Vacation Dread

Trips are for Normies

I am drunk at the poolside bar. I am going to bed at 3am after room service. I am not waking up ‘til 9. I am taking walks to avoid my mom. I am beachside trying to read my book. I am turning around to go find my mom. Am I become full normie-mode? At my brother’s destination wedding, I am over dressed and assembling a platter of food in a convention hall full of boomers. In a strange corral of time called vacation, I am a feral mind who cannot but overthink it, so let’s have at ‘er. 

*in my mom’s voice* “Samantha Marie Willman, what is so bad about all this?”

Vacation is simple, it scratches simple itches with simple means, so why should I go around ruining it all with analysis? Am I allergic to this form of pleasure? Because surely there is nothing to dread… And yet, packing for the trip, that is all I felt.

It wasn’t unexpected though, for a while now, I always experience what I like to call my vacation dread. I’ve found a bunch of articles describing the same feeling. But all they ever do is try to describe it, and conclude with the reassurance; relax, stop worrying, everything’s fine, you can just do what you want, and since this is what you are doing you may as well try to enjoy it. But none of them offer any good insight into why this happens. So here I am, attempting to inspect it in myself.

For me, Vacation Dread is pretty standard and I’ve learnt to avoid it, but when I was 20 I did cancel a trip to Whitehorse, because I felt so bad leading up to it. On this occasion, one week before this trip I was very stressed and there is some practical reasoning to this. I like my place to be really clean when I leave it, and I hate leaving my cat. I spent the week thinking that if I got my taxes done before I left then I’d really be set, but doing those has been the biggest emotional hurdle I’ve had to face in a while. So I agonized about not doing them, and then went into a trip-prep overdrive wherein I thought that old familiar thought, “I just really wish I didn’t have to go”... Which is absolutely crazy. 

But there’s more to it than just prep-stress. In fact, it feels like the dread motivates the prep-stress more than the other way around. So anyways, I made it on the plane, it was a morning flight and I had a McDonald’s cappuccino which I actually really love. And I often get a lot of good thinking done on planes, so I sat with my notebook, asking myself what is all this resistance about?

What the hell is a Vacation Dread? 

The first thought that came to mind was the vogue opinion: People who can’t enjoy vacations are workaholics who cannot sit still, because when they do they are forced to confront all sorts of inner discomforts which they had been avoiding with distractions. 

Now, I’m no guru, but I really didn’t think this is me. I journal, I meditate, I actively seek out my dark corners, I put on Sufjan Stevens when I need to cry. Plus, I love being forced to do nothing, it’s by and far the thing I relish most about long car rides and spa days.

There had to be some other entry point into this. So I asked myself, is there any vacation I can think of that went so terribly that it would cause me thereafter to dread vacations? And what I realized was that completely to the contrary, usually what happens is that; I arrive at my destination and the smell of new air washes through my head, suddenly I am completely enamored by the exhilaration of being somewhere different, and not only do I enjoy myself immensely, but I see the world like it is new.

Which is when the thought came to me: Could I dread vacations not because they are bad, but because they cast high beams on life’s ordinary experiencing?

When a vacation ships me off to an ‘other place’, do I inevitably look back at my usual life, to find it looking a little dingy? Truly, there is something about modern day vacations which are to earlier practices of travel actually extraordinary, or trans ordinary, out of the ordinary.

In the phenomenology (or study of the experiential) of observation, the place where we see things ‘objectively’ is from without. It is from the outside looking on or in, that we notice our lives as movie scenes. Vacations can give us that distance. They halt the rhythms of our days: time gets really long in the moment, but quick in the past, and in a miasma of pleasures and novelty, we can separate the newness from a background against which novelty arises.

What I usually get from vacations is optimism. But what accompanies this normative sense, is also the converse sense that I myself could be living differently, more specifically living better, and that I have no excuse not to be doing so. Quickly optimism morphs into discontent. And although vacations are great, all the questioning winds up being a lot to bring home. I think I have begun sensing the burden ahead of time, and pre-vacation-me just does not want to go through the shake-up.

“I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers,
and arrows of longing for the other shore” *

What troubles me about leaving my life, is that in seeing it from without, I never return to it the same.

Trips are for Normies

Being a common vacation dreader, I feel very envious of people who get really excited about upcoming vacations. Most people I know fall under this category. O, to plan a trip, and then think about it often, and then derive from it a source of tickling and joyful anticipation. It must be such a good thing for the soul.

At the same time, in the last decade or so especially, I have noticed the content of vacation plans has shifted a lot. We’ve been relocating more and more of our real life to the confines of our time-off from it. Vacations provide the setting for so many of our social media portraits and every year it seems like more of our rites of passage get exported offsite also: Weddings, birthdays, bachelorette and bachelor parties. Hell, I planned a family Christmas at an Airbnb once.

Just ten years ago one of my friends got married quite young for our age, the ceremony was in our hometown, I don't think there was a bachelor party, and after the golf-course club-house reception, a group of us drove around to all the dive bars and eventually wound up smoking in the Zellers parking lot till sunrise. We had a lot of fun. Whereas this year I watched myself and friends pour thousands of dollars into travel expenses, costumes, and restaurant food/drink budgets to go to destination weddings and wedding related events. Even deaths that are marked by a family trip to spread ashes at some far away destinations.

So what then?

If I am right in identifying the dread I feel towards vacationing is the sour light of discontent it casts on ordinary life, I would hazard a guess that making vacationing into one’s normal life sort of nullifies or reverses the potential. And that the more concentrations of joy that we relocate to the horizon—dislocating it from the everyday—the worse our daily discontent is gunna grow, right?

The potential of travel I think relies on the traveler's relation to it. Is there a willingness to step away and glance back? Or is the intention to migrate as much of the important stuff as possible to that place, so that when you return home, it is towards that experience that you will glance back?

And so my thoughts return, as they often do, to Bachelard’s insight; that in the dialectic of inside and out, the two are often very capable of switching sides or turning inside-out so to speak. This kind of oscillation does not change the form of the figure at all, but changes radically it’s meaning (like the face which becomes cup).

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* A quote from Thus Spake Zarathustra that often haunts me.