Soul-Searching and Surfing: What’s the Point Behind ‘Gap Yahs’?

If you meet someone who has been on a gap year, you will probably know about it. It might be the armfuls of beaded jewellery, or the tapestries hung in their room. Anna Boyne asks, what is it that makes people feel the sudden urge to ‘gap yah’?

The stereotype is that someone who takes a gap year is searching for a greater purpose, inner peace and to ‘find themselves’. They often set off for South America, Asia, Australia, or Africa in the hope that they’ll come back as a different person. However, eventually the harem pants come off, the tan fades, and they begin to regret that spontaneous but generic tattoo.

Nevertheless, as Leah, a student at the University of Nottingham, told Impact: “finding yourself sounds like a cliché, but it really is true.” Leah spent a month in Borneo, where she had no SIM card or access to Wi-Fi. She spent her time waking up at 6 am to do workouts on the beach, carrying out humanitarian work and swimming in the sea. It made her realise that “we waste so much time on our phones. Social media is all fake and about how we make our lives look to people we mostly don’t know very well.”

It could be that gap years are a way to procrastinate becoming a real adult with a proper job. This is especially the case with fresh graduates not yet ready to let go of their university days. Instead, exploring the nightlife scenes across the world can seem much more appealing than work. And yes, supposedly ‘immersing oneself in different cultures’ plays some part in the decision too… People who have taken gap years are often mocked for their uncanny ability to slip phrases like “on my gap year” or “when I was travelling” into nearly every conversation. Nonetheless, they almost always do have interesting, bizarre, funny and sometimes downright terrifying experiences to recount - from paying five euros to be slapped in Greece, to paragliding in South America. Maybe, therefore, gap years are about having stories to tell later down the line, long after you’ve sold your soul to the corporate world.

If someone mentions their gap year, they’ll nearly always be greeted with a taunting, ‘don’t you mean gap yahh?’. This stems from the stereotype that people who take gap years are travelling using ‘daddy’s money’, having just left private school and not yet ready to take up their role in the family business.

Gap years seem to have quite a poor reputation amongst parents and teachers. They fear that students will take a gap year and never be able to get back into the education system again. But what does that say about the education system? Maybe the freedom and experiences gained through travelling make you realise that there is more to life than the conventional grind of school, university, work and, before you know it, retirement.

Leah told Impact that travelling gave her a wider perspective on life. “School tells you how important it is to be well-rounded, but the education system forces you into one channel. You have no real freedom or independence when you’re 18.” We are taught to be global citizens but haven’t actually seen much of life beyond the UK and Europe.

As much as we may all take pleasure in mocking people who have taken gap years, they only ever seem to rave about their experiences. Travelling does truly seem to be invaluable, even if you never work out quite what it means to ‘find yourself’.

By Anna Boyne

Illustration by Shaha Alzamil Page Design by Chiara Crompton