We need to talk about our holiday fetishism

Let’s get back in touch with what holidays are actually about

Most people feel a number of things when they walk back in the office after the Christmas break. Tiredness. Lethargy. A sadness so deep and painful that you feel like dropping to your knees when you find out there’s no milk in the fridge for your morning coffee, the one ray of hope that was keeping you going in an otherwise meaningless void of bleak despair.

We also feel like we want to book a holiday.

I’ve been looking forward to writing this post for a while now. When I talk about environmental issues with people, this is always the most contentious point. Most people can accept eating less meat, buying less stuff and taking public transport, but as soon as you suggest they should take fewer holidays, shit hits the fan.

I’ve tried to reflect on what it is that drives people to feel so protective about their holidays, and I think the reason is twofold:

1. holidays are seen as some hedonistic break from the monotony of life
2. as a society, we have fallen in love with the idea of going travelling to ‘broaden our horizons’, when in fact, we’ve lost touch with why we go on holiday at all.

The ‘hedonistic break’ issue

Alan Watts summarised the ideology behind this nicely:

Most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure.

I think we’re all victims of this to some extent. During the week, I am hard-working, self-restrained and healthy. As soon as Friday evening hits though, it’s like a switch is flicked and all the good habits I’ve been maintaining come crashing down. Drinking, check. Overeating, check. Slacking off work, check. This also means that I probably spend about half of my weekly budget during those two days.

The reason for this is that I feel like I deserve it. If I work hard and am ‘good’ all week, then why shouldn’t I go out on Saturday? And I think we see holidays as just an extension of that feeling. If we work hard all year, then why shouldn’t we treat ourselves to a holiday?

Now I don’t want to scare too many people here, I’m not against the idea of viewing holidays as a reward for working hard. The problem comes when we extend that mindset to rationalising why we are entitled to compromise our morals: we know that our flight to India is bad for the environment, but we deserve this break so it’s OK.

The ‘losing touch with the reason we go on holiday’ issue

There’s a real lack of critical thought when it comes to choosing where we go on holiday: we search ‘top places to go’ or we see a friend’s picture and think “that would be nice”. We get swept up in the romanticism of going to certain places instead of actually considering what it is that we are looking to get out of our holiday. And when we think this way, it starts to become a competition, or worse, a box-ticking exercise: “I’ve been to 74 countries”.

What this boils down to is that we now go on holiday to signal to others that we are woke, empathetic individuals with broadened horizons. We’ve ‘found ourselves’ and ‘experienced other cultures’, so we’re better people now.

There are some curious ironies in this. We travel to Thailand to experience a culture different to ours, only it’s been completely westernised because we don’t actually want to eat and live like them. We go to see the beauty of the Great Barrier Reef which is being destroyed by the very fumes that got us there in the first place. We justify our holiday to Myanmar by saying that tourism provides the country with our money which improves conditions for the people, when the industry is actually funding their war.

So what should we do about this?

My suggestion is simple: think about the experience you’d like to get from your next holiday, and plan around that, rather than the place itself. Turn the focus of the holiday back on yourself, instead of what you’ll show and tell to others.

Once you know what you want to do, look to the closest location possible to gain that experience. You’ll save money, the environment and time from not needing to travel so far. It sounds so fucking obvious but I don’t know anyone who actually does this.

• For hot weather, look to the Mediterranean instead of South America.
• For nature, look no further than the UK; we have some of the most stunning scenery on our doorstep.
• There’s no need to travel to Thailand for culture when we live on perhaps the most diverse continent in the world.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of what we can experience in our own country (relevant ad campaign), so let’s stop looking to other continents for our adventures and let’s get back in touch with what holidays are really about.

In my next post, I’ll highlight the drastic impact these considerations can have on your carbon footprint.