LIFE AFTER TOUR

1. Introduction
2. Schedule
3. Days Off
4. Decompression
5. Sleep Deprivation
6. Geographical Disorientation
7. Jetlag
8. Nutrition and Fitness
9. Conflicts
10. Romantic Relationships
11. Post-Tour Depression
12. Conclusion

Over the past 15 months, I’ve been on a concert tour. I crossed Europe four times, North America twice, and the Equator four times as well. And once upon a time, I even managed to work on five continents within a single calendar month.

I stopped keeping detailed counts a long time ago, but I can say for sure that I’ve spent over 1,000 hours in moving vehicles and about an entire week inside a flying airplane. The mileage has confidently passed the 100,000 mark. The total duration of my jet lag adds up to months.

Despite the fact that I love what I do, I am fully aware that the human body and mind are not designed (and never will be designed) for such extreme strain. Today, I want to talk about the price that I and my colleagues in the industry pay for what often looks from the outside like the most fun job in the world.

From my perspective, people in the music industry have only fairly recently begun to talk openly about physical and mental health. At least, when I went on my first major U.S. tour in 2018 and came back from it completely burned out, that state was seen as something entirely normal.

I think the first reason is that touring, as a whole, lags behind other fields in terms of development and isn’t perceived as a separate, fully fledged industry — despite the fact that it generates billions of dollars every year. If someone works at a factory, they are protected by labor law, unions can intervene, and some ministry of health sets safety standards for production. But when a team of freelancers heads out on a bumpy ride in a minivan, everything comes down to negotiation — there are no clear standards.

The second reason is the aura of “exceptionalism,” built largely on stereotypes. Rock ’n’ roll, concerts in front of cheering crowds, the romance of life on the road, and the chance to be close to the artist’s genius every day — all of this sounds far more appealing to many people than a five-day office week and a benefits package. And if you’re lucky enough to make it into this small circle of the “chosen,” you’re expected to grit your teeth and make sacrifices. I understand this logic, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. But when touring becomes a career, you start to look at many things from a slightly different angle.

That’s why I’m glad these conversations have finally begun.

And I’m ready to add my two cents.

Tours can be VERY different. (see my Artist Tour Management Encyclopedia)

The routing, the type of transportation, the number of days without shows, and the overall duration — based on these metrics alone, you can already roughly understand what will be happening and how it will feel.

Any tour consists of at least two entities: the Artists themselves and their Crew. For each of them, the tour can look completely different.

But even within the Crew, when two people work side by side all day, differences in their responsibilities can lead them to have very different (and sometimes even opposite) experiences.

If a band is traveling in a minivan, their average day might look something like this:

• 08:00 — Wake-up, departure to the next city for the show (400 km).
• 14:00 — Load-in (equipment onto the stage, personal belongings to the dressing room).
• 15:00 — Build (assembling the stage and setting up the equipment).
• 16:00 – 18:00 — Soundcheck.
• 18:00 – 19:00 — Free time / dinner.
• 19:00 — Doors open.
• 20:00 – 23:00 — Show.
• 23:00 – 00:00 — Load-out (dismantling the stage and loading the equipment back into the minivan).
• 01:00 — Arrival at the hotel, check-in, sleep.
• 08:00 — Wake-up, departure to the next city for the show.

If multiple bands are playing, there is a lot of equipment, or the stage build takes longer, either the soundcheck time is reduced or the load-in is moved earlier — for example, to 12:00. Travel time from the previous city is a fixed variable, and in that case the wake-up time also has to shift two hours earlier — from 08:00 to 06:00.

When an artist reaches a certain level of success and income, they can afford to switch from a minivan to a tour bus. A bus costs 8–12 times more.

The main advantage of such a bus is that it drives at night while you sleep inside.

On paper, everything looks great:

• 09:00 — You wake up already parked in the next city. No need to travel anywhere!
• 09:00–14:00 — Free time, yay!
• 14:00–00:00 — Soundcheck/show, etc. Everything is the same as on a minivan tour.
• 00:01 — You’re already in bed.

… but in reality, things can be very different, especially for the Crew.

For example, if the Artist has grown to this level, the show is expected to be bigger and better, right? Bigger show → more equipment → earlier load-in. On bus tours, unloading can start as early as 6 a.m., and load-out may finish at 1–2 a.m. And just like that, all your “free time” is gone.

“But don’t you have some kind of days off? I see days without shows in the itinerary!”
I hear this phrase a lot from relatives and friends, and I can finally debunk it.

A tour is a commercial operation organized by the Artist. Every single day on a tour costs a lot of money — transportation, crew salary, accommodation, and so on. The Artist only earns money on show days, while a day without a concert is a net expense. That’s why the number of such days is always optimized.

A typical situation is a “travel day.” For example, the distance between two cities is 900 km, and if you wake up at 8:00 a.m., there’s no way you’ll make it to the next venue by 2:00 p.m. With traffic, fuel stops, bathroom breaks, and lunch, that trip will take at least 12 hours. So a separate day has to be allocated for it, and there will be no concert that day. We all wake up at a reasonable time, get in the vehicle, and grind our way to the next city until evening. We arrive completely fried and go to sleep with our heads spinning.

Often, promotional activities are scheduled on these days as well — video shoots, interviews, podcasts, record signings at a big vinyl store.

But even if it’s a proper day off, and even if it’s in a city with plenty to do, it’s far from guaranteed that you’ll actually be able to take advantage of it and get real rest.

The first week of a tour is always a bit chaotic — everyone is getting used to each other, equipment issues surface and get fixed, and general workflows are established. That week is the most fun.

By the second week, the tour starts to “sink in.”

Based on the schedule, if the Artists have a full Crew, the only time they actually have something to do is the two hours of the show itself. The rest of the time they can sleep, sit in a café, watch insta reels, read a book, or just slack off. For 22 hours of their day, nothing is happening.

If the show was good, for a couple of hours the artist performs in front of an ecstatic crowd, riding a wave of euphoria. Five minutes later, back in the dressing room — and for the next 22 hours, there’s nothing to do again. The adrenaline and dopamine spike collapses to zero in an instant. And ideally, you should go straight to sleep. For the human brain, that’s an almost impossible task.

If the show was bad, you have to go to sleep in a terrible mood, left alone with anxiety and frustration in the silence of a hotel room.

For the Crew, it’s the opposite. From early morning until late at night, the crew is working. Your day starts at 8:00 a.m. and ends at midnight, and if there are no major screw-ups, you’ll manage to eat a proper lunch and dinner.

So that’s a 16-hour workday. And the next day, it all starts again.

Now let’s multiply that by six weeks (42 days). That’s the standard length of a European or American tour.

When was the last time you worked forty-two intense 16-hour shifts in a row?

A tour cannot be paused or stopped. No matter what problems you face — fatigue, lack of sleep, family issues, negativity, interpersonal conflicts — you are still trapped with the same people in a small space, and you are required to keep working with them every day.

There’s simply no room for decompression, solitude, or a “change of scenery.” In just a few weeks, a once-lively tour group can turn into an explosive mix under immense pressure, and no one has the time or energy to defuse it. All it takes is a single spark.

Sleep has both duration and quality.

I try to include the golden standard of 8 hours a day in all my schedules. But reality always makes its own adjustments.

No decent hotels near the venue, and after the show you need to drive a bit out of town? Minus 1 hour.

Incompetent hotel staff, check-in issues? Minus 1 hour.

Sudden road repair on tomorrow’s leg, need to leave earlier? Minus 2 hours.

The only direct flight was early in the morning? Minus 3 hours.

And so on.

Sleeping on tour for more than 8h is an unattainable ideal. So when a proper “day off” appears on the schedule, people often spend it in bed.

You can, of course, grab a power nap during the day, but this can throw off your overall rhythm, making it hard to fall asleep at the hotel, ultimately costing you 2–3 hours of night sleep. Not worth the risk.

When the tour is on a bus, technically there’s more time to sleep. But, for example, I (for various reasons) cannot sleep in a moving vehicle. And for me, a supposedly pleasant 10-hour sleep window each night turns into a nightmare.

Now about quality.

It remains a mystery to me how Artists manage to fall asleep an hour or two after a show — a peak adrenaline rush. As a tour manager, I sometimes have very intense workdays when my brain is so sped up that it won’t shut off until 2–3 a.m. I imagine something similar happens to artists, only almost every day.

You can try to sedate the brain with melatonin/sleeping pills, alcohol, or other substances. But then the quality of sleep suffers, and even after 8 hours, you wake up tired or "not there". The same goes for hotels — sleeping in a different place every night gives a terrible sleep quality. Regardless of how nice the hotel is and the quality of the mattresses.

In the end, it’s like in a video game:

• At the start of the tour, your energy bar is 100/100 ⚡️
• You worked all day, got tired, now it's 50/100 ⚡️
• Go to sleep, wake up in the morning, and instead of 100, you’re now at 98/98 ⚡️, and it never goes any higher
• Next day it's 96/96 ⚡️, and so on

Fatigue builds up day by day, week by week, and sooner or later, your mind starts to melt down. For me, this usually happens around the fourth week.

I first heard about sleep deprivation when I was preparing for uni exams, but I had just turned 20, was still very young, and the preparation itself wasn’t that long.

You can read a full list of symptoms on Wikipedia, but here are only those I experienced personally:

• Excessive daytime sleepiness
• Reduced ability to concentrate
• Loss of sense of self and/or reality
• Weakened immune system
• Dizziness
• General confusion
• Hallucinations (visual and auditory)
• Headache
• Irritability
• Lucid dreams
• Memory lapses
• Slowed reaction time
• Paranoia

Now imagine that there are 8 of you, all “handsome devils,” trapped together. And every day you have to work a 16-hour shift, because the work hasn’t gone anywhere.

Last fall, I flew to China, and due to scheduling conflicts, I broke my own record for going without sleep — 33 hours. I mechanically drank beer just to stay awake and complained that something was moving in the corner of the room. To which a colleague calmly replied:

“Sorry to hear this, brother. The last time I was in that state, it started snowing inside my room.”

I hear touring often being called a “journey” or “life on the road.” It does sound rather romantic. People unfamiliar with the industry, out of innocent ignorance, project their understanding of vacations or road trips with friends onto it — but touring has nothing to do with that.

As I wrote above, a basic tour route lasts six weeks. That means, over 42 days, the tour group needs to be in 42 different cities (if we're lucky, because it can be more cities than days).

If we’re traveling in a van, the time on the road is usually spent on emails, admin or mindlessly staring out the window. I’ve been to 45 U.S. states out of 50, most of them four times or more. Do you know what I saw? Nothing. Nothing but endless highways, identical gas stations, fast-food restaurants, exits, and city centers. I haven’t been to a single national park, never seen a sequoia, and crossed Arizona 6 (six!!!) times without ever visiting the Grand Canyon.

But when the bus tours started, even that disappeared. I just kept waking up already parked in the backlots of venues — which, as you can imagine, all look exactly the same.

In a way, it feels like teleportation. You close your eyes in Houston, open them — and you’re already in Dallas. Close your eyes in Dallas, open them in New Orleans, and so on. Except everything looks exactly the same.

These jumps between cities, combined with overall fatigue, long stressful work shifts, and sleep deprivation, eventually lead to complete spatial disorientation.

In the morning I used to check my watch to see what time it is. Now I check Google Maps to figure out where I am. A person (no joke) can genuinely not know exactly where they are.

And my final observation is especially true for the U.S., because of the wide variety of climate zones within the country. Sometimes on tour, you get to be in a snowy pine forest, in the mountains, on the plains, by the ocean, in the desert, in a tropical forest, and then back to the snow — all within just a couple of weeks.

Because of this insane pace of travel and the constant change of scenery outside the window, the brain simply can’t process all the information, and in the end, a month on the road merges in your mind into one shapeless blob. It’s as if you’ve been everywhere, yet nowhere in particular.

Jet lag is a condition caused by a desynchronization of internal biological rhythms after crossing multiple time zones. It can also be called “temporal disorientation.”

Before I started touring, I never really thought much about time zones. Even if I had to fly somewhere, it was always just 2–3 hours off from my “internal” time. Not a big deal!

But everything changed when I flew to New York, and the difference was 8 hours for the first time. For several days, I forced my eyes open as long as I could, and then collapsed into darkness, only to wake up completely exhausted.

Internal clocks (or “circadian rhythm”) basically boil down to three components: when you want to sleep, when you want to eat, and when you want to poop. There are lots of other things too, like hormones, but you mostly notice those just as general fatigue.

Flights from east to west are usually the easiest. For example, you fly from Europe to New York, and the difference is 6 hours. Normally in Europe, you’d go to bed at midnight, but in New York it’s only 6 p.m., and you have to stay awake as long as possible. Anyone who ever pulled all-nighters gaming or at parties in college knows how to do this.

But the worst jet lag comes when you fly west to east, against the movement of the Sun.

Once I had to fly for work from London to Melbourne. The time difference was 11 hours. In Melbourne, it was already midnight, time to go to sleep — but according to my internal clock, it was only 1 p.m., and I physically couldn’t just go to bed “in the middle of the day” for a full 8 hours.

I went to sleep at 2 a.m., taking melatonin just to randomly wake up at 4 a.m. feeling wide awake. By 11 a.m.–12 p.m., I already had work to do, but according to my internal clock, it was the exact time to go to bed. All day, I functioned on autopilot just to survive until evening. But in the evening, I didn’t want to sleep, because my body thinks the next day has already started. And at the most random hours, one either becomes insanely hungry or unbearably, forgive me, need to poop.

On top of that, all of this is spiced by “acclimatization” — flying from rainy London at +1°C to dry Australia at +35°C. And the work shift lasted for about 10 days, each one feeling like I’ve been hit by a freight train. It was something else.

When time zones change on vacation, it’s also not particularly pleasant, but you can adapt — chill for a couple of days in a hotel or on the beach, slowly getting into the new rhythm.

On tour, you have to work the next (or the same) day. Not according to your internal clock, but local time. And your shift, if you remember, starts at 8 a.m. and ends at midnight. And you’d better fall asleep right away, because tomorrow brings the exact same shift. Then another 40.

Different studies interpret jet lag in different ways, but for me to fully adjust to an 8+ hour difference, it takes 2–3 weeks. And that’s not even counting the smaller time zone changes within the tour itself, which don’t make much of a difference on their own but definitely slow overall adaptation.

So I finally get my body back in sync — but the tour ends soon, and it’s time to fly home. And again, 2–3 weeks of jet lag. And that’s how it goes all year.

I wrote in detail about physical health in the Encyclopedia, so here I’ll just mention it briefly.

Maintaining proper nutrition is pretty difficult. Based on the schedule, you often have to eat not when you’re hungry, but when there’s time. The result — you’re often hungry or overeat.

Dinner according to the schedule is usually around 6–7 p.m. You can’t eat much, or it’ll be hard to work during the show. So you eat lightly, then work intensely for four hours, and by the time you finish load-out at midnight, you’re hungry again. Most restaurants are already closed, so the go-to solution is to order pizza for everyone. You eat your slice of pizza and go straight to bed.

The quality of the rest of the food is low for the same reason. If you stop at a gas station and have only half an hour for lunch, you have to choose between two or three types of fast food. After a couple of weeks on that “diet,” you start feeling pretty awful. Digestion suffers, bathroom trips are unpleasant, and the rest goes from there.

If the concert venue isn’t on the ground floor, all the equipment has to be carried upstairs. If there are no stagehands/loaders, the artist’s Crew does it. If there’s no elevator, it’s done via stairs — sometimes quite narrow ones. Strained lower backs, sore shoulders, pulled muscles, and joint injuries are quite common.

Any health problem can’t really be treated on tour. You’re constantly on the move, and there’s simply no time to see a doctor. And where would you even find one, on a random morning in a random city during a so-called “day off”? All injuries get smashed with painkillers and postponed until the end of the tour, because tomorrow you’ll have to haul boxes up the stairs again.

In 2025, I decided to break the vicious cycle and completely change my work routine.

I set myself the goal of not eating fast food once during the tour. I bought proper food, packed it in containers, and scheduled my meals so I wouldn’t have to overeat at night. I walked extra kilometers to reach decent cafés instead of the burger shack around the corner.

I set a goal to work out in the gym, stretch my muscles, and keep the body in shape. I walked a lot, even though it usually wasn’t necessary: during a single workday, I could easily end up walking 15–20 thousand steps just moving around inside a small concert venue building, without even going outside.

I ultimately achieved these goals. Instead of gaining the usual 3–4 extra kilograms during a tour, I would now lose 1 kg. But I can’t say I felt any better. Against everything else, it was just a drop in the ocean.

And the last thing I just recently started doing is ear-protection.

I bet you have been at a show where the sound system was way too loud, and afterwards in a silence of a home you still hear some sort of noise. Similar to what you "hear" if you lean your ear to a large sea shell.

Most of the time the speakers are fine and comply with local decibel limits. But I figured that if I do 100+ shows a year, being exposed to loud music for this long isn't gonna be good anyways. Plus I happened to know sound engineers 20-30 years older than me, struggling with severe hearing loss, and I didn't want to repeat their mistakes.

The venues often provide ear-plugs for visitors, and there are also fancier versions with good colourful designs for frequent concert-goers. I skipped that part and went straight to the construction noise cancelling headphones, that cut 37dB out of usual 100-105 dB limit at shows, basically 40% down.

It's too early to tell the difference, but I already feel like my tinnitus (high pitch "ringing ear") frequency already went down.

You’re far from always surrounded by pleasant people on tour. Sometimes artist’s Crew doesn’t know each other at all and ends up shaking hands for the first time on the day of the very first show.

All of these people then find themselves locked inside a small moving metal box for the next six weeks. Every day brings enormous stress, lack of sleep, and a whole pile of personal issues. As I wrote above, all of this can very quickly turn into a highly explosive mix.

I’ve been incredibly lucky to tour with all of “my” artists and their teams — we quickly found common ground, built working processes, and enjoyed it as much as was possible. But that’s far from always the case.

You’ve surely heard a handful stories about bands fighting with each other, and sometimes even breaking up during a tour or right after it ends. Life in such an environment can breed personal animosity, anger, negativity, avoidance, and criticism — there’s nowhere to hide from it, because there is simply no space for decompression. Today you almost got into a fight, and tomorrow at 8 a.m. you’re working together again. I once found myself in this exact situation and wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

In the end, I’ve come to formulate it this way: touring is extremely hard, and experiencing any kind of emotions while doing it is completely normal. The real question is what you do with those emotions.

“Emotional intelligence” is the ability to recognize your emotions, understand their cause, and correctly assess how appropriate it is to show them to the people around you at a given moment. After all, your colleagues may objectively have nothing to do with those emotions.

In almost every tour I’ve been on, there has been at least one person whose emotional intelligence was either absent or poorly developed. I think every reader of this post can recall at least one such acquaintance.

Such a person might be unhappy about something and show it with their whole demeanor without ever saying what the issue is. I call this being “loudly silent.” Or they might voice any dissatisfaction to everyone around them, about anything at all. Add fuel to the existing conflicts, provoke, and so on.

The consequences of this kind of behaviour spread quickly, like a fire, affecting the rest of the team and their mood. They dissolve group morale like acid.

And the thing is, such person can be very professional at their job, tour for many years, and perfectly understand why a particular situation happened within the tour group. So it’s not a question of knowledge, but specifically of managing one’s own emotions.

I treat such people with understanding, because I used to be one of them myself. And I know that emotional turbulence spreads into all other areas of life, poisoning them as well. Emotional intelligence is a skill that needs to be forged over years. I personally solved this problem through many years of cognitive behavioral therapy.

I can have as many bad days as you like, but I always try to make sure no one knows about it. If I’m having a bad day because of a specific person, then later — on a day off, in a low-stress environment — I’ll take them aside and calmly talk one-on-one, without accusations or public yelling.

But if I do need to deliver bad news to the entire tour group, I’ve found a way to make it as fun as possible. On one of the trips, I bought myself a frog hand puppet and named it “The Frog That Brings Bad News.”

Now I talk about all the delays, breakdowns, and screw-ups as if it’s not me speaking, but the Frog. And the whole team is just laughing instead of getting angry or upset.

Many, VERY many people working in the touring industry don’t have and can’t find a long-term partner. Unfortunately, I belong to that group as well.

Relationships are highly individual, and a lot depends on a person’s character. To avoid inappropriate generalizations, in this section I’ll talk only about myself and my own perspective. Let it be a kind of self-therapy.

The main reason is, of course, physical absence. For the vast majority of people — those who live and work in one place — the basic definition of the term “relationship” doesn’t include a clause like “my boyfriend is away six months a year, and I don’t always know exactly which country he’s in.”

Long-distance relationship practices can help here, of course. Not an ideal setup, but still better than nothing, right? Calls, video chats, postcards, packages in the mail — all of that could work, if not for one “but.”

Emotional absence.

When I’m on tour, every day starts early and ends late at night. During that time, all of my attention is focused on work. As a tour manager, I have to be on alert 24/7, always ready to take on a problem and solve it as quickly as possible. That’s exactly what I’m paid for.

During the workday, I can be in all kinds of psycho-emotional states — irritation, anger, anxiety — but for the most part, it’s simply exhaustion from severe sleep deprivation and spatial disorientation due to constant travel. My head is a mess.

Sleeping for three hours, then spending the whole morning hauling heavy boxes, having and resolving a heated conflict with a venue or promoter — that’s not the state I’d want to be in when calling my girlfriend afterward. You can have all the composure and mindfulness in the world, but one way or another, work-related negativity will seep into the conversation. And the person who has nothing to do with my warped state simply doesn’t deserve that.

Things are a bit better on days off, even though I just lie on the couch like a vegetable. And suddenly it turns out I don’t really have much to talk about. The past few days were no different from each other, and the next ones probably won’t be either. I can talk about work, or about what I ate for breakfast. I can’t even honestly say that I miss anyone. The only thing I truly want is to sleep for three days straight. It’s that terminal stage of exhaustion where you simply don’t care about anything anymore. It's scary.

I tried to explain what it means to be in a relationship with me — a person working in the touring industry. I chose the right words, put them into coherent sentences. People say they understand everything. But in reality, they don’t. And they never will.

I’ve accepted the fact that it’s impossible to explain what my state is like on tour to someone who has never been on tour themselves. It’s like explaining psychedelics to someone sober. Or sex to a virgin. You can only truly understand it if you experience it yourself.

What’s left? Not much.

You can try starting relationships with women who also work in industries tied to constant absence — touring, film, international business, FLIGHT ATTENDANTS. There’s not much point in it: you’re both unavailable for most of the year, and if your schedules miraculously line up, you might see each other in person for just a couple of months.

And of course, you can choose not to have relationships at all and settle for one-night stands, just to take the edge off. It could be someone from the venue, groupies, or a sad lady from a bar near the hotel. Everything’s clear to everyone — you’re on tour, you’ll be gone tomorrow — so just go and do it. Maybe if I were in my early twenties, that would sound like an amazing opportunity. But I started touring professionally after 30, and I almost immediately realized that it’s not for me.

Of course, there are plenty of people for whom relationships and family life work out just fine. It’s all very individual. But I’ve heard a great many stories identical to mine.

So at that point, it’s either change your career, or return again and again to an empty, cold, dusty apartment. And here we arrive at my “favorite” part.

Right now, I’m writing this text for you from its dark depths.

Post-tour depression, or “reintegration,” is the state you enter after a tour — when you’ve just returned home.

Every day on tour is packed with events from morning until late at night. Both good and bad. There’s always a task. Always a goal. After a couple of weeks, you fall into the rhythm, and by the end, you do everything automatically, without thinking. You’re always in motion. It’s life "in fifth gear".

Every concert is a peak of adrenaline and dopamine. The crowd is screaming with excitement, and even though I’m not the artist, I’m still part of what’s happening and have the right to enjoy the moment.

Almost all the processes — how you sleep, how you eat, how you interact — have nothing to do with real life. Food appears magically on the tables in dressing rooms, organizers bring whatever you ask for on demand, and the venue staff waits for your command.

I’m a tour manager. The artist team’s facade for interacting with the outside world. A one-stop service for all questions. Often, people watch my every move, trying to please and impress. I control everything that happens around me.

If I’m also working on merch sales, I have to exchange at least a few words with every customer, ask what they need, and how the concert went. Just basic courtesy, you know.

Over the past 15 months, I’ve probably spoken to 70–80 thousand people. That number simply doesn’t fit in my head. Can you even imagine that?

Then, one day, it’s all over, and I return home.

At home — ringing silence. The engine of “life in fifth gear” abruptly stalls.

One time, I couldn’t remember which key opened the front door of the apartment I’ve lived in for over a year.

On the funny side — once I ate a meal and stared at the plate for a long time, not knowing what to do with it. On a long tour, from which I had just returned, we ate either in cafes or in dressing rooms from paper plates that we then threw away. I had forgotten how to wash dishes.

But honestly, there’s no fun at all.

Today everyone needs you, and tomorrow no one does. You have no task. No goal. The daily routine, hardwired into your muscle memory, is no longer required. The routine no longer exists.

You don’t know how to interact with regular people on the street, in a store, or at a gathering of friends. You only know the tour, and all you can talk about is it. But no one understands what you’re saying, because you lived that separate life without them.

Probably, people who have just been released from prison feel something similar — though for a different reason.

All the sleep deprivation, stress, fears, and anxieties that you suppressed and put “on hold” for two months straight (because you had to work!) suddenly erupt.

The brain, used to little sleep, suddenly gets 8 hours a day and starts hallucinating. You dream nightmares and wake up exhausted, as if you hadn’t slept at all.

Adrenaline levels drop, you “come down,” and your immune system collapses. All the injuries masked with painkillers immediately make themselves known.

But the worst part, for me, is that I don’t understand what’s happening at all.

It’s very hard to explain. Everything around seems completely meaningless, I wander around in a daze, and I can’t even grasp the simplest things. For example, how public transport works. Or what a line/queue is. Sometimes I genuinely don’t understand why strangers don’t know who I am and don’t greet me.

At the same time, I want someone to drag me somewhere, but I absolutely don’t want to talk to anyone, experiencing social anxiety almost as strong as a panic attack.

This terrifying state can last quite a long time. After difficult tours, it takes me about a month to come back to myself.

Many of my colleagues return to their families, where they’re genuinely welcomed. Their roles change — for example, from sound engineer to husband and father. That helps them readjust more quickly and fall back into a home routine.

I, on the other hand, return to emptiness.

I’d like to end on a positive note. Otherwise, you might get the impression that we’re constantly burning in hell, surviving on pizza before bed.

I just wanted this post to focus on the flip side of touring, the side that’s often forgotten in the cheering Instagram after-posts.

This insane pace weeds out the weak and the casual. Many make it to the end and say, “This isn’t for me.” Some are broken by the tour and are forced to drop out along the way.

But those who stay… oof! One thing I can say for certain: if someone has been touring for many years, it’s hard to imagine anyone more flexible, patient, and emotionally resilient. They are capable of overcoming any life challenges, often without even realizing it.

We all pay a high price for what we do, that’s true. But we also gain a lot.

Touring is a separate life. The main storyline of your life is put on pause, and it’s like taking a six-week side quest. During that time, the tour group develops its own stories, memes, and life events that no one else can truly understand. Not friends, not family, no one. This little life belongs only to us.

During that time, we experience all kinds of states. Under harsh conditions, people quickly show their true selves — there’s no energy to hide it, and no space to do so — you’re literally sitting across from each other all the time.

I can say with complete certainty that I know some of my colleagues better than their spouses, parents, or childhood friends. And they know me just as well.

Perhaps something similar is felt by soldiers who served together, long-distance sailors, or workers on offshore oil rigs. You’re thrown straight into the boiling pot, and you can rely only on yourselves.

When it’s all over, you can be so tired of each other that you’ll never speak again.

Or it can create a true brotherhood based on merit.

And that is priceless.

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