Cabin Fever Is a Scam Invented by People Without Cabins

Respectfully, I doubt anyone has ever cried beside a crackling fire while wearing moose pajamas.

The phrase “Cabin fever” is officially in the dictionary and it is defined as a state of restlessness, irritability, and boredom caused by being confined to an indoor space or isolated location for an extended period.

I have NEVER met a cabin that made me feel annoyed or irritable by sitting inside it for extended periods. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. Cabins make me never want to return to my real home…a bland structure with siding where I can hear my neighbors sneeze if the windows are open.

There’s no fever in a cabin. There is peace and quiet, and hopefully a sketchy-at-best internet connection.

Every time life starts feeling overstimulating, my brain immediately starts fantasizing about cabin life again.

I want log walls and a fireplace. I want a wood staircase leading to an A-frame loft where my writing studio should be. I want to sip hot cocoa from a moose mug nestled between my palms, which may or may not be wrapped in Canadian maple leaf mittens.

And naturally, this lifestyle would be carried out in sweatpants and a flannel lumberjack coat seven days a week.

Being stuck indoors at your real home is nowhere near the same as re-wilding yourself in a cabin in the woods out in nature.

Let’s take winter as an example. Winter in a cabin feels cozy yet rugged, kind of like I’m earning my right to survival by tossing another log on the fire.

Summer in a cabin feels nostalgic. Hasn’t everyone spent at least one childhood summer in some sort of family cabin?

In a cabin, even making coffee feels like frontier living instead of a depressing one-button Keurig brew that you don’t have to work for. If I’m going to exist indoors, I at least want it to feel intentional.

I feel like people don’t really hate being cooped up. They just hate modern life, because where the hell is the charm in it?

But THIS? This cabin is oozing with charm.

You just open your internet browser and hit up Airbnb. I’d bet almost everyone lives within driving distance of a hidden cluster of cabins somewhere, whether tucked into the mountains, buried in the woods, or plopped beside a lake.

The ones I’m showing here have full kitchens, hot showers, pre-chopped firewood, and yes…even Netflix you could watch while sprawled across a loft bed wrapped in enough moose blankets to survive a historical winter event.

But the best feature about these particular cabins? Shelves full of board games! Can you imagine meaningful interaction with the humans you’re cabin-ing with rather than plugging into something electronic?

Absolutely prehistoric behavior.

When I stayed at the Yoho Chalets (pictured in every photo), nearly all twenty cabins on site were occupied….and we were in the middle of a pandemic!

One of the biggest surprises was learning that everyone staying there had flown in from different parts of Canada to visit a place I can reach in three hours by car.

It was a bit shocking to realize that foreigners (a.k.a. eastern Canadians who speak French 😂) flew 4000 kilometres across the country to sit inside a log cabin nestled in the Rockies.

First of all, it tells you the dictionary guys need to get the hell outside and take a road trip or a flight once in a while.

It’s not cabins that people are irritated by…it’s their own homes! Or maybe even the pace and structure of modern life itself.

Each evening at this woodsy haven, unshaven fleece-hoodie-wearing humans would emerge from their cabins around dusk to light up firepits in the yard. It seemed we all silently agreed that once the sun started setting, civilization was temporarily cancelled in favor of marshmallows and smoke inhalation.

That’s when I’d wander around the property waving at strangers like I owned the place and chatting with fellow homebodies.

We all showed up for S’mores, coffee with Baileys, and the oddly satisfying feeling of knowing we paid good money for the privilege of “roughing it.”

Funny how we do that, isn’t it?

We’ll willingly spend hundreds of dollars to smell like smoke, wear the same hoodie for three days straight, and struggle to make coffee without pressing a button…yet somehow feel more alive than we do sitting in climate-controlled comfort answering emails.

And I’m here for it because everyone should have the luxury of existing where time doesn’t matter unless it’s firepit time.

To me, cabin life is a privileged life.

My family has summertime lakefront property with several tiny cabins scattered around it. Aside from the main house, the cabins are basically glorified pre-fab garage packages plopped into the woods. VOILA…cheap cabins, sans heat.

We use wood and potbelly stoves to stay alive when it’s chilly. We use outhouses for toilets, a generator for hot water, and we have to put actual effort into making morning coffee. No button-pushing involved.

Cabins are places where our teenage boys grew up, taking the time to sit and play cards with their grandma, or have floating dock wars to see who’s the last man standing. They ran around shooting pellet guns at paper targets on trees.

It’s where adults make candle holders out of driftwood and do the physical work of paddling a canoe…all in the name of a thing called LEISURE.

And bacon. Even vegetarians eat bacon at the cabin.

Cabins have this low-key superpower of slowing us back down to human speed, and for me, that’s the entire appeal.

Screw granite countertops and smart appliances. I want to relearn and re-understand how to be a basic person again and there’s no better place to do it.

If you’re going to suffer from cabin fever, it’s probably best to do it at a cabin. 😉

Alright, enough of my nostalgic woodland propaganda.

I’d genuinely love to hear about your relationship with cabins. Do you even have one? Would you ever consider a cabin getaway or are you firmly against “roughing it”?

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