(Actually) Unplug Your Next Vacation

September is a heartbreakingly beautiful month, but it’s also the cruel end of summer. The kids are pulled out of the joyous freedom of summer vacation and stuck back into orderly rows and told to keep quiet unless they raise their hands.

And for adults? The business world is back in full swing. No excuses. Get to work!

For many of us that also means checking the news headlines in the morning to find out what is going on in the world. It was one thing when you looked at the morning paper and then checked into the evening news. When it is 24/7 it’s another thing entirely.

Give me just one more day of holiday freedom from care! 

Oddly enough, I find that when I spend a long weekend without looking at the news, somehow the world remains intact. We made it. Another round.

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Have you noticed that Facebook keeps finding new criteria for creating notifications? They keep finding new reasons to put up those irresistible little red flags. By now I am so conditioned to interacting with Facebook, that I tend to interrupt whatever I am doing to check out the latest notification. It’s a constant interruption in my concentration, like a constant all-day brain battering.

Yes, time spent in isolation from the news and from social media, can not only be okay, it can actually be healing. 

I have become used to asking first thing at the hotel check-in desk: “What’s the Internet arrangement here?” But now I am increasingly looking for ways to escape. Today the Internet makes it so that we are never really away from work. 

The conditioning is so strong in my case, that if the Internet is there, I have to look. Did I get a new email? Is there some emergency I need to tend to? What is happening in the news? What’s the latest threat to my well being, to civilization itself?

So we’ve moved from a place where the Internet is the most important amenity of any hotel, to where getting off the grid, out of reach of the Internet has actually become an attraction. 

If we want to take a break from the Internet, we have to go somewhere where there is no access, where we don’t have the choice, period. Cold turkey.

(If we have the choice, we’ll be on it. We’ll be immersed again and we may forget where we are and barely notice that we ever left home.) 

It becomes increasingly important to find ways to break that conditioning. Hence we now see the proliferation of tourism offerings that are designed just for that purpose. Now being “off the grid” has become an ideal in itself, a rare luxury.

Google “off the grid tours” and you’ll come up with about 6 million entries. Researching that in itself may take a whole afternoon. The world has become so ubiquitously wired now that you may have to go to Patagonia to find a place that is off the grid.

But maybe that would be a good thing!

Take a break, a real one, on your next vacation. You'll see the world moves on, but this time you're (actually) rested and refocused enough to get back on the wheel.

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