My hand hovered over the trackpad as I contemplated the repercussions of the impending decision: to buy a plane ticket to Australia or not? It was Thanksgiving 2011, my second year as a PhD student, and I had been invited to film an interesting field experiment on rip currents down under. The ticket cost about a thousand bucks and I was broke. And to make matters worse, the experiment was only a few weeks away and I had a final project due in my hydrodynamic modeling class that I hadn’t started. I’m a pretty practical person and my inner adult was vocalizing a very rational argument for not buying this ticket. In fact, the debate was completely one-sided. This made no sense whatsoever. I clicked “buy” and went to bed.