I have a friend in the finance business who convinced himself for several years that by taking his family to Hawaii for their vacation, he was hacking the time zone system. He could get almost a full day of work in from, say, 3 o’clock in the morning to 8 o’clock, when his children woke up. And then he could hang out with them on the beach, by the pool, snorkeling, whatever, feeling stress-free.
After all, the markets back east were closed. Everyone he worked with was essentially done for the day. He was officially on vacation but also not on vacation. It was, he said, a brilliant strategy.
“It’s really all about having special time with my kids,” he’d say. “These are precious memories for them. I get to focus on them and just be with them, you know? This is what they’ll keep in their hearts. This is how I want them to think of their childhood — just them and me on the beach in Hawaii.”
What he didn’t realize — until his wife and children staged a kind of intervention — was that by getting up at 3 in the morning and working for five hours in the brutal and competitive world of the financial markets and then hanging out with his children, by 3 o’clock in the afternoon, he was an exhausted and rageful monster.
The precious memories his children were collecting were of a manic, mood-swinging psychopath who at a certain point every afternoon began screaming at them before falling asleep in his poi.
Which is why vacations are tricky things. On the one hand, you want to be able to let it all go, put work and responsibilities behind you. But on the other hand, there’s nothing quite like the feeling of paying your bills on time and making a decent living, and that makes it hard for some of us truly to let go. “I just didn’t like the idea of a day which was all outflow,” my workaholic friend said. “I thought that if I spent the morning working, making money, keeping the financial trains running on time, I’d be more inclined to kick back and relax for the rest of the day.”
I’m not sure the human brain works that way. For instance, once, early in my career writing for Hollywood shows, I was sitting in the writers’ room during a particularly grueling rewrite, and we were all stuck trying to come up with a really funny joke to end a scene. There were about nine of us in the room, maybe a dozen Emmys among us (not mine, of course) and several seriously rich guys (not me, of course) who had expensive cars and giant houses and second houses near the beach precisely because they were able to come up with things like the last joke in a scene.
But at that moment, we all had nothing. One veteran writer turned to another who was staring into space. “What do you got?” he asked. “Not a thought in my head,” was the shrugging reply. “Not even thinking about it. I was thinking about retiling my pool.” And we all laughed.
But a few seconds later, that writer who insisted he was thinking about his swimming pool pitched the winning joke, and we all went home. What we needed, apparently, was a little mini-vacation from all of that thinking. We were thinking about that one joke so hard that the solution was to think about something else, even if it was only for a moment.
The mini-vacation strategy would have been better for my friend. His time at the beach would have been a lot more enjoyable for his family had he simply spent his days on his phone and computer, looking up every now and then in a distracted way, forcing a smile, pretending to pay attention to his children as they frolicked.
Every so often he could have participated in some brief amount of family fun — his mini-vacation nested inside the family’s maxi-vacation — and returned quickly to emails, conference calls, work emergencies, and spreadsheets. That would have been more effective than trying to outwit the universal Law of Vacations, which is that someone is always having a miserable time thinking about how much it all costs and how to pay for it.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
