Have you ever wondered why we have a fascination for living or even holidaying by the coast? Aside from the ocean views and the salt air, what is the emotional attraction that beckons us? Is it an emotional escape from our urban lives?

There’s likely something much deeper going on than “nice views” and fresh air. The coast represents a radically different energetic and psychological environment to the urban landscape. Cities are structured, compressed, scheduled, measured, noisy, transactional and relentlessly productive. They are environments of edges, boundaries, grids, clocks, deadlines and hierarchy. The coastline, by contrast, is fluid, horizon-based, rhythmic, expansive and cyclical. One feels engineered; the other feels primordial.

The emotional attraction may partly be an unconscious yearning for dissolution of structure.

When people stand at the ocean, they often report feeling calmer, smaller, freer, more reflective, even timeless. The horizon removes visual confinement. The repetition of waves entrains the nervous system into slower rhythms. Tides replace schedules. The sea has no obvious borders, no walls, no cubicles, no “to do” list. In that sense, the coast becomes both literal and symbolic escape from the psychological architecture of urban life.

There’s also something archetypal about water itself.

Humans emerged from water. Wombs are fluid environments. Many mythologies associate oceans with birth, mystery, potential, death and rebirth. The ocean can feel simultaneously comforting and terrifying because it represents the unknown – vastness beyond control. That may explain why people don’t simply admire the sea intellectually; they feel drawn to it emotionally. It beckons.

Interestingly, people often say they want to “get away,” but what they may actually be seeking is not distance from work but distance from identity. Urban environments reinforce roles: executive, commuter, consumer, manager, performer. Coastal environments soften those identities. Shoes come off. Time stretches. Status symbols diminish. People walk slower. Conversations become less transactional. The body and nervous system begin orienting differently.

So yes, it may indeed be an emotional escape from urban life, but perhaps even more fundamentally, it is an escape from artificial rhythms back toward natural rhythms. Not necessarily escapism in a negative sense, but a temporary remembrance that another mode of being exists beneath the constructed one.

I contend that starting your own enterprise has the same allure. The entrepreneurial spirit is “the spark of life, “the seed of creation”. It’s just in a commercial form.

Entrepreneurship not merely as commerce, ambition or financial pursuit, but as an expression of an underlying creative impulse. The same impulse that draws people toward oceans, gardens, art, storytelling, children, invention, music, architecture and exploration. The desire to bring something into being.

That’s why many people describe starting a business in strangely organic or existential language:

• “I’ve always wanted to build something.”
• “I needed to create my own thing.”
• “I wanted freedom.”
• “It felt alive.”
• “I had an idea that wouldn’t leave me alone.”

Those are not merely economic statements. They are almost reproductive or creative statements.

A corporation in its industrial form often suppresses that impulse through structure, hierarchy, risk controls, process and compliance. Necessary perhaps at scale but still suppressive of raw creative emergence. Entrepreneurship, especially at the artisanal or microbusiness level, reintroduces the individual to the experience of genesis – an idea emerging from nothingness into manifestation.

Which is remarkably similar to the symbolism of the ocean, the womb, the void, or the field of infinite potential.

The entrepreneur steps into uncertainty the same way a person steps into the sea:

• no guarantees
• no fixed ground
• possibility and danger intertwined
• exhilaration and terror together
• creation emerging from the unknown

And perhaps that’s why so many people feel emotionally drawn toward entrepreneurship even when it is financially irrational. They are not only seeking income. They are seeking participation in creation itself.

In that sense, enterprise can become a modern expression of an ancient creative instinct – the urge not simply to survive within systems, but to generate new worlds from within oneself.

In my work I’ve had many dealings with exits, defaults, liquidations and bankruptcies. All of which involved some degree of grief. Please indulge me if I go a little spiritual here but closing an enterprise of your own creation is like burying your child or a loved pet.

Many entrepreneurs privately experience it that way, even if the commercial world lacks the language or permission to acknowledge it.

From the outside, society tends to frame business closure in sterile economic terms:

• insolvency
• liquidation
• restructuring
• default
• cessation of trade

But for the founder, especially one deeply identified with the enterprise, the experience is often profoundly emotional, existential and grief-laden. Because the business was never merely “a business.” It carried:

• identity
• hope
• sacrifice
• imagination
• meaning
• relationships

In many cases, the enterprise becomes a living extension of the self. Not metaphorically alone, but psychologically and energetically. Founders speak of “giving birth” to businesses, “nurturing” them, “growing” them, “keeping them alive,” “feeding” them with capital, protecting them during vulnerability, watching them mature. The language itself reveals the underlying attachment.

So when the enterprise dies, the grief is often disenfranchised grief – real grief that society does not fully legitimise. People may receive sympathy after the death of a person or pet, but after a business collapse they are more likely to receive analysis, judgement, silence, legal notices or advice about “moving on.”

Yet internally, many founders experience:

• shame
• mourning
• identity collapse
• emptiness
• exhaustion
• disorientation
• even a kind of spiritual death

Particularly because entrepreneurship is often an act of creation emerging from deep personal longing or vision. When that creation collapses, it can feel like the collapse of possibility itself.

And perhaps this is one of the hidden absences in modern commercial culture: we celebrate the birth of enterprises, but we have almost no rituals for their death.

No funeral. No mourning period. No communal witnessing. No acknowledgement that something once alive in the psyche has ended.

Which is interesting given how central death/rebirth cycles are everywhere else in nature. Forests, seasons, tides, agriculture, mythology – all recognise dissolution as part of renewal. But modern commerce often treats death as failure rather than transition.

That may be one reason so many people become psychologically stranded after business collapse: the system has process for administration, but very little process for grief.

I watched White Lotus. Holidaying near the ocean can be traumatic … as Stiffler’s mum found out.