Just Relax: Why is it so hard to

Just Relax: Why is it so hard to really take a holiday?

Written by Seraphina Nicholls

Taking a holiday was once a time for a “do-nothing” period of relaxation. Now, it’s time for a “do-something” period of anxious productivity. While the holiday season offers us the annual opportunity to do nothing, the nagging urge remains to do something. We fall victim to mandatory sunrise walks, obligatory gratitude journals, or reading lists that spill over the page. It’s been widely recognised that our day-to-day world valorises productivity and professional efficiency—doomscrolling through a colleague’s LinkedIn is enough to make this point clear. Our digital world, too, encourages a kind of personal and social productivity that includes the continual maintenance of our personal identities and exhibition of our coming-of-age summers. So, with the sometimes-tense holiday season in the rear-view, a closer inspection of “the holiday” (and no, not the movie) is in order.

Taking a holiday encourages a new kind of productivity: the productivity of relaxation. Without a to-do list of academic or workplace tasks to fall upon, the contemporary holiday paradigm mandates socially desirable personal fulfilment. Cue the yoga, daily meditation sessions, and the maxed-out social calendar. The point? Self-optimisation. Whether we really want to do these things or not is irrelevant. So long as we don’t face the guilt of incompletion, we can convince ourselves we are still doing alright. For a holiday, it’s a terrible concoction of mental strain not even the ocean sounds can drown out.

The urge to fill our holidays with activities we’re told are good for us is a means of mindlessly killing time. But without placing ourselves in the uncomfortable space of doing nothing, we have little hope of achieving the genuine comforts and self-reflection that our guided meditations have tried to achieve in the space of 15 minutes. Instead, this could look like assessing your close personal relationships, picking apart your true wants, or navigating the traits that serve and limit you. If the compulsion to do some yoga after this still bites, know that the stretches may dig a little deeper.

A lengthy list of holiday tasks may distract us, and convince us we are relaxing and using our time productively. But it affords little time in the day to sit around and enjoy the scenery. All these empty distractions may catch up to us on one summer morning, as we sleep through our sunrise alarm, and stuck in the quiet of unfilled time, we are struck with the realisation that we have been evading ourselves, our unexamined hang-ups and simmering neuroses.

Martin Parr’s famous photographs of New Brighton Beach come to mind when picturing the pressures of recreation. The saturated tableaus show scenes of middle class aspirationals sunburnt with raspberry ice-creams dripping down their fingers. Their faces have expressions that scream “shut up, I’m on holiday for the day” as they find a spot on the concrete to sunbathe because the beach is too crowded. Each frame captures the exhausting quality of being on holiday, one akin to the modern-day experience. While the photographs were taken almost three decades ago, their point stands.

Hiding underneath the pressures of relaxation and recreation is the insipid cult of productivity that we encounter in day-to-day life. This productive culture disincentivises us from making the time in the day to do nothing. What I am trying to get at here is the mentalities that encourage fulfilment in the workplace via long hours, holiday internships, or concurrent degrees are the same that drive our wacky summertime ambitions and scheduled moments of selfactualisation.

Counterintuitively, the productive impulse neglects the basic patterns of self-care which prioritise meaningful selfreflection and relaxation. While self-care is a buzzword that invites an eye roll, the crux of its basic philosophy is important: to do nice things for yourself that you want to do, without feeling like you owe it to someone. This includes the voice in your head telling you that you ought to be doing more. Ironically, to counter the culture of productivity is to sit and be comfortable with doing nothing for a few hours—or more.

When we can finally take a holiday where we do not feel the pressure to do something, we have found a finite moment of modern rebellion. And it’s one we should hold onto with both hands.