The concept is so simple—a beautiful vacation where everything is taken care of—it’s hard to imagine it ever being formally invented. This would be like claiming to be the first person to want to wear comfortable clothes, or hang out with friends. And yet, most sources agree: The first modern all—inclusive resort was founded in 1950 by the Belgian entrepreneur and water polo player Gérard Blitz. Built on the Spanish island of Mallorca, the Mediterranean lapping at the club’s shores, it was only natural to call it exactly that: Club Méditerranée.

Just by packaging endless sunshine, bottomless buffets, and mindless relaxation, Club Med had a replicable winner, decade after decade. The idea was so replicable, in fact, that when competitors began catching up, in the ’90s—Sandals, SuperClubs, Beaches—they were suddenly everywhere. All throughout my childhood, commercial breaks were full of ads promising generic tropical fun (with strong undercurrents of marital sex)—and at a shockingly low price. It isn’t surprising then that the all-inclusive model gained a reputation for attracting budget travelers. After all, the thinking went, who would want to sacrifice choosing where to eat and drink each day but sunblock-nosed penny-pinchers?

Well, now, everyone, apparently. Over time, the all-inclusive customer base has continually widened, as all-inclusives have become fancier (Club Med among them) and fancy resorts have become more all-inclusive-y. Major hotel brands like Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG are in an arms race to invest in resorts across the Caribbean and Mexico—and for good reason. Between 2019 and April 2024, demand for all-inclusives on Expedia and Hotels.com grew by 70 percent. More recently, interest has begun to mushroom: Just last October, it was divulged that searches on Hotels.com filtering for such resorts jumped 60 percent year over year. Yes, we are witnessing, in real-time, the fabled rise of AI—that is, all-inclusives.

This cultural phenomenon was, until recently, none of my business. In fact, the last time I thought seriously about prepackaged tropical vacations was at a copywriting gig I had 15 years ago. This mostly consisted of pumping out mind-numbing, repetitive nonsense for a high-end credit card for travelers. Even when inspiration struck, it was sure to be snuffed out by their draconian legal and compliance teams. We’d get dinged for calling a destination sunny (it might rain) or perfect (no such thing) or the vacation of your dreams (how were we to know what customers dreamed about?). This led to some delirious language choices (instead of a delicious adventure, we’d write a taste-inspired excursion), as well as crazy-making repetitions of preapproved phrases (Fill your family photo album; definitely doable!). But there was one term that we overused more than all the rest, given its brevity, versatility, and literary quality: escape.

Day after day, I’d write lines like Book your escape today and Plan your next escape and Escape to the beaches of Miami. Of course, lest someone confuse the word for something more meaningful (escape expectations, escape your boundaries, escape yourself), these lines were inevitably paired with palm trees, tranquil waters, white sand beaches. What was most striking about these images was, well, the fact that there wasn’t a single striking thing about them. There were no cultural signifiers, no geographic clues, nothing to get in the way of the viewer’s imagination. They weren’t really advertising a specific place; the point of such a vacation was what you were leaving behind.

I was not my target audience. I much preferred to think of travel as a chance to see the world, to widen my experience of it. I learned that I didn’t even need to go that far—Montreal was a short drive away, Mexico City a short flight—to feel like I was in a completely new culture. This was, of course, the whole point of taking a vacation: not to escape, but to find something exciting and immersive and, most of all, real. Yes, if traveling was a game, authentic experience was its grand prize, the nectar that justified peeling through the hard stuff—the cost, the flight, the jet lag. This all made meeting my wife, Mette, a Danish expat, extra sweet; I could now travel to Copenhagen and find myself among actual Danes living genuine Danish lives. Once or twice a year we would go with hardly a suitcase between us, crashing on friends’ couches, dining out most every night, drinking most every night, using and abusing our metabolism for adventure.

Then, out of nowhere, as if my copywriting past were coming back to haunt me, I began to see sun-drenched escapes everywhere. Which is to say: all over Instagram. In stories posted by close friends, in posts published by old coworkers, even on my Explore page, it was all there—the picturesque sunsets and piña coladas and every anodyne detail in between. Except, as I started to pay a bit more attention, I realized that there was something different about these pictures, some new aspect that wasn’t in the stock photography we’d used at the agency. Look a bit closer at the piña colada and you’d notice the wrist-banded hand holding it. Zoom in on the towels and you’d see the same logo, over and over again. Scan the background of the image and you’d spot a surplus of staff, ready to assist with whatever was desired.

The author, his wife, and their twins. (Third child not pictured.)

Adding to my confusion was the fact that, just a few thumbscrolls down these same feeds, you’d find photos of tequila-soaked music festivals, ruined European villages, street food in Kuala Lumpur, espressos in Havana, blacked-out nights of karaoke, white-out parties at nightclubs, new lovers, old friends, backpacking, road trips, side projects, political activism. What happened to everyone? Well, the answer is also right there on the grid, a clean demarcation separating the before times from now: a picture of a newborn baby, that impossible thing, posted from a state of near bliss.

Mette and I have a sort of inside joke, where we look at each other and cheerily mutter, “Easy-peasy lifestyle!” The joke is that, with a toddler and twin babies, our lifestyle is not easy at all.

The night before I started writing this story, I experienced a pretty typical easy-peasy moment. After a long, intense day at work, I was tasked with putting all three kids to bed. (Mette was out for the night.) I don’t know when exactly things went off the rails, but I soon found myself consoling the twins—one was slapping the other in the face, which somehow caused them both to cry—while my toddler shouted for me from the other room. It wasn’t until I’d calmed the twins that I realized why: Diarrhea was pouring out of his butt, filling his pants, and, on the way to the bath, his socks too. Now it was the twins’ turn to be ignored. They screamed and hollered as I sprayed down my son, which caused him to add some earsplitting shrieks to the mix. Ignoring this deafening cacophony, I tried desperately to recall what we had contaminated on the way to the bathroom, while ricocheting shower water speckled more fecal matter across my legs.

I tell this story not to showcase an especially trying night. In fact, I so quickly assumed my usual pre-bedtime mentality—a kind of benumbed state in which I forget I exist for anything but logistics—that I barely noticed how hard things had become. At that moment I cared about one and only one thing: getting everyone fed and changed and locked in their cribs, where it was only a matter of time before they would become beautiful, sleeping creatures again.

I imagine that if you have kids, you’re nodding vigorously right now, and that if you don’t, you’re thinking, This is kind of boring. I myself would have felt the same way a few years ago, when we were still childless. Part of me feels that way today. That’s the weird thing about becoming a parent: You transform, but you never lose the person you were. The old you stalks you night and day, occasionally popping in just to let you know how single-minded you’ve become, how rigid, how tedious. It’s enough to make you wonder how much happier you’d be if only you’d been born a parent and never knew all of what you were missing out on. After all, Gregor Samsa’s problem wasn’t really that he metamorphosed into a cockroach; it was that he remembered being a man.

This ambivalence is even more salient when confronted with the irksome behavior of other parents. I feel it when I watch them obsess over slicing grapes as thinly as possible, as I myself have done just that. I feel it when they make the kind of lowest-common-denominator chatter parents make, as I will happily join in. And I feel it most of all when I see them post about those vanilla, sun-drenched resort vacations they’ve taken, as my first instinct is to wish I was there. Yes, perhaps no other carousel of images provokes such a distinct mix of envy and repulsion than those featuring endless buffets, signature cocktails, and perfectly manicured pools.

It isn’t just American parents who have succumbed to this road very much taken. “I have never thought I would end up booking an all-inclusive resort vacation,” our friend Kenneth, a consultant in Copenhagen, recently admitted to me. Before kids, he spent his vacations going to places like Marrakech and Moscow, train-hopping in Spain and trekking through Fiji. And yet, after his first child was born, priorities shifted—specifically from “adventure” to “comfort.” Though he and his family have since gone as far as the Canary Islands and Greece, both trips were through the same Danish travel company—one that caters specifically to families. In these exotic locales, he has found himself surrounded by a strictly Scandinavian crowd, but this is hardly a concern. When recalling what he loved most about the trips, Kenneth doesn’t cite the atmosphere or the activities or even the unlimited drinks. Instead, he notes the messes left by his children after meals and how relieved he was “every time the waiter came and cleaned up under our table.”

If I had, through almost four years of being a parent, managed to hold onto the idea that I myself was above such a vacation, a confluence of factors intervened at the end of this winter. It was the longest of my life, an impossible stretch of time in which, somehow, I had no time at all. Between my full-time job, the kids, the release of my new book, and nights spent working on my next one, there just weren’t enough hours in the day to give anything its due focus. I became so used to multitasking—writing while I watched the twins, or doing an interview while I reparked the car—that I even began to appreciate scrubbing crusted yogurt off the floor after dinner, as it was one of the only times during the day that I got to do just one thing.

With the clarity of desperation, I realized that not only did I need a vacation now more than ever, but it was to be unlike any I’d ever taken before. I no longer craved adventure. I did not yearn for a new experience. I didn’t even want to have to plan anything, really. Instead, I went with the first idea that came to mind, an option I’d never given much thought to despite the fact it’s been swimming in my subconscious since I was a child. So it was: We were going to Club Med.

If greatness takes sacrifice, so too do great trips. In this case, we sacrificed our toddler. While we spent five days in Club Med Michès Playa Esmeralda—tucked away on the northeast coast of the Dominican Republic, it is the company’s only five-star resort in the Americas—he would pass his days with his namma and farfar in suburban New Jersey. Though we felt some guilt for leaving him behind, we worried the vacation wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Unfortunately, we would be proven right.

The morning of the trip, I experienced an upset stomach. This is putting it lightly. On the drive to the airport, we had to pull over twice—three times if you count when we first got in the car—narrowly avoiding the unspeakable each time. (Considering I drive a 2009 Nissan Altima, this could have quite literally totaled the vehicle.) After the second instance, I became so worried Lady Luck would leave my side that I inserted a baby diaper inside of my boxer briefs, like a menstrual pad. The whole debacle, along with some other snafus, set us back an hour; in fact, it was only by the grace of a few angelic airport employees that we boarded the plane in time for takeoff.

The flight itself was fine—but then again, if I’d had the same experience before I was used to being a parent I would have considered it torture of mind and body. We spent most of our critical thinking abilities deciphering what might satisfy our little nonspeaking piggly-wigglies and dedicated our bodies to the sole task of creating enough comfort for them to go to sleep. When they finally did—after a spate of crying from each in perfect succession—I used my free concentration to watch the market crash on various cable-news networks.

The drive to the resort was long (about 90 minutes) but a relief: After hauling the babies in carriers for seven hours, we could finally off-load their weight to car seats. Then, arriving at the resort, our suitcase was taken from us and our step became a little lighter. Minute after minute, more burdens were lifted: Our thirst was quenched with a medley of fresh-squeezed juices; our clammy skin was dried by the cool, fragrant air; our taste for luxury, heretofore repressed, was simultaneously released and satisfied. The public areas were breathtaking but elegant, and so was our abode, a long, long bungalow that led directly out onto the purring, blue tropical water.

While we were basking in how much space we had—the suite was even bigger than our apartment—and how well that space was furnished, my gaze settled on a canvas beach bag lying on a chair. Picking it up by its roped handles, I saw that there was a message embroidered on it in gold thread: Sunset MINDSET. This reminded me of a post I saw on Club Med’s Instagram a few days before. Overlaid atop a video of a couple water-skiing under a setting sun was the phrase, written in plain white text, What if our only problem is to miss the sunset? At the time, I’d mocked this in my mind, reasoning that such a reality would imply I’d recently been lobotomized. But now, I found my chronic cynicism just out of reach. Sunset mindset, I thought, optimistically. It struck me that the phrase was a near-perfect synonym for easy-peasy lifestyle—and yet, at the same time, it was completely different: purer, simpler, unsoiled by our sarcasm. It was even a kind of promise, if not a provocation: In its fearless earnestness I could, if I wanted, find the courage to be earnest too.

I thought more about this. I pondered over how much of our happiness is controlled by our own free will. Then, finally removing the baby diaper from my boxer briefs—completely unused, mind you—I realized that we had undergone a great change today. It was a slow, smooth shift, an easy gradient that had started when we’d woken up and ended at this very moment. Yes, on one side was hell, and on the other side, this one, was a place that held the possibility of heaven.

Our first day, Saturday, we introduced the twins to basically every possible permutation of baby-friendly water: the ocean; the main swimming pool, long and thin like a runway; the more private, family-only pool; the water park. While each came with their own unique, resplendent environs, the water felt exactly the same, kept at a temperature that was, impossibly, at once refreshingly cool and easy to slide into.

I began to notice, however, that there were areas we couldn’t enter. There was the child-free Zen Pool, with its corresponding El Limon Bar. There was the Emerald Jungle, a village and social zone only for adult guests. If these delineations at first seemed like a rebuke, a middle-finger aimed at those keeping the human race alive, I came to understand they served the opposite purpose. Yes, these spaces were just as much for parents temporarily relieved of their kids by the resort’s on-site childcare as they were for the childless. After all, what did liberated parents want more than to forget there was such a thing as children?

Perhaps it is just that my poisoned brain cannot hear “adults-only” and not think of sexual penetration, but these areas also called to mind some of the lore I’d heard about a bygone Club Med era. Sometime during the ’70s, its sporty, young, minimalist vibe—riding the waves of the sexual revolution—morphed into something a bit more, well, horny. Les Bronzés, a 1978 cult French comedy satirizing Club Med, features a scene in which men lazily adorn women’s bare breasts with paint. A curious piece in The New York Times from 1981 captures “the image of sexual abandon,” describing a wet T-shirt contest “and its male counterpart.” Well into the ’90s, Club Med’s reputation remained: the place to go, whether you were a single or a swinger, to get your coconut scraped.

“In the ’80s and ’90s, the core of our clients were active singles,” Carolyne Doyon, president and CEO of Club Med North America and the Caribbean, told me. But then, in the early aughts, decades of sex finally yielded to its most natural consequence: children. After suffering waning demand in the ’90s, and then 9/11’s dampening effect on travel, Club Med initiated what would be a decades-long pivot. In 2004, with recently installed CEO Henri Giscard d’Estaing (son of the former French president) at the helm, Club Med reportedly began investing billions of dollars to enhance its resorts while gearing them toward a new demographic. “We have realized that, with the needs of the clients of today and tomorrow, the family market—the affluent family market—was the way for us to go,” Doyon said.

The more we explored, the more I came to appreciate just how tailor-made the resort was for families, meeting parents on a nearly psychological level. For starters, the endlessly paved paths and ramps allowed us to push our stroller across the expansive campus with sublime ease. Then there was the abundance of high chairs. And the toddler-size poolside cabanas. And the blackout curtains in our room. (For once, I wouldn’t need to use the black plastic sheets I brought with us everywhere, covering any and all windows in a ritual that made me feel like Patrick Bateman.) It was so convenient to be a parent there that a French family of three (the mother a psychiatrist, the father a member of the French air force) chose the resort for their honeymoon, telling us that it was easier to take their daughter with them than have her stay with relatives and “go somewhere just us.”

This spirit of seamless accommodation is neatly captured by the fact that all Club Med staff—from the waiters to the receptionists to the porters—go by the term G.O., or Gentle Organizers. If the moniker is a bit unsettling at first (reminiscent as it is of an inpatient psychiatric unit), it quickly makes a certain kind of sense. Flash a look of worry and a G.O., clad in the brand’s signature bright white and royal blue, will soon be at your side, ready to help. Walk with a heavy gait and a golf cart will miraculously appear. At mealtimes, it was hard to go five minutes without a G.O. visiting our table, making faces at the twins. Such interactions with G.O.’s are, for many guests, a big part of the appeal. The moderator of the r/Club_Med subreddit, who has visited Club Med resorts 39 times to date, told me, “Over the years, I’ve become quite close with many of the G.O.’s,” noting that she’s even befriended a few at one resort, only to cross paths with them again at another location. Her husband doesn’t quite get it. “He is kind of like, why would I want to talk to a bunch of strangers on my vacation? It’s my vacation.”

“There’s not really a firm line between ‘you’re staff’ and ‘you’re a guest,’ ” a former G.O. who worked at Club Med in the aughts told me. As a “naive Brit” among “more sexually free and adventurous” French guests, she said she found her professional friendship sometimes mistaken for something more. “I was definitely propositioned a couple of times,” she said. “I was like, ‘I’m English.’ ” As in, No thank you, I’m not going back to your room with you and your wife. Plus, she had work to do, like dressing up as a baby chicken for a comedy sketch put on by staff or encouraging guests to join a dance party in broad daylight.

It is a testament to the power of social conditioning that, in no time at all, having a team of people gently organizing our lives felt completely natural. When a few G.O.’s corralled everyone for a coconut-throwing contest on the beach, I hardly thought twice; in the moment, it seemed as normal as lining up at the buffet. Slowly, like shy crabs approaching the ocean to mate, guests big and small, young and old, gathered around a particularly charismatic G.O. One by one he called us up to toss the hairy shells over our heads, with each throw receiving a nice clap from our fellow competitors, and even some ooh’s and aah’s. The event created such a flow state that it was hard to even care that prizes, though promised, were never awarded. Wasn’t the real prize just being there, laughing with and rooting for strangers? Wasn’t the only point of anything the feeling it gave you in the moment? What if our only problem, at the end of the day, was to miss the sunset?

Club Med's Gentle Organizers use choreographed dances called “crazy signs,” which are the same across locations, to entice guests to dance.

To say that it was important that the resort had childcare would be like saying it was important that our suite had beds and running water. So it was that as I walked the twins to Baby Club Med—their first day care of any sort; Mette stays home with them—I was a little worried. What if they didn’t take to it? What if they cried? What level of guilt was I willing to withstand for the paradise of having a child-free day?

The author relaxing.

There was no guilt required. As soon as I brought them in, they were absorbed and tended to, surrounded by loud, bright toys and chirping, attentive G.O.’s. After a few minutes of playing, one of the caregivers gave me the sign and I left like a thief in the night, scrambling back to our room to deliver Mette the good news.

Nervous with possibility, the hours ahead like scarce funds we needed to spend wisely, we hurried to the kid-prohibited Zen Pool. There I read a paperback and drank a cocktail called a Dominican Spirit (likely the trip’s deepest cultural foray). This was followed by a banana daiquiri at the swim-up bar, where I soon ordered its strawberry cousin, and then went back to banana. By the time I’d normally be ensconced in my first meeting of the day, I was four drinks in.

What to do now? Browsing the My Club Med app, I reviewed the long list of scheduled activities. We could attend classes on Latin dance, archery, vinyasa yoga, and trapeze (a Club Med signature). We could play beach volleyball, bocce ball, and something called “Coffee Games.” It is precisely these sorts of activities that many guests pay the Club Med premium for. (A four-night trip like ours, including day care and private transport to and from the airport, costs around $6,500 during peak season.) And yet, I wanted none of it. In fact, the very idea of skipping these events gave me an odd sort of pleasure, as if each one were a meeting I was intentionally missing. Yes, all I wanted then was whatever in this world was the exact opposite of work, a concept that suddenly seemed not only a bit foreign—abstract, even—but utterly, perplexingly, shamefully absurd. Why, I wondered, my brain the right kind of stupid, were people always making things? What, really, still needed to be done? Wasn’t the invention of NFTs proof alone that a breather was in order?

We went to the beach. I read some more and then swam languidly in the water. I drank various elixirs. We had sex. We ravaged the buffet. I pushed my limit on passion fruit. I got a mind-blowing massage from a gifted masseuse. Lying under a cabana overlooking the ocean, we laughed so hard I cried. We devoured a beach barbecue and drank from coconuts, running into the water right after eating. Lying on a hammock, I became emotional as I considered how lucky I was—not to be there, but to have what I have.

This was, more or less, how we would pass the rest of the vacation: not with activities, but with boundary-less pleasure, floating from one thing to the other, doing whatever our hearts desired, and yet, at the same time, doing nothing at all. It was the first time in almost four years we had been alone together and not felt the need to cash in our autonomy for something especially eventful. It was the first time, after a long winter of multitasking, that I could engage, finally, in exactly zero tasks.

One of the best parts of the trip, for me, was reading together. It’s something we never do anymore, given the demands of parenthood, and the pressure to fill in our leisure time with more active pursuits. (And yeah, okay, sometimes we’re too exhausted to do anything but be on our phones.) Just like old times, we traded notes about the book she was reading, which I had loved and given to her: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico.

The novel follows an expat couple in Berlin as they live exactly as young, hip, creative professionals are supposed to: with au courant taste and limitless freedom. They’ve liberated themselves from everything: salaries, convention, nationality, ideology, tradition, history. The book succeeds as a commentary on how curation can take the place of identity, a nearly anthropological study of two people suffocated by their own liberty—though I couldn’t stop myself from thinking there was quite a simple solution to all that ailed them. If their lives are so rich in freedom but devoid of meaning, why not sacrifice one for the other? That is: have kids.

I sympathize with Latronico’s protagonists. It wasn’t so long ago that I, too, felt that I had way too much possibility and not enough actual life to fill it in with. In retrospect, this is precisely what my pre-kids vacations were actually about: exchanging some of my excess freedom (time, money) for a meaningful experience. But of course, the trade can be made in the opposite direction too—which is exactly what’s in order when you suddenly find yourself drowning in a sea of work, obligation, responsibility, routine.

On our last morning, our fifth straight day spent mindlessly, vacuously pursuing nothing but our own comfort, it dawned on me that this trip wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Well, we did basically exactly what I thought we would, but how it felt—what it meant, even—was beyond what I’d imagined. It wasn’t really, in the end, even an escape. That term was far too focused on subtraction, the deletion of something from your life. What I had experienced, on the other hand, was an addition, an acquisition, a retrieval even. Yes, this whole time I had been briefly reclaiming the freedom that I had, years ago, left behind.

Andrew Lipstein is the author of Something Rotten, The Vegan, and Last Resort. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three sons.

A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2025 issue of GQ with the title “The Last Resort”