This is part of Airplane Mode, a series on the business—and pleasure—of travel right now.
Little about a trip I took last year suggested it should have left me feeling rejuvenated.
I’d signed up for a meditation retreat shortly after deciding to leave one job for another. But soon after arriving, I made three alarming discoveries:
Back in the 1980s, several of the facilitators had been part of the cult in Oregon that is the subject of the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country.
The retreat center in Colorado that was hosting us was currently managed by one of the longest-running intentional communities in America. Some neighbors referred to it as a “cult.”
I was pretty sure I spied a quote from the notoriously violent self-proclaimed prophet David Koresh displayed in the dining area.
Thankfully, after realizing that the quote came from a different David K. and making a pact with two fellow participants to order a Lyft if anyone tried to keep us around forever, I was able to relax. I had a strange but (mostly) lovely week.
Back at home, still feeling buoyant, I concluded that my week off had worked. It had provided the sort of reset that I’d struggled to extract from trips in recent years. But though it was tempting to attribute it to learning a new form of meditation that involved dancing and slamming Nerf bats against the floor, I don’t think that was it. I believe it’s that, for an entire week, I committed to a system that prohibited carrying around our phones, advancing on work projects, or engaging in any other sort of conventional productivity.
Though years ago I used to make full digital disconnection a core part of any vacation I went on, in the past few years, that commitment had slipped away. Instead, I’ve found myself trying to maximize time off by taking workcation after workcation. Sure, I can attend that family reunion. Sure, I can get to my friend’s birthday extravaganza. Sure! I can plan a lake adventure when my mother comes to visit my daughter and me. I’ll just need to hide away for a morning or day or two or three on my main job or side hustle. As I book the flight or cabin—and work through the logistics of child care, which likely means alternating with my wife, who will also be workcationing, I tell myself that it’s better than not going on a trip at all. Isn’t this the point of remote work? We get to say yes to everything—even if we have only a little bit of time off left to play.
No, I’ve finally concluded, three years into America’s compulsory experiment in remote work: The workcation is a farce.
I am far from alone in being tantalized by its promise. Around 80 percent of remote workers are more open to workcations than they were two years ago, a Marriott survey of 2,000 of them found, with a similar percentage identifying it as a promising way to extend a trip. A recent study by researchers in Austria, the U.K., and Hong Kong asked workers to write a letter describing what juggling work and leisure will look like in 2030. Responses were optimistic. One writer worked from a campsite while her children played at the lake. Another was on the cusp of taking a two-month workcation facilitated by the fact that their kids would “do most of their learning from a VR classroom with their tutor.” Few had concerns about boundaries. “I partly own multiple homes in multiple countries and travel with my family every three months to a different home,” another participant wrote. “We don’t split our life between holiday and work, our lifestyle has a lot of play, fun and work built into it and we navigate between them seamlessly to support our wellbeing.”
These people are delusional! Workcations may be alluring, but they also deny something more important than sating our wanderlust: a chance to rest our brains.
Research supports the idea that time off benefits our physical health, ability to make decisions, sense of life satisfaction, and performance at work. But it’s not necessarily how much vacation we pencil in; it’s how we approach the walls between off and office that matters to well-being, Ellen Ernst Kossek, a professor at Purdue’s Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. School of Business, told me. Kossek has been studying work-life balance for decades. In some ways the issues are the same as they were back in 2006, when she conducted a study on teleworkers’ well-being. No, people weren’t yet contending with a COVID-19 pandemic–fueled blurring of professional and personal time so pervasive that government health agencies in Canada began urging people to disconnect. But increasingly employees were doing work, such as making calls and sending emails, in their own homes. The widespread assumption at the time was that this flexibility enabled work-family balance. She did not find this to be true. For some, it seemed to be tied to familial conflict, overwork, and job dissatisfaction.
“What mattered was feeling in control of your boundaries,” said Kossek.
This is an issue no longer affecting just a few teleworkers. As of June 2022, 58 percent of Americans were able to work from home one a day a week, according to a study by McKinsey. Thirty-five percent had the ability to work remotely five days a week, according to that same study. That adds up to tens of millions of workers with a level of location flexibility that was unheard of before the pandemic.
To be clear, I’m happy for all the people who’ve gotten to try living, short-term and long-term, in all kinds of different places, spending more time with family, and applying for jobs that would have previously been off-limits. I’m convinced that the small business owners raving about workcations on their podcast really did get joy and inspiration from working in a new city alongside friends. It makes sense to me that people who have the freedom to take workcations are more satisfied with their jobs than people who don’t. I am one of many people who were able to spend way more time with sick family members, before they died, than I would have pre-pandemic. I am also one of many people who have had the opportunity to experiment with living my commune fantasy with a group of friends. (And yes, that time in Maine was one of the most enjoyable months of my life, despite the fact that we were all still working.)
But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that the act of traveling somewhere turns a trip into a vacation. Because as we do all this, the number of vacation days the typical American gets––a fraction of what many European countries offer—has not changed. Yes, the average remote worker took four overnight trips in 2022, according to the Marriott survey, but they did this with just nine vacation days. A similar study from JobSage found that nearly half of all respondents had opted for a workcation instead of a true vacation because they couldn’t take time off. It wasn’t that they didn’t have remaining vacation days; participants said they often felt pressured not to use them. Nine out of 10 people who’d taken a workcation in 2021 told a passport photo service that the experience was positive or very positive, and even more than that planned to do it again in 2022. Still, I cannot help but conclude that what’s really going on here is that we’re duping ourselves into thinking we have more time off, while the already flimsy partition between work and leisure erodes further.
For those with lofty professional or creative goals, it’s not hard to see why the idea of extending or taking a trip—by working from somewhere new—can feel like a life hack. Around 40 percent of Americans were already checking work email during paid time off, according to a recent study by Go City, a sightseeing ticketing company. This way you get actual credit for working—and you get more done. There’s Elon Musk, bragging that he allows himself maybe two or three workless days a year. There’s Sam Bankman-Fried, pre-FTX implosion, arguing that it’s best not to step away from the office, even briefly, a position once shared by Bill Gates, who also famously detested the idea of a weekend. Though on one level, Instagram is one big advertisement for a vacation prioritization, it’s simultaneously pushing the idea that a vacation exists to mine it for content. And though in interviews successful entrepreneurs and artists often credit downtime for big ideas, we have the competing narrative that breakthroughs come from simply working somewhere more inspiring. So which is it?
Personally, after taking too many trips where I came back feeling more stressed than when I’d left, I’ve arrived at the extremely scientific conclusion that a restorative, perspective-shifting vacation requires four consecutive days off without working at all, preferably without using a phone as anything other than a camera. I do understand that going down social media rabbit holes or posting photos on vacation gives some people true satisfaction. Fine. As a parent of a young child, I also understand that total relaxation is an unrealistic goal for many of us and vacation may be the only chance we get to deal with overdue tasks. Still, I think by conflating travel with vacation, it’s easy to forget the point that’s baked into one of the earliest definitions of the latter word: to be empty, be free, have leisure. We are not empty or free when we’re responding to Slack messages.
Kossek, the time-off researcher, declined to endorse my four-day theory or even the idea that it’s always superior to do vacation in large, fully uninterrupted chunks. Some people may get great relief from using a clearly defined 30 minutes a day to clean out their inbox instead of returning to 1,000 unread messages, she pointed out. (I disagree and feel that inbox cleaning is a gateway drug to elsewhere brain, keeping us from being fully present in the group meal, or whatever it is, that follows.) But she does agree that the back-and-forth is generally bad.
“When you mix them together constantly, you’ll have switching costs from work to nonwork, and it will affect your flow and performance in either role,” Kossek said. That’s been my experience. It’s even plausible that it slowed the progress of this very article, which I began writing, slowly, with resentment, on a poorly structured workcation. The truth is that without former commune members wearing shirts with slogans like “Just Do Nothing” by my side, my four-day rule hasn’t been easy to implement. Still, I believe that trying again is not only possible but necessary.
