We don’t know how to have fun, not really [long-term behavioral flexibility]

Laura Vanderkam, Don’t Feel Guilty About Working on Vacation — or About Vacationing at Work, NYTimes, August 13, 2022.

Here’s a problem:

And when we do take time off, we struggle to relax: A 2022 survey of over 20,000 professionals found that 54 percent of people said they weren’t sure they could fully “unplug from work” while taking paid time off.

This vacationing failure has consequences: Some research suggests that being a “work martyr” who doesn’t take time off or works through a vacation isn’t good for work performance. Of course, it’s not so great for people personally, either, increasing stress and the risk of burnout. Some companies are going so far as to mandate that employees take time off — a measure that is perhaps only necessary in a culture where people feel guilty for not being at work, and then feel ashamed of working when they should be relaxing.

Why is it difficult for professionals to relax from work? That’s a good question, a deep one. The next paragraph suggests an answer:

“Maybe we can blame the Puritans,” Emma Goldberg wrote recently in The Times. “Those settling in America in the 17th century thought idleness was sinful, and a six-day workweek sensible.”

I might buy that, it’s certainly worth exploring. Here’s a paragraph from that Emma Goldberg article:

People need a vacation. They always have. But especially when the office is closed, and work is what happens when you’re near your phone, which is to say every waking hour, employees need to recharge. Some are quietly asking permission to rest. Others know that their break is overdue, and now they’re getting nudges from the boss: log off.

I assume that “recharge” is a metaphor; we’re not talking about plugging into some kind of device that charges our, our what? Circuits? What circuits? Neural circuits perhaps?

I think there’s something there. It’s about the long-term maintenance of the brain, about behavioral-mode and long-term plasticity. Work requires a certain general configuration of neural ‘readiness’ if you will; over time that can ‘harden into brittleness’ and that’s not good. You need to get away from that configuration into a different one, one with different requirements and options. Just why, we don’t know. But, you know, I’m inclined to think it has something to do with the requirements of living in the early human environment, whatever and wherever that was. Here’s what Wikipedia says about life during the Paleolithic era:

Nearly all of our knowledge of Paleolithic human culture and way of life comes from archaeology and ethnographic comparisons to modern hunter-gatherer cultures such as the !Kung San who live similarly to their Paleolithic predecessors. The economy of a typical Paleolithic society was a hunter-gatherer economy.[24] Humans hunted wild animals for meat and gathered food, firewood, and materials for their tools, clothes, or shelters.[24]

Human population density was very low, around only 0.4 inhabitants per square kilometre (1/sq mi). This was most likely due to low body fat, infanticide, women regularly engaging in intense endurance exercise, late weaning of infants, and a nomadic lifestyle. Like contemporary hunter-gatherers, Paleolithic humans enjoyed an abundance of leisure time unparalleled in both Neolithic farming societies and modern industrial societies. At the end of the Paleolithic, specifically the Middle or Upper Paleolithic, humans began to produce works of art such as cave paintings, rock art and jewelry and began to engage in religious behavior such as burials and rituals.

That’s very different from the more sedentary lives of office workers. Does “recharge” mean something like “return to a more primitive way of life,” if only for a week or two? Why does the brain need that, if that’s what’s going on?

Let’s get back to Vanderkam’s article:

But is enforcing the binary between work and time off, sharpening those blurred boundaries, the only solution? I don’t think so. Particularly for those of us who enjoy our work, if you can’t — or, let’s face it, won’t — disconnect from work on vacation, let me assure you: It is probably OK. Work is no worse a way to spend vacation downtime than watching TV or perusing Instagram — and creative work can sometimes even be a welcome break from the chaos of a family vacation.

Ah, but watching TV or cruising Instagram aren’t a very good alternative to work mode. They’re more like work mode without doing any work.

Continuing on:

It is also OK, however, to take little vacations during working hours. An hour outside reading a novel, an afternoon bike ride, lunch with a friend, leaving the office (or desk at home) a little early to shop for and cook a special dinner: If you’re thoughtful and intentional about it, dispensing with strict boundaries between work and the rest of life can make a fuller, less burned-out life possible.

OK, but that’s presupposing the kind of behavioral flexibility that’s missing in work-conditioned lives. Notice that phrase, “thoughtful and intentional.” That implies the possibility of deliberate choice. A bit later Vanderkam notes:

When I did a time diary study in 2013 and 2014 of women who had professional jobs and kids at home, about half said they worked what I call a “split shift” — leaving work on the early side to spend time with their children, then doing work at home at night after the kids went to bed. Moving work around in terms of where and when it is done made it more possible for these women to have a big career and a meaningful family life. Men don’t talk about this time shifting as much, but some do it too.

Still later:

I hope we can begin to understand that, for many, work is a collection of tasks, not a collection of hours in a certain place. And time is a finite resource, but one that cannot always be neatly divided into “work time” and “free time.” Taking time for yourself during the work day doesn’t make you lazy, and working a bit on vacation doesn’t make you a workaholic. Dispensing with strict time boundaries should also mean ditching the guilt you might feel for either.

What’s the appropriate mixture of tasks? How do we engender the flexibility to move back and forth between them? What’s the proper childhood foundation? Of course I’m going to suggest that music is important –requiring, as it does, both focused technical practice to acquire and sharpen physical skill and wild-and-crazy jamming with friends – but that’s more than I can squeeze into this post.

But I’d like to end with a passage from an article I wrote some years ago, The Evolution of Narrative and the Self (1993):

Another observation from my own experience seems germane. Back in my days as a university faculty member, I noticed that I was not in a really good research frame of mind until three or four weeks after the Spring semester had ended—my brain had to have one set of modes to handle the academic routine of teaching and committee work and another set for intense thinking. Transition from one set of modes to the other took time [14].

Extended vacations may well afford a similar change in modal organization. One takes a month off from work and spends two weeks on safari in Africa; then boards a small sailing boat and island-hops in the Caribbean for a week, and concludes with a climb up El Capitan. With all that time away from work, the mind changes and we enter different modes of experience. Reading travel books, or novels, even the best, is quite different from going there. Physically restructuring the mind requires time and a steady regime of different sensations, desires, and acts. That “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment” (Coleridge, 1817, p. 6) through which the Rank 3 reader transports him/herself to another world is but a transition between currently available modes. What happens after days and weeks of exploration has a different quality.

That’s what we need, more of that, and deeper.