Taylor Kitsch Let Relationships Fall ‘to the Wayside’ for His Career (Exclusive)

Taylor Kitsch has a goal for 2025: “Got to have a little bit more of a life.”

In the years since he first shot to fame as beloved bad boy Tim Riggins in the first season of Friday Night Lights in 2006, the actor, 43, tells PEOPLE he’s struggled to balance his career and personal life.

“There’s never going to be a balance,” he admits. “But I’m more conscious of the lack of balance now in my 40s than I was in my 20s and 30s.”

Through the years, Kitsch has had to relocate to places across the globe for months at a time to film projects (he recently shot his new Netflix Western American Primeval in Santa Fe, N.M., and the second season of Amazon Prime Video’s The Terminal List in Hungary). The nomadic nature of his job, he says, often allows his relationships to fall “to the wayside.”

“I was telling a buddy who’s an actor, ‘Man, I can’t even get a dog yet,’” Kitsch recalls. “He was like, ‘Man, I can’t even buy more than four bananas, because that’s how great my lack of commitment is.’ And it’s all a choice, and I think as you get older, you’re like, ‘Okay, you got to find these balances because life just goes so fast.’”

“The catch-22 is I keep getting these great, fulfilling jobs,” he continues. “It’s like, it does make me happy, and I love what I do. They’re very intense roles, so you need to be super myopic doing them, and you got to push your relationships and everything else to the side.”

When choosing jobs now, Kitsch says he looks for projects that are “big risks.”

“I want to keep pushing and make sure I’m not getting comfortable,” he says. “It’s so much to go to work and you sacrifice a lot, willingly, so it better be worth it. Now, it’s about the right stories and the people I’m working with. I’m way more comfortable with myself and who I am as a person and as an actor.”

Outside of acting, Kitsch has been busy building a nature retreat on 22 acres of his land in Bozeman, Mont. He hopes to serve kids, veterans and the sober living community as a “tip of the hat” to his sister, Shelby Kitsch-Best, who got sober from opioids and other drugs in the mid-2010s.

“I didn’t even know sober escapes existed until I had the crash course with my sis,” he says. “I was like, ‘Man, it sounds incredible to offer people a chance to reconnect in nature and slow things down.’”

During time off, Kitsch often takes his van to the backcountry for fly-fishing or photographing wildlife.

“After you do jobs that are intense like Primeval, you need a breath,” he says. “There’s no better place for that.”

And next month, he’ll be making a big step towards his 2025 goal.

“I’m going to Patagonia with two of my best friends on a two-week motorcycle ride to photograph the pumas,” he says. “It’s those things I want to start doing a lot more of.”