This may well seem like a treatise on curmudgeonly, sour-faced miserliness, so with a heading like this, I know I’ve got some explaining to do. The first thing I feel the need to declare is that I am not against fun or relaxation; I’m just against the belief that they represent the pinnacle of human achievement, the goal of life or some kind of curious, consumer-culture entitlement.

Chain yourself to your desk!!!

Working compulsively because you have no idea how to relax or take time out is of course a lamentable condition; but it’s also largely a straw dog, manufactured by what I’ll call the ‘culture of hedonism’ which has thrived in recent years. Along with many people, I resist holidays because I want to nurture my career. I am not bowing to pressure from tyrannical superiors or thrusting rivals; I’ve put a lot of time, effort and hard-earned money into building my skills and knowledge and I take enormous pride (and pleasure) in cultivating them further. I want to excel, not merely get by; and not because I have some arrogant ambition to be top dog, but because I genuinely believe that our lives are enriched by our potential to flourish in our chosen paths. And it seems to me that our life paths, rather like our economies, tend to stagnate when they fail to flourish.

If you love your job, it will be no problem!

Being self-employed undoubtedly makes one rather more cautious about holidays, but I do not wish to spit bile at those with the security of predictable, salaried pay-checks at the end of each month. I was once in this position before leaping into the freelance void, and even then I was cautious about holidays.

I mentioned earlier that competition from rivals was not a major factor in my antipathy to vacations, but I do think that occasionally a certain degree of opportunistic zeal creeps into one’s work colleagues whilst one’s back is turned. I’m not a misanthrope, but I like to think that I’m not guilessly naïve, either. My brother – a resilient, tough, tireless salesman with a luxury car manufacturer – took a two-week honeymoon holiday as a young man. Whilst he was away, a colleague rifled through his sales-book and ‘closed’ deals that were all set up and waiting for his return. A blissful fortnight in the Bahamas was vaporised in an instant when he got back – thanks to his ‘colleague’, his boss decided that he hadn’t made his targets and asked him to clear his desk (he was still on his probationary period as a relatively new member of the team and had absolutely no employment protection). Thankfully, he was able to dust himself off and move on to better things (he’s a qualified pharmacist now and loves every minute of it).

We always go for the under dog, or cat

Even if we could be completely sure that little outbursts of malice will not temporarily overcome some of our more ambitious team-mates in our absence, there are times when our personal stewardship simply cannot be dispensed with. A good friend of mine had just qualified as a psychoanalyst; years of training, mountains of books and a seriously dented bank account had finally resulted in her embarking on the career she had always dreamt of. In her first year of practise, she fell in love with a young man from her native Italy. The relationship blossomed, and he enticed her into taking a week in Rome. This, she knew, was a little unorthodox for psychoanalytic practise: patients are normally carefully prepared for breaks in the analysis weeks in advance, and analysts tend to take their vacations at highly conventional points in the calendar (winter/Christmas, spring/Easter, summer). In analysis, people often experience a heightened degree of dependence on their analyst, and need to be painstakingly forewarned of interruptions to the therapy to minimise feelings of loss and disruption. A holiday in Rome in the middle of February didn’t really fit with this scheme, but she went ahead with it anyway and gave what little warning to her patients that she could. If you can’t act on impulse when you’re in love, when can you? On her return, she discovered that a particularly disturbed patient had reacted very adversely to her absence and had made a serious suicide attempt. Her career (and the patient) survived, but she was quite devastated by this episode and contemplated throwing the towel in for a very long time afterwards.

We always go for the under dog, or cat

Perhaps what I am trying to say is not so much ‘Never take a Holiday!’ as ‘What will a break do to your career right now?’ If a vacation could place in jeopardy all that you have poured your personal and financial resources into, deferring it may be a wise, not a desperate, decision. And if your career is, as careers ought to be, not simply a ‘job’ for you but a chosen life-project, endangering it needlessly is a form of self-sabotage.

We always go for the under dog, or cat

However, if the pursuit of your career leaves you feeling exhausted and depleted, depressed and wretched, it’s not a holiday you need but a change of career. This is one of the great beauties of pursuing a career – it is not a prison sentence: you can walk away from it and do something different if it turns sour and brings little but joyless dissatisfaction. I suspect that most of us underestimate how versatile and resourceful we can be when we’re intent on following one path and one path only. I’m all for committing to a project, and doing so with vigour and enthusiasm, but I think wilful blindness is always a handicap. Knowing when to close down and move on is possibly much more productive than taking momentary escapes from chronic misery by fleeing to a holiday resort; this is when needing a holiday becomes a symptom of unhappiness. Treat the underlying unhappiness, and this particular cure will start to feel far less necessary.

We always go for the under dog, or cat

Careers need devotion, attention and even love. Your career should help you flourish as you help it flourish; if this isn’t happening, start investing in a new career, not a couple of weeks in Cancun!

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