender politics or sexuality at the dinner table. So unless you're like cis, white, straight and Christian, everything else is politics, right?
Kent
Yeah, we actually need to break our rule. We need to start talking about these things more ahead of time. We try to be like a good talk show where the hosts don't talk before and they just come out straight face, right? Because the minute you start talking about this, I have a million episode ideas, a million project ideas. I also think, wait, didn't we talk about this? Oh no, we just talked about keeping this short and I'm already, you know, so I need to keep this short. But I do think we talked about this maybe once. Sorry if we've talked about this before. But yeah, it's a very weird shield that I think people need to examine because it's reality. My personal experience, Caanan's personal experience, our personal experience, colors how I, you, we think of whatever topic is gonna come up at your dinner party. So to try to keep that sterilized—that is the unhealthy thing. This idea of, "whoa, don't say that. You're making this political," is the unhealthy thing. Because if you can't imbue what you're sharing lovingly, wholeheartedly into whatever topic is up, then what is it for?
Caanan
Why are you engaging at all? Yeah. Anyway, I just want to say, to keep this light—I know, I know. I'm like, oh, this will be a fun, short one, and then I drop this. I want to worry less about keeping spaces politics free or whatever, because it's impossible, and worry more about welcoming people's authentic experiences. Like tell me who you are. Tell me what you're into. Tell me what you're about.
Kent
Yeah, I think, oh, now, okay, this is a podcast episode, but, uh, it's funny, I know we talked about this on the podcast when we were somewhere and you were up ordering a smoothie or whatever, and struck up a conversation with a woman who's like, "oh, where are you from?" And you're like, "oh, Seattle." And she's like, "oh, God, it must be terrible." And you're like, "no, we love it." You kind of brought us, and it nearly turned into a fight with this woman. And it's like, I'm not going to sit here and listen to you completely badmouth my personhood because of the assumptions you're making, which were all true, by the way, about where I live.
Caanan
She thought I was a radical liberal and she was right. But I have to say the quiet part out loud also, unless you're going to tell me you're anti-woke, then don't bring that, keep that to yourself. Okay. I wanna hear your short thing.
Kent
Okay, so I've been so excited for this mind share cuz I'm being a basic B, uh, just cuz this story just has amused me so, so much. Thinking about this and thinking about the things we do and the things that make you feel embarrassed and all that stuff. So we were recently in Miami living our best Miami life. Yes. For close confidants, we have major issues with Florida.
Caanan
We have all the issues with Florida. And we, but we like Miami.
Kent
Yeah. I mean, there's places in Florida, people in Florida that we love, love, love. But man, it's tough to be in a place like that. You know, you don't want to give your money to a place like that. But anyhow, we were in Miami, staying in the Brickell neighborhood and living our best life and talking to people about how much we love Brickell. And we're walking around and enjoying the green spaces they inserted and Brickell, Brickell, Brickell, and videoing and emoting and everythinging. So then it comes time to leave and we get on this little motor mover thing at like the station before Brickell. And we're coming up to the Brickell station and the little automated voice says, "next stop, Brickell." And we both looked at each other and had like a—we each had video montages of all the times we'd been yapping about Brickell. And to be fair, I mean, go look it up. Go Google it. It should be Brickell. Like, I don't know what's going on.
Caanan
Must be like, it just sounds fancier. It's somebody's name. That moment where you realize you're a total noob. But I have to admit, too, that after it said Brickell, I had a moment where I was like, this people mover thing, automated voice, is so bad. Like, Miami needs to fix this. It's mispronouncing the name of this neighborhood. And I actually had to go look it up to like prove to myself that I was actually wrong. I looked it up. It's Brickle.
Kent
Okay, wait, because I was thinking, oh no, maybe it is a voice automation error, but it's not. You're saying it's Brickle. It's the wrong answer, but it's Brickle, not Brickle. So imagine us living our best life, our whole urban Brickell fantasy, and we sound like a couple of out of town dweebs.
Caanan
Out of town simps, yeah. Simps. But I'll say, I'm a Brickell simp. It was, it's a really nice neighborhood. Okay.
Kent
Okay, so in this series, we are talking about Growth. This is the second episode in this moment. Check out the last one. We talked about freedom. We were really inspired by all the people who say, I wanna travel the world. I wanna travel like you. How did you do it? Kind of our surprise at people still not thinking imaginatively about how they can experience their own freedom. And for so many people, that means traveling. So this week in this growth focused month, we're talking about presence. And this, oh man, I say this every month, but I love this month. I love that we take things that are really happening and we're really experiencing, and we turn them into these episodes because so many people, specifically cuz we're so proud of our relationship, how much we've grown together, how much we support each other, how we have this kind of unique and—unique in these days—relationship and love for each other. People are always saying, "oh, I want to spend more time. I want a partnership like you guys have. I want a spouse like you guys. I want more time with people I care about just to sort of like, yeah, everything in my life has me so bogged down that I'm not able to be with the people I want to be with." So last week, as I said, our focus word was freedom. This to us, when we were asking ourselves, okay, everybody—because we've been traveling, so interacting with people and they see us together and talk about this—we're like, all these people talking about wanting a loved one or more times with loved one. That's presence. That's right, right? They want presence. And this one makes me really sad. You know, we were just talking about—actually, we've talked about this so much lately for a project that we'll get into later—but learning how people don't even have—I don't know if it's most yet, but many people in studies have been found to not have a single person that is their person. Now, ideally—and this is what we just talked about yesterday—ideally, that person is in, you know, a love relationship or whatever. And that's what we advocate for. But a person, period, that—not a single person.
Caanan
Who is their person?
Kent
Yeah, it used to be that a decade ago, this study said people would have maybe two or three. And even then, a fair number of people didn't have anybody, but it was kind of like the largest group was that people had two or three people. Then, despite the illusion that everybody had these nine or 15 person friend groups and, "oh, I want that girl chat or that bro chat," and now, you know, marriage and unionship is way down and people are just relying on social media for their—see me holding up air quotes—for their connection. So this is kind of a one to untangle. There's the "people want more time with people they love" part A, but part B is people we've learned don't even have that person or two or three that they can be their real selves with.
Caanan
Yeah, I'm thinking back to the last episode we did on travel and how everybody says, "I want to travel, I want to see the world." And we were saying, yeah, you probably do, but poke at it. See what's underlying that, because it may not just be about travel. It may be about the freedom to pursue your interests or curiosity or to own your time. And I'm thinking this about presence. So if I'm saying I want to spend more time with people I love, you really have to poke at this because I think a lot of people—like you, that is an authentic feeling. That's the right feeling, the correct answer. But I think you're not looking at all the reasons why that isn't happening.
Kent
Yeah, you're right. Just like our freedom conversation.
Caanan
You have to explore like, what are the barriers to this? And you just said one of them, Kent, which is social media. Like what a sad thing, like at a time where people have no people in their lives that they can be authentic with, we have a media landscape and a social landscape that is telling us that we actually need hundreds or millions of people who we can be real with or authentic with, which is just insane. So it's like we're not even wrapping our brains around what the real problem is here.
Kent
There's also, in our "Why Are We Still" theme here: Why are we still pretending everything is important? Much like our freedom discussion, what are we putting in our own way? What is clouding our ability to have the presence with the people we love or to cultivate relationships so that there are people who feel like our people? And I think of you and I, and this is a story we've told many times on the podcast, but it's such a pivotal story for us. And we decided, you know, we're living these like massively, upwardly mobile, successful lives for the first ten years of our union and realizing like, wait a minute, we're crawling up these ladders that are taking us apart. We were always close, never had any problems, but like, wait a minute, I want to be spending more time with you. I want to be growing a relationship. And as you know, if you listen to this podcast or if you know us, we were training for the Paris Marathon at the time. One of our vacation breaks at the time to see some of the world. We're doing these training runs at like 4 a.m. in the morning so we can spend time together and just deciding what we're asking you, listener, to ponder. Wait, what is in our way? All we're talking about on these runs at 4 a.m. is how it feels so great to be spending time together and actually doing stuff together. What is standing in our way to doing that? So asking, okay, wait, do I really want that?
Caanan
Yes. And if I do, then how do I make it happen? Yes, this is the key because a lot of people want this—like I said, correct answer. You should want a sense of connection with one or two people in your life who you can be truly yourself with. You need this in your life. But we say we want it and then we don't do anything about it. In fact, we structure our lives in a way that actually keeps us from getting the very thing we want. So you've got to get curious. Oh, that's such therapy speak. But you do. You have to get curious, like, what am I doing that is keeping me from having these kinds of connections? And I can tell you, the entire world is built right now to keep you from having these connections. When you and I, Kent, decided that time together, that our relationship was the most important thing to us, we had to dismantle pretty much every other belief.
Kent
Completely. It was semi-painful.
Caanan
Oh yeah, we flipped our life around completely, but we had to do it. It was the only way to get to what we said we actually wanted.
Kent
Okay. I need to jump in here. I wanna say something because, with these podcasts, we have a loose frame of what we're gonna talk about, but we usually like to just kind of riff and be in the moment. But this might seem like even to you, Caanan, it's coming outta left field because this article I just read popped in my mind—this dimension of this conversation, based on what you were just saying—and that is that talking about how, of course, there's so many influencers now, so many content creators and an even larger pool of people who see themselves as wanting to be influencers and content creators and making a living off of that. But what I read which is fascinating, is that some of the most quote unquote successful content creators and influencers develop kind of a persona. Caanan and I always laugh about "YouTube face" and these things that people have to do to create a persona to make people latch on to their content. So these people have creative personas, which is creating this massive mental health dilemma, because then when they're with people in real life, it's completely uncomfortable for them to come out of their persona and to be real because people expect them to be in their persona. And even worse, they've attached their own personas with their rise in influence and content creation. So they're kind of—what is the phrase you always say? High on their own supply. So then they become caricature. And this is something you and I, having been in the influencer blogger world in the earlier and growth stage of it, noticing this in people—oh, we got so and so the whatever blogger, where it's this persona that you're faced with. So we have this added element. Hearing you talk about social media, these personas—not only is fiction among our supposed friends and loved ones being fed to us a curated life, entire personalities that are like TV characters posing as real people. Right? So this article exposing the mental health breakdowns because people can't navigate the world unless they are their persona. It's something that drives you and I crazy because it's like, oh my God, you know, we are all about figure out you. It all starts with personality. You've got to be operating from who you are and then your persona—we're big on personal branding—your persona could be a part of that, but it's just a part of it. And if you have that knowledge about who you are, then you can know how to like, "okay, I need to turn up this dial because I'm doing a YouTube on Mac Cosmetics, so I need to go into my mode, but then you turn it back down and you go fully into the rest of your life and your other elements of your personality." You and I constantly interacting with people who are their persona, and it's like, oh, wait, no.
Caanan
I'm gonna jump off of something you mentioned in your last little speech about personas. You mentioned that you and I, Kent, when we were travel bloggers and we'd created quite a presence for ourselves, but there was a moment where we realized that to go to the next level on that, we were going to have to compromise our values. You know, in some ways maybe create personas of ourselves or do things that just didn't align with our core value, which was spending time together.
Kent
Totally. And having this be an authentic expression—and sorry to jump in here, but I'm so moved and surprised by what you just said that I have to say, I have vivid snapshots of when we started to get some traction and we were people to pay attention to, and we were talking to a co-creator about an honest bad element of an experience we had. And he was like, "you're not going to mention that." And I totally got what he was saying, because it's like anything, late stage capitalism, you know, you got to do the thing, stick to the template. He was like, "you're not going to mention that, are you?" And you and I, yeah, it was a younger version of ourselves, but we had to have that get real conversation like, "okay, wait, there's the track where we keep this kind of what's turning out to be bothersome trajectory going very successfully, or we have to decide that we want to stay true to what we actually believe are our values." And we decided, yep, we're going to be honest about that.
Caanan
Staying true to your values, staying true to what you say is important to you. In this episode, we're saying, you know, "I want more connection with people." What it really comes down to is, I think, tough choices, really tough choices. Because as I was saying earlier, the world is not designed for you to have authentic connections and deep relationships anymore. Like everything is sort of antithetical to that now.
Kent
Yeah, I read that the goal of algorithms now, as we all know, is 100% FOMO. You are just made to feel like you're missing out, you're missing out, you're missing out.
Caanan
Right. Even your social connections—as ridiculous as that euphemism is—your feeds aren't even feeding you the people you want to see anymore. You can't even connect, quote unquote, with actual people anymore.
Kent
Yeah, they're feeding you what you're gonna fear you're missing out on with a link to the sponsored content that fuels what's on your feed.
Caanan
So tough choices. Like you and I, Kent, we realized that in order to become even more successful at the time, bloggers or what we now call influencers, we were going to have to compromise some of our core values and our time together and our authentic voices. And we decided, no, we don't want to do that. And let me tell you, that was a tough choice because we had lots of incentives to keep going. It was very lucrative and it was very splashy and it was very fun, but it didn't align with what we really wanted. Back when we were running that marathon and we recognized that this time together that we had running and talking and figuring life out uninterrupted was what we actually cared most about, we had to decide to examine things that we didn't even think we'd ever have to examine. And then we had to choose to let a lot of that go. And those were tough choices. So I'm saying like, if you're saying to yourself, "yes, I want more connection. I want people in my life that I can be authentic with," you're going to have to make some tough choices. You're going to have to maybe make some less money. You're going to maybe have to not go after a promotion. Maybe—yes, I'm going to say it—you're going to have to choose to not have children. Big decisions about your life, because if that's important to you, you have to let go of a lot of other things.
Kent
Yeah, so before we close up—and that's good, but it takes a lot of bravery. And, you know, I'm going to say, just like I said in the last episode, and maybe you're going to find like, oh, wait, I like exactly what I'm doing and I'm using this fear of missing out to block myself from my own reality.
Caanan
Yeah, there's a—what a nice outcome that could be. Like, just examine your life and maybe you'll see like, "oh, if I stop caring about everybody else's fake dreams, my actual life is really good."
Kent
Yeah, so you want to spend more time. The Muse here is "wanna spend more time with your people, people you love," or you wanna get those people. It's such a helpful exercise: track your time. It's a great way to start. Track your time, track what you're doing, and then reflect back on what you've tracked and decide, "okay, wait, is that really stealing my attention, keeping me away from making this move to more presence with people I love that I claim to want? Or is it actually serving a purpose?" Now, I'm going to guess, like most lives are unexamined. So I think once you examine, you realize like, "ooh, I'm putting a lot of roadblocks in my way." But there's a chance you're going to find that you're kind of creating complication by overthinking things that you don't really want. So yeah, look at your tracking, get real honest about if you're putting things in your way, things that steal your attention and what you can do then to have that presence that you want because it's there, it's yours for the taking.
Caanan
Okay. Okay, so I have a "flip the script" worth the time. We often recommend books or TV shows or movies during Worth the Time. And that's fun. They actually are. But this week, based on what we've talked about, Kent, I'm going to go out on a limb. I'm putting myself out there and I'm saying the Worth the Time this week is just get off social media. Stop doing it.
Kent
Give us a breathing room. Yeah.
Caanan
We dabble a little bit. We have a very, very, very healthy relationship with social media, i.e. we barely do it. But it's a drug.
Kent
It's a drug.
Caanan
It's stealing your time. It's stealing your presence. It's stealing your energy. It is a fake sense of connection. And the only way to really free up your time to be more present with people is just to stop doing it.
Kent
Yeah, I love that. I mean, it's so straightforward. It's just a way to give yourself the space to examine the very things we're talking about. So yeah, try it out.
Caanan
You're not going to miss anything. You're not going to miss anything.
Kent
Thanks for listening to the No Vacation Required podcast. For more information, including services designed to help you build a life you don't need a break from, check out novacationrequired.com. And if you found this information helpful, please subscribe.