The Lost Art of Taking Holidays
I do not know anyone good at taking vacations. This won't be a shocking statement to any reader living in the bustling neoliberal work culture of the early 21st century. Email is in your hands anytime; the news is there, too. Enough (or too much) has been said about the blurred lines between work and play. Like every post, I'll try to say something fresh here that introduces a new line or angle on the conversation, to make the old problems we're stuck with feel a little bit new and enjoyable to try solving again.
My understanding is holidays did not emerge with any industrial revolution or standard workday; words for rest and leisure are as old as words for work and servitude. This isn't helpful to anyone feeling digitally stressed out, though. Like all great people of great eras, we are stubbornly convinced that the problems of our time are uniquely serious and require new approaches. Have a look at the self-help sections or pop psychology shelves of bookstores, physical or digital, or peruse the ugly scrolling lists of podcasts and online videos discussing the problems of relaxing these days. It's not ironic that most of this content adds to the stress; it's by design. How can one get rich selling self-help if one actually helped people? Better to keep them in distress.
So having not emerged as some brilliant invention after 8-hour workdays were established in a few Western countries, and having not been totally destroyed by the 'leisure-content' market social media throws in our faces, what precisely is leisure?
I'll lean on Byung Chul-Han, a contemporary philosopher who thinks and writes much more eloquently on this topic than I'll ever be able to. We are compressed by our work and leisure duties. We are accelerated, bodies and minds through time, by the convenience and speed of our stupid digital technologies. People wear the psychic g-force of living through fast times like it was a second jacket or second skin. Pressure is some people's default, and it can feel good now and then, like a snug blanket or just-too-hot bath.
The sick pleasure of pressure is hard to escape. I think I spent the better part of my 20s actively searching meaning in pressure. Burn out from the search usually meant searching the same depth of meaning in pleasure -- alcohol or women in my case, usually with mixed results (pun intended). Do a lot of US Americans in their 20s oscillate between chasing pressure and chasing pleasure? It's nice the words rhyme, as though they were designed like opposite poles and we are just swinging between them like mad apes.
I don't think I took a true holiday until perhaps 2020-22, when the pandemic made everything I'd done up to then feel simultaneously romantic and ridiculous. Some think pieces posit that people 'cannot remember' COVID. I think this is nonsense, at best sloppy and at worst propaganda for neoliberal machines that were unhappy at having to slightly slow down and stop for a couple of years, and they are desperate to make people forget that the world didn't end when capitalism tripped. But let's not go too deep too soon; we're writing about holidays, after all.
COVID as an Immigrant
The 'loneliness' of COVID did not hit me as hard perhaps because I have been an immigrant at the outer peripheral of a 'foreign' culture for quite some time. Put another way: it wasn't a change of pace to not really speak to store clerks or train drivers, etc. I still did my job and chatted with people, more or less. Where I lived was also pretty quiet to begin with. The pandemic arrived after I'd ended a long-term relationship, gone through a tumultuous affair, and was pretty well emotionally burnt up. The weird silence of the time, as much collectively psychic as physically manifested, was something of a distracting balm from my own romantic miseries.
About a year in, as my American contacts grew increasingly despondent, it registered for me how long I'd been living with a baseline of social isolation as an immigrant. This revelation cut two ways: I felt 'tougher' than the depressed Americans I knew who missed getting haircuts, etc., but also incredibly pathetic at having lived in something like lockdown for about 4 years already. Not that I didn't go out, have friends, socialize, and so on from 2015-2020, but as any immigrant can tell you, one's social circles are generally limited and impermanent, as people come and go in and out of your life. This can be true anywhere; some of the loneliest people I know live in their hometown, fully capable of accessing community and social life, yet spend most of their time in digital fantasies, whether that's streaming or video games or influencers - you know the deal.
Being an immigrant forever 'outside' an imagined 'mainstream' culture yields a legion of hidden benefits: one sees 'culture' constantly, and is invited to make comparisons and analysis not for mere academic curiosity, but for survival. For instance, how does a post office work in another country? Almost the same as what you might expect, but with tiny differences that will trip up and embarrass you constantly. In fact, if I had to identify one emotion that characterizes my experience of immigration, it's a near-constant embarrassment, as though my presence anywhere here is a funny accident. On good days it is quite funny; I'm usually the biggest and tallest person in any setting (certainly often the hairiest). On bad days, it's exhausting and boring.
During the pandemic, everyone became an immigrant in their own country. Cultural norms shifted; social boundaries and expectations were flipped, reversed, warped. People didn't know how to act. Embarrassment, and its cousins of confusion, rage, and weird glee, were everywhere. People translated past behaviors into new realities very poorly. Do I wear a mask here? Or here? Wear it outside but take it off inside, as though it were a coat or a scarf? Knit crappy home made masks? Buy one thousand from the pharmacy? I want nothing more than to hug someone today; to touch someone; can I? Is it allowed?
Holidays
The world out of sync made me feel more in sync with it. The madness and weirdness of not belonging in your own home was something very familiar to me. Of course we don't know quite how to behave or act. I wonder, actually, if teenagers during the pandemic got some relief from the collective confusion around them. It's confusing and stupid to be a teenager - puberty, social pressures, leaving childhood, etc. Was it nice to suddenly see everyone else go through a pale imitation of 'social puberty', having to learn new rules for their bodies, social distance, and hygiene? I wonder if the pandemic was especially hard on many Americans whose personal hygiene standards tend to be quite low: dirty shoes in the house, barely washing hands and hair, conflating individualism with selfishness. I wonder if some friendships suffered when the virus made it clear who was just a bit more clean than others, and who was a bit more dirty and careless.
I wondered that kind of stuff as I began taking trips during the lockdowns. With no tourists allowed in to the country, the world-famous sites and cities I had yet to visit looked pretty appealing. And upon visiting them, it was exactly as good as you'd think: nearly no people, no lines, no crowds, no hustle. I could look at famous things just as themselves, not having to crop out the massive poorly dressed crowds doing the same. I could walk as slow or as fast as I wanted down old pretty roads meant for accommodating the speed and preference of their visitors. It was as close to time travel as I'll get in those old cities. I can never go back. Those special lockdown visits were once-in-a-lifetime.
Leisure as a Skill
That brief period - 2-3 years really is brief - has a lot to teach. Whatever we did in that time, those lockdown times, could be the basis of a lot of good habits and thinking going forward. More than likely, though, people are already in the frantic business of forgetting that period of time even happened. It's not even ten years ago, as I write this in 2026, that the world 'shut down' in a very significant way. I still suspect a large part of our collective amnesia is propaganda from the powerful sections of society who do much better under a status quo that is frantic, rapid, buying and selling, hustling and grinding, ignoring and distracting itself. Of course part of the forgetting is that the pandemic was a terrible, terrible thing: people got sick, people died, people's lives changed for the worse.
Multiple things can be true at the same time. Taking only negative lessons from events is the habit of the unhappy: everyone hated me at school, I was never good in bed, my exes all pitied me, my parents never played with me, the lockdown ruined my friendships. Negative narcissism is an attitude in which one believes their actions invariably make social situations worse, e.g., I ruined the party, I said something awkward, I made everyone feel weird. The negative narcissist insults themselves to enlarge themselves. Their actions become the core of the event; other people are background characters proving the uniqueness of the narcissist by their negative reactions. US Americans have done extensive work in cultivating this attitude as a cultural trend; social media is composed of large amounts of it.
Negative narcissism is an expression of desire for escaping responsibility for social interactions and empathy. A narcissist does not wish to understand or feel the emotions of others, much less accept responsibility for the ways they might impact these. So they wear ugly clothes, say ugly things, do ugly things, and insult themselves for doing it before others can, changing what should be a collective social norming exercise into a publicly performed individualist exercise. Put another way, narcissists perform shame so that they don't have to really feel it. They express guilt in order to avoid it. They say out loud what should be privately felt and reflected upon, hoisting responsibility for emotions on to others and off of themselves.
What is the link here to holidays and leisure, COVID and immigration?
I think it's this: the negative narcissist treats their emotions and reputation as jobs to be done and overcome, moved on from and ticked off. Social gatherings ought to be leisurely at some level. Of course we'll always be performing for our friends and worried about our hair. But the appeal of socializing is to let down rather than pull up our guards and defenses. The value of friendship comes from the vulnerability we're allowed with people we trust. Narcissists, like people working in finance and politics, do not trust anyone. Vulnerability is seen as a weakness, not an opportunity for connection and exhaling.
Narcissists cannot take holidays, because their fixation is themselves and they can never get away from themselves. COVID forced a great deal of us to be with ourselves, perhaps more than we'd like to be. As an immigrant, I'm consciously 'with' myself nearly everywhere I go, as the looks from locals make me constantly aware of my body as a foreign object in a culturally and ethnically circumscribed space. It's not an accident that a lot of immigrants turn into narcissists. Our attention is constantly called to our bodies and actions by others. It isn't intentional, per se; locals don't always mean to 'other' the outsider. Humans are a visual species and we don't waste a lot of time connecting what we see to how we act around it.
Among its horrors, COVID offered two psychic exhalations: the first was to slow work down and really think about whether capitalism has made us all kings yet. The second was to make us all immigrants (and partial narcissists) in our own homes, suddenly aware of new rules and norms and the option to adopt them. A little travel is a good thing; it makes one aware of their little weird habits and presumptions about normalcy. COVID wiped off some of the thick fog covering people's cultural windows on the world; some things got more clear, others got painfully clear.
Neoliberalism loves a Narcissist, and Hates a Holiday
I'll try and make this a full circle. We live and work in a neoliberal time, by which I mean we are encouraged by our jobs and advertising to seek monetary value in every single thing that we do. Our personal thoughts can become posts; our bodies products; our relations a network to be leveraged; our day a list of tasks to complete. I won't take up space here reflecting on what this means. There's enough said on this by smarter people. I washed the dishes this morning and then asked myself: What do I want to have done by the end of today? Immigrant that I am, I'll always be partially a hustling US American, pathetically chasing my first million dollars.
Narcissists treat their emotions and bodies like products, and this is incredibly useful for neoliberal economic systems. The more value people can be convinced to squeeze out of themselves, the more businesses can commodify and monetize. It's a very intensive cycle. If this sounds off, think for a moment how many people in your social circle behave - in some fashion - like influencers. Counting steps, counting calories, dying hair, posting daily, updating profiles, making their life a list...and then reading books or listening to speakers telling them to not do this, do this differently, or do this more. The rush of it makes me think of laundry machines on fast and hot settings, and we are tumbling around like dirty socks.
A holiday, a true holiday, is the absence of activity. It is not an escape from pressure - this implies some kind of velocity and conscious strategy. It's the emptiness of space, the vacuum, even the cold.
Most people take holidays only when or if they become incredibly sick. This is the closest they come to the emptiness I'm gesturing towards: an inability to work, even if one wanted to. Lying in bed staring at a ceiling not knowing when will be the next time one picks up a phone. More importantly, perhaps, not thinking about it at all.
This absence is the hard thing to find. I won't say more because I am in danger of smelling like the awful New Age trends of the 1970s (or 2020s), where someone writes a big huge book pressuring people to simplify. I don't think you should simplify. I think you should get really, really sick and lay in bed for a while. When you get better, but before you return to the world -- that's the holiday.