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So we sat down and decided what we wanted.How did you know that's what you wanted? What gives you the authority to say that's the best path for everyone?
Consider an analogy for me - you mentioned travel. Have you ever driven through the mountains? Hiked up a few? Even from the road, it's easy to look up and see spectacular peaks calling out your name, begging to be climbed.
And coming from a flat, midwestern state, you may need to recalibrate your eyeballs for distance: You can't park the car for lunch and walk up most of them if you start in the afternoon...it's likely to take most of a vacation to hike in and up one or two peaks, so you need to plan your route before you arrive at the park.
The tragedy of the story is that there's no better viewpoint from which to gaze at a distant mountain and imagine a climb up it than from the path up the adjacent one you're climbing up.
I'm not yet thirty and have a family, a home, savings, a degree, and a career. I've got life-long commitments and am building solid roots like I thought I should, but now that I've got that all checked off it's not what I thought it would be. I've just got to continue trudging up this mountain I picked as a 17-year-old applying for college and dating one of the girls from high school. It's time to work my 40 hours, enjoy a few weeks vacation every year, and wait for retirement until eventually dying. It's quickly starting to feel unfulfilling and stifling.
The author of the article has spent her twenties and thirties bouldering up dozens of smaller cliffs and clambering over foothills all over the place. You denigrate them as "hobo adventures" but it sounds magnificent to me. I won't get to spend my thirties adventuring like that because I have a wife and a kid and a trade and a home, and it's just not all it's cracked up to be.