Once upon a time there was a time when going on vacation really meant detaching. When left for the holidays, the world of work was physically behind you, confined to a distant office. Today the holidays have a completely different taste, decidedly more harsh: for many they have become only a change of location where to continue working. Thinking about leaving the laptop for a week home? Utopia.
Last week I was talking to a friend who was organizing his holidays abroad and he made his debut with: “What a mange to take the computer on the go”. So I asked her if in those days she was kept to work. “In theory no, but in practice there is always something to do, you can never know” was his answer.
Cold shower.
The problem is not my friend at all. All this has been normalized by a company that wants us constantly active and performing and I also find myself, often without realizing it, in this trap that we have created. Between a regenerating bathroom and a mojito from time to time we find ourselves giving a peek to the emails, the chats of WHATSAPP of work and teams. You never know that our colleague needs a hand or that our boss send us the ok on that project you have worked for for months.
Always available, never really rested
Whatsapp, zoom, teams and beautiful company have done a miracle or perhaps pushed us into a nightmare: has made every moment of our potentially productive life. That notification that arrives while we are admiring a sunset in Sicily is not just a message, it is a digital umbilical cord that keeps you linked to work. “Sorry if you disturb you, but would you have a minute?” A minute, if all goes well, then turns in half an hour of call with customers or colleagues.
The emails, for their part, have perfected The art of silent persecution. They do not play, do not vibrate, but accumulate like a digital avalanche. Whenever you use your mobile phone to take a photo, here they are chasing you: 37 emails not read. And so the mental blows begin: do you open them? Absolutely, I’m on vacation. What if he were urgent? But come on it will be nothing important, in that case if someone needs me calls me. Okay, I look at a couple …
And there is over. And even if you decide not to give in and not to open the emails before the end of the holidays, their presence contaminates every moment of relaxation with the anxiety of everything that will have to recover once the pacchia is over. The technology, which should have freed us and lightened the workload, made us slave, harnessing us with invisible chains made of calls, messages, emails.
Let’s go back to considering the holidays a sacred and involable territory!
The holidays, which should be a moment of regeneration, turn into a schizophrenically fragmented schizophrenne experience. Half of your attention is on the present, on the experience you are experiencing, the other half is projected towards that meeting to be held on your return, towards that project that advances without you, towards that crisis that perhaps your colleagues are facing while you are “selfishly” on vacation. The result? Let’s go back from the holidays more tired than we left. We have the restful body but the exhausted mind, worn out by a continuous connection that has never allowed us to really turn off our brain. The truth is that we have become workers away from permanent, where the trip is our own life. And with the “Smart Working” (which often has nothing about Smart) all this has worsened.
Maybe the time has come to regain the right to disconnection, To rediscover the pleasure of being unattainable, to return to consider holidays as a sacred and inviolable territory. Because basically that email can really wait. While that sunset you are losing while you read strips of emails or work messages that is not.
The solution? Probably the most effective is to choose a tourist destination where there is no telephone network and where the Internet has not yet arrived …
