Day five of my first proper solo trip and I've had a good time all day and then felt genuinely low every evening around 8pm. Nothing has gone wrong. The days are great. It's specifically the gap between dinner and sleep where I run out of things to do and start scrolling. Is this a thing that passes in a week, or a thing people just manage?
Usually four to seven days, and yours sounds right on schedule. There's a real dip somewhere in the first week when the novelty stops carrying you and the trip becomes ordinary life in an unfamiliar place.
The evening gap is the classic shape of it, and it's fixable because it's structural rather than emotional. What worked for me:
That last one is the big one. Unscheduled homesick phone calls make it worse. Scheduled ones make it better.
The scheduled call point is uncomfortably accurate. I call home exactly when I feel worst, which turns out to be the worst possible time to do it.
Sunset walk is my whole evening routine now. It fills the exact window, costs nothing, and I've ended up talking to people at viewpoints more than in any bar.
Give yourself something to do in the evenings that isn't socialising. I write a page about the day in a cheap notebook. Takes twenty minutes, fills the gap, and re-reading it two years later is the best souvenir I own.
Hostels with a kitchen, even if you book a private room. Cooking in a shared kitchen at 7pm produces low-stakes conversation with zero effort, and you can leave whenever you want. It's the most reliable social hack I know.
I'd written off hostels because I wanted my own room. Didn't realise private rooms in hostels were a thing at reasonable prices.
Worth saying: some people find out on a long solo trip that they don't much like being alone for weeks at a time, and that's useful information rather than a failure. I've since settled on ten day solo trips and I'm happier than when I was forcing five week ones.
Just talk to more people, everyone is friendly if you make the effort.
@quietmargin · 5mo ago · 2 replies
It passes and then it comes back in waves for the rest of the trip, which nobody warns you about. Around week three I get one bad evening out of nowhere. I've learned to just let it be a bad evening, go to bed early, and it's gone by breakfast.
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@coworking_cass · 5mo ago
Same pattern for me, roughly every ten days. Once I stopped treating it as a sign I should go home it stopped being a big deal.
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