There's a very specific kind of misery that accompanies the dawning realisation that your best-laid plans are exactly the same as everyone else's.
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That you and your family are pedestrian-level normies, doomed to fall into the same cycles of frustration over and over again, even as you claw desperately for a way out.
Or maybe there's a German word for it?
I'm referring, of course, to the phenomenon that is the ritual traffic jam between Batemans Bay and Braidwood, as Canberrans make their way back to the capital after a long weekend at the beach.
After a stellar weekend at the South Coast, you leave nice and early to "beat the traffic", failing to understand that you, a car driver currently at least two hours from home on a public holiday, are thinking along the same lines as every other car driver similarly located.
Never mind that it's Canberra Day, and half the city had also decamped to what is commonly referred to as Canberra's summer playground.
But it was bad this time around, with some (including me) reporting an extra 90 minutes to a journey that usually takes two hours.
The Canberra Noticeboard on Facebook was awash with comments and updates on the situation, which looks to have lasted all day, with the odd smug pundit boasting about having left by 7.30am, so "no traffic, woohoo"!
Others made the incredibly unhelpful suggestions of other coastal destinations - Kiama, Jervis Bay - that don't suffer the results of the same peculiar hubris of imagining the logical end result of our own very predictable behaviour is somehow able to be circumvented by what feel like well thought-out strategies.
But really, in hindsight, all the signs were there early. The beach that morning had been packed with families who, given there was no public holiday in NSW, could only have been Canberrans.
And, not at all strangely now that I think about it, most of these families decided to leave the beach at roughly the same time.
They, like us, were aiming for the sweet spot - get a last dose of summer, wear out the kids, pack up and hit the road with plenty of time to stop for lunch.
Home by mid-arvo, time to sort out the washing and dinner, weekend done and dusted.
I daresay every other family was silently - or vocally, who knows? - congratulating themselves for having the discipline to tear themselves away early from the sparkling ocean and back into the real world of school and work.
The traffic was worst on the Clyde from about Pooh's Corner onwards - usually a reliable marker for being "nearly at the top so take deep breaths if you feel sick or have a snack and yes we'll stop at Braidwood".
The lined crawled along King's Highway, slowing down as we reached the usually reassuring line of poplars into Braidwood, reaching a standstill at the town itself.
Once in the town, no one was particularly taken aback by the queues, including the bloke at the servo who, when I did the whole "what's with this traffic" schtick, simply shrugged.
"It's the Canberra Day long weekend - it will be like this all the way back...to Canberra," he pointed out.
And yes, the heavy traffic was exacerbated by around 40km of roadworks between Braidwood and Bungedore which, being in NSW, weren't stopping for some random holiday in another state.
It's penance, of course, for leaving the capital on its own very special weekend - the weekend on which we're all supposed to stick around and celebrate.
But, in all our defences, at the tail end of a very ho-hum summer, the weather forecast was irresistible, and there's still a touch of the end-of-COVID elation in the air.
And anyway, how much more Canberra can you get than fanging it to the coast with everyone else, and then complaining about the journey back?
