Your name is Robert Shaw. You’re a 26 year old man. You live in a large city. Specifically, you live on the elevator accessible tenth floor of a modest ten floor apartment building downtown. Your apartment is a spacious and attractive, but not ostentatiously so. You work as an analyst at a venture capital firm in town.
You were able to get this job because you are a highly intelligent, socially capable person, but primarily because you have shown willingness throughout your life to subsume all of your other needs to the acquisition of money. As such, you have spent the majority of the four years since you left college working one hundred and twenty hours per week without vacations, except for days at a time on holidays to see your family.
You are sitting up in bed rubbing your eyes, and you feel a vacancy in your mind, a mental cavity that you don’t remember being there ever before. The cavity in your brain is the space hollowed out by four years of grinding work days. The reason you had never noticed it before is that this morning is the morning of the first day of the first vacation you have ever had. You have the next three weeks off from work.
You stand and stare in to the mirror. You are a moderately attractive, unremarkably constructed man of average height and weight. Your character, if there ever was one, has been completely obliterated by your work habits, as have any friends or contacts you once had. If you have any preferences, wants, needs, desires, you will have to rediscover them on your vacation.
As you slowly consume your breakfast, you think about your plans for the time off. You have none, except the loose idea that the time should be spent re-acquiring what normal people call “a life”.
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