So here we are at the symbolic end of summer, and the symbolic end of the vacation season. Personally, I love vacations, being lazy by nature. But I know that not everyone shares my enthusiasm. This summer I’ve had plenty of opportunity to study other people (and myself) in a state of leisure. While I am usually relaxed to the point of inertia, my fellow vacationers often seem nervous, anxious, and restless. In France I watched one busy professional, down from Paris for a couple of weeks, wash his immaculately clean car three times in three days, and vacuum the interior too. He wasn’t coping well with leisure. He just couldn’t stand doing nothing.
Busy and hardworking people often have this problem with vacations. Psychologists tell us that work gives us our identity – so what happens when work stops? All our familiar routines are disrupted, and we wake up each morning not knowing what to do. I have an easy answer to this – do nothing. But more energetic folks schedule lots of exhausting activities and sightseeing expeditions, so that their vacation will be as much like work as possible.
Family vacations are particularly stressful. Couples and children are thrown together much more than normal, perhaps cooped up in a single hotel room, or for long hours in a car or a plane. This can be the opportunity for a second honeymoon, or a fresh outbreak of hostilities. If two families decide to vacation together things will inevitably blow up at some point, and the multi-generational family travelling together is like one of Mr. Kim Jong-un’s unguided missiles. They don’t call them nuclear families for nothing.
So, for the survivors, the return home is a mixed experience. On the one hand nobody really wants a vacation to end, but on the other it can be an enormous relief to get back to the familiar routine, the familiar bed, the familiar food, the familiar climate, and perhaps the familiar language. The kids go back to school, the pets come back from the pet hotel, and normal life is resumed. It’s not uncommon for returning travelers to experience a kind of guilty post-vacation high.
Fortunately, technology has provided an antidote to vacation stress. Travel may be hell, but now we can go anywhere without ever losing sight of our normal world. No matter where we are – in a nice restaurant by the beach or gazing into the Grand Canyon or at the Mona Lisa or the Parthenon – we are sure to be surrounded by fellow travelers of all ages with their heads bowed, gazing down at their tiny screens and ignoring the sights they have come so far not to see. Whatever appears on those screens – a message from the office perhaps, or a reminder about somebody’s birthday, or a picture of a friend’s new puppy – is more interesting than anything else could possibly be.
So, we never have to come home because we’ve never really been away. We’re all connected, all the time, never more than a click away from comfortingly familiar people and things, and at last we have the ready solution to the pesky problem of leisure. We stop, and yet we continue, we go, and yet we stay.
Copyright: David Bouchier
