I don’t do holidays in the traditional sense of cramming two suitcases full of my stuff and then going and staying in a hotel somewhere else for a week or two during which period I will variously engage in polite trivialities with strangers, gawp at and photograph cultural artefacts and/or eat too much/ get wasted/ lie around in the sun reading a book. While I don’t have too much against anyone doing any of the above, I do think it’s a complete waste of money paying a few hundred (or thousands of) pounds for the privilege, especially if you are doing so to ‘escape’ a job you dislike when paying for said holidays.
If you take someone on the median income (£21k/ year) and work on the basis of a holiday costing £800 for a fortnight (which is a relatively cheap holiday), over a 33 year period this would tie that person into working for another 66 weeks, or more than one year. Looked at in this way, if you dislike your job, your holidays are actually extended your misery for a year, or several years if you have a penchant for more frequent trips to further flung destinations.
A second argument against the standard holiday is that on those rare occasions when I’ve done so, I have found the process of finding and booking a ‘holiday’ quite stressful because of the need to constantly be on guard to avoid being suckered-in by a misleading headline price, and because of the irritation about going through part of the booking process only to find out that the actual cost for that particular week in that hotel, or the cost of flight once the cost of baggage and taxes has been added on is 10-20% higher than initially advertised. On principle I don’t make a purchase when I have been misled, so in the past I’ve wasted quite a lot of time on this.
Thirdly, the experience of coming back off holiday is always been a bit of a downer, with something of a readjustment period. Over the years I’ve found not doing such things much more conducive to my equanimity of mind.
A further reason for my thinking holidays are a waste of money is that when people are on holiday, they are, for much of it, not actually on holiday, rather they are engaged in the holiday in order to chalk up the experience, which is intended to be shared with friends and looked back on in later years. As I see it, this is no different to consuming objects as status symbols – except that the photographic narrative has become the status-symbol. In this case, the holiday has become a mere habit and the person exists in a similar situation of unfreedom as the person addicted to what many people would (mistakenly) differentially categorise as ‘mere’ stuff.
(On this note – see my previous post – Everything’s not necessarily alright, I’m on holiday)
I’ve nothing against getting out there in the world and experiencing life, I’m merely pointing out that the way we spend money on what for many of us is our ultimate yearly experience (our holiday) is a bit pathetic.
My own personal alternative to the holiday is to avoid the standard idea of it altogether, pay the damn mortgage off first, then rent the flat out and use that as a base income which will allow me to go budget traveling in a van, on bike or on foot, combined with a spot of voluntary or paid work a period of time – maybe a decade or so. Now THAT is a much more effective way to use Capitalism to your advantage, rather than you being used by it.
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