Thomas Pavlik had a month left in Whistler and he didn't say it outright, but he had reservations about leaving. He looked down at the cigarette lodged between his fingers, at the smoke curling up toward his face.
He said, "I'm fighting what to choose - a nice life to do what I want, to enjoy my life and do some brainwashing job, or do I do something important, to keep my mind focused and develop my mind? I'm feeling this pressure again."
This is at 10 a.m. and the Czech-born lawyer has just woken up, eyes bloodshot, short crop of curly hair in tangles, smoking a cigarette on the deck. The luxuries afforded by Living the Dream in Whistler: frequent sleep-ins and very late nights. The drawbacks: being 28, sharing a home in Blueberry with six other people and making around $9 per hour.
He finished law school in 2006 and landed a job shortly after. It was a typical legal job in Prague: very stressful, working 10 hours per day, drafting the equivalent of million-dollar contracts overnight.
"One day, I was sitting in my office at, like, 12:30 in the morning and I was like, what am I doing? I looked around at myself and I was just producing the paper," he said.
He saw a future vision of himself in that position - probably a little wealthier, but in the same position more or less - in similar clothes, with more wrinkles on his face, having stayed in Prague because the routine of the Real World had him shackled to his seat under halogen lights in downtown Prague, transferring papers from one stack to another.
"That's when I decided to leave," he said.
He was one of a legion of young people who quit jobs in their career fields to "Live the Dream," in what is typically intended to be a final fling with juvenility before finally growing up and settling down. Whistler has one of the highest educated work forces in the country for a place that doesn't have many professional jobs to offer. Engineers work in the dish pit. People with medical degrees work ski patrol. Lawyers, like Pavlik, end up as shippers at Home Hardware.
This is what developmental psychologists call a moratorium on life and Whistler seems like the perfect place to do it. You can work and party and play with a stunning backdrop of mountains and trees, breathing in the fresh air while a rotating cast of beautiful people come in and out with the changing seasons. It's like travelling without having to travel.
"This place is like a non-reality sort of place," said Kelly Ford, a former lab technician from Perth. "It's like a - I don't know - like a fantasy land. You can be a different person here than what you are at home. It's addictive. No one knows you here. No one knows what you're about... In this town, it doesn't matter if you have a degree."
Erik Erikson, the developmental psychologist famous for his theory on social development of humans, believed that alternative experiences such as travelling help to establish the individual's identity. While the scientific community is divided on this issue, for some people a moratorium may, in some respects, help people explore options for where they want their life to head.
While some young people take a break from university or wait to start, others quit their careers altogether. Like Ford, who had reasonably well-paying gigs at labs - first in Perth, then in London. She did that for seven years. Then she bailed and moved to Whistler, where she spent two years rolling burritos at Dups before moving back to Perth in October.
"I like the classless society here," she said, back in September." It doesn't matter what you are. You can be a lawyer in the dish pit. It's classless. No one know what you've done or what you've studied. It only matters what you're doing and what kind of person you are, really. It's so addictive."
But she had been Doing Nothing, ignoring the Real World, for two years by the time she left. She was staring at the precipice of 30 and with that milestone looming she felt the anxious pull to grow up.
Marshall said there's no evidence to suggest that Getting It Out Of Your System works at all. It might work for some people, but for others it might make some people want that freedom even more. She says the pleasure principle inspires a "why work when you can play" attitude.
"There's no rational reason as to why you could get it out of your system. Catharsis doesn't work," she said. "If you get angry and blow up at somebody, does it get rid of the anger? No. It's the same thing. Does the blow out at Whistler get rid of anything? No."
She says there's no evidence to suggest that people who have explored the world are any more content than the people who haven't. The moratorium period is the most anxiety provoking, and for some people knowing the world is a diverse place makes them "delightfully less content and decidedly more bent on trying to change the world."
Whistler is considered a fantasy land because the people who live here have the resources to create it, and many of the young people who move here for a season or for a year come from privileged enough backgrounds to afford to take time away from life. Whistler is in many ways the province of the privileged and Marshall says that for people in lower socio-economic standings a visit to Whistler is akin to a visit to the moon.
"For every one that you can find with the privilege of being there, I can find you thousands who will think that it's a trip to the moon," Marshall says.
As a result, the idea of "finding yourself" in Whistler, or becoming fulfilled having Done Nothing for a while, may be linked more to opportunity and privilege than to the actual development of human identity, because - according to Marshall - it's easier to be well-adjusted and content when you aren't under the chronic stress of poverty.
But anyone who has lived the ski bum lifestyle knows a little something about poverty. It's not chronic for most and it's certainly instigated by a life choice, but it can lead to a prolonged period of floating. People wind up stuck here for years. People who once had ambition are now riding a cycle of seasonal work, drinking and/or doing drugs and skiing in the winter.
Jackie Dickinson, drug and alcohol education program coordinator for Whistler Community Services Society, says that every year she sees young people dealing with issues of anxiety and stress, as well as mental health and addiction issues, both within the local community and the transient population.
"Whistler is this place of excitement and adventure, but we all arrive here with this sense of a holiday mentality - where for most us we're thinking this is temporary with the idea of getting things out of our system," she says. "Like all of us, when we embrace that sort of holiday mentality, it's all about excess spending, partying and drinking, but eventually you have to promote a more sustainable lifestyle."
A lot of people end up staying, having found that sense of balance while they're here. Others move on or head back from whence they came. Many others end up stuck in a cycle of low-paying jobs and heavy partying that never really subsides and can be linked to stress and anxiety issues, trying to find that balance.
"There are a lot of young people who come here and eventually they deal with issues related to stress, anxiety and homesickness because after a few weeks the honeymoon period kind of disappears and they need the type of support network that they needed at home that doesn't exist here."
She says the WCSS is busier around late October and early November, once people have arrived but before the snow has hit. The clouds are low and it's not the happiest place to live. For some of them, the anxieties and stresses they were feeling at home - the ones they had tried to escape by going somewhere new - catch up with them as soon as that honeymoon period is over because, as Tony Soprano once said, "there's no geographical solution to an emotional problem."
Some people end up in a permanent moratorium - a perpetual state of floating.
"A person could go off to wherever they want to travel to, have a great experience and go 'Well screw that, I'm never going back to work because this is a heck of a lot of fun.' It hits their pleasure response in their brain," Marshall says.
She says these people tend to be high-risk sport types who will find every way possible to continue doing what they're doing - exactly the type of people who flock to Whistler every year for what may just be a season and end up staying here quite a bit longer.
"They won't settle down. They won't be more content. They'll never be more content, because contentment to them is high-risk sport," she says.
Like Ben Ashby, perhaps. He came to Whistler two years ago as a first stop on a world trip and has been here ever since. He has no intention of going back to Sydney, Australia where he worked as a mechanical engineer. He hated it there. He'd wake up at 7 a.m., eat breakfast, brush teeth, bike to work, and sit at a computer all day writing specs or altering drawings. Staring out the window at times. Attending meetings. Liaising with people. Holding half-hearted conversations about the weather with strangers at the deli down the road. Go home. Cook dinner. Watch TV. Go to bed. Wake up. Do it all again. Wait for the weekend.
"I hated it. I hated the city lifestyle. My job just wasn't doing anything for me. It's not that I was bad at it, I just had no passion for it," he says, sipping a cup of tea at the very messy kitchen table, of a messy kitchen, of a very messy house he shares with two other guys. A salt shaker knocked over next to a stack of dirty dishes. Beer cans and empty cups scattered around. A bottle of Visine on the windowsill.
"When I finally made the decision to 'retire'" - he laughs - "it just felt right. I don't know why but it just did. I was like, 'I can't do anything else but get out of this. I don't know what I'm going to do but it will all work out in the end.'"
His eyes relax and glaze over, staring out the window in front of him, and it's like he's really going back there, back into the void, in the office overlooking Sydney Harbour on a sunny day when his soul or whatever was crying to break free, to see something else, to meddle in nature and nothing else. But he's in Whistler now and had no problem trading a promising career to live the Whistler Dream, making money as a cab driver. Regardless what his parents think or what some developmental psychologist will say about why he's choosing the life that he has, he says he's happy just to float.
"I guess you could see it like that, but it just depends on what way you look at your life," he says. "I tend to look at it like, just love your life. Be happy with what you've got and don't be striving for something."
