I figured out by the pool last week that there are two kinds of people on a beach vacation.
And I don't think any of us can help it.
I was on a lounge chair, my natural habitat, with a cold drink sweating on the table and a book I wasn't really reading.
And I started watching the families filter past.
Half of them made a beeline for the sand. They hauled chairs and umbrellas and little mesh bags of toys down to the water, set up camp for the day, walked the shoreline for an hour, and came back gritty, sunburned, and grinning.
The other half never left the pool deck. Towel service. A chair that doesn't move. Water that's the same temperature every single day. The ocean is beautiful from here, thanks.
I am, to my core, a resort person.
The sand, the salt, the schlepping, the waves knocking you sideways: it's a lot of work for what is, to me, a slightly worse pool.
But I watched a guy about my age boogie-board with his kids for three hours straight, and he looked like the happiest man on earth. We were at the same place, paying for the same week, and we'd built our entire vacations around opposite ideas of a good time.
Neither of us is wrong. That's the part I can't stop thinking about.
My three boys
I have three boys (9, 11, and 13) and they sort themselves the same way, with zero help from me.
My middle son is a beach person down to the bone. You cannot get him out of the surf. He comes back every evening exhausted, salt-crusted, and thrilled. My youngest is a pool kid like his dad, perfectly content to never touch the ocean. And my oldest mostly wants to be left alone with his headphones, wherever that happens to be.
Three boys. One house. One set of parents. Three completely different factory settings.
But here's the one that actually gets to me. I love music. Always have. I'm the guy filling the house with it, making the road-trip playlists, saying "no, wait, listen to this part." And my kids could not possibly care less.
For a long time I took it personally. Like I'd failed to hand down the one thing I most wanted to.
So I went looking for why.
What I found
I'm an anesthesiologist, not a scientist. But I went down a rabbit hole on this one, and the research is wild.
Twin studies, comparing identical twins to fraternal ones, keep landing in the same place: somewhere around 40 to 60% of your personality is simply inherited. Baked in at the factory.
Fine, you think. The other half is how you raise them.
But here's the gut-punch for those of us with kids: the shared environment (the home you build, the values you model, the dinner table, the vacations you save up for) explains almost none of the difference between siblings. Close to nothing. The non-genetic part is mostly the random, individual stuff each kid experiences on their own.
Which means three boys in one house were always going to diverge. It isn't a flaw in my parenting. It's the blueprint.
It goes back further than I realized, too. A psychologist named Jerome Kagan handed brand-new things to four-month-old babies and watched what they did.
About one in five recoiled: fussed, flailed, wanted it gone. About two in five leaned in, captivated. Before they could talk, before the world had any real chance to shape them, babies had already sorted into approach-the-new and stick-with-the-known.
That's the beach kid and the pool kid. Sorted ten thousand vacations early.
I see the grown-up version every week. Two patients, the exact same surgery. One's cracking jokes while the anesthesia goes in; the other is white-knuckled and shaking, terrified of an identical procedure. I used to file that under bravery. It's mostly wiring. Same operation, two completely different nervous systems.
And the music? Even taste turns out to be partly genetic. One study of around 2,500 twins found that the pull toward music is substantially heritable, and that it travels with a trait psychologists call "openness." So my kids shrugging at the song that gives me chills may not be a gap in their upbringing. They might just not have the same antenna.
I can hand them the radio. I can't hand them the chills.
The reframe
We think we choose our preferences. Mostly, we don't. We discover them.
You're not choosing what you love. You're finding out what you were already built to love.
And this runs way deeper than pool chairs, because so much of "wellness" is people grinding themselves down trying to become a different kind of person.
The cold plunge, the 5 a.m. club, the meditation app, the marathon: someone else's nervous system found peace there, posted about it, and now you're convinced the problem is that you haven't tried hard enough.
Maybe. Or maybe you're a resort person white-knuckling your way through a beach person's routine and calling the misery "discipline."
The healthiest people I know mostly stopped performing someone else's preferences. They found their own version of the pool chair and built a life around it, instead of apologizing for it.
The bottom line
Two quick caveats, because wiring isn't a prison.
Heritable doesn't mean fixed. That 40 to 60% leaves real room. A resort person can learn to love a long walk on the beach, and you can absolutely stretch and surprise yourself. I have. But you'll probably always drift back to the chair. Knowing that about yourself isn't a limitation. It's a map.
And for my kids: my job was never to make three copies of me. It's to hand them a pile of doors (music, books, the ocean, the pool) and pay close attention to which ones they walk through. Expose, don't impose. The thing I love might skip them entirely. They'll have their own thing. My job is to notice it and feed it.
So I'm staying in my chair this week. The boys can have the waves.
Here's my question for you: Where in your life are you a resort person trying to be a beach person? What preference have you been treating as a character flaw, when it might just be how you're built?
And if you've got kids, which of their factory settings have you been trying to fix, when you should be feeding it instead?
Reply and tell me. I can't write back to everyone, but I read every single one.
That's all for this week.
See you next Saturday.