'Quiet vacationing' is another made-up trend, but it's also a reminder of how much needs to change about work
Here's what you need to know about the quiet vacationing trend.
In the summer of ‘22, the phrase ‘quiet quitting’ spread far and wide across the internet and inspired a near-endless barrage of thinkpieces, features, and rants. I don’t think it’s too bold to say I played a part in this happening. After watching a TikTok video from the coiner of the phrase, who defined it as “not outright quitting your job, but […] quitting the idea of going above and beyond, […] performing your duties but no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life”, I wrote an article for Metro.co.uk. The video was already getting a tonne of engagement on TikTok, but my article was the first to cover quiet quitting on a news site. The article generated a lot of clicks, got shared all over Twitter (back when Twitter threads and featured moments were a thing and publishers could actually get traffic from the site), and soon enough everyone on the hunt for internet engagement was hopping on the quiet quitting coverage trend.
The amount of conversation quiet quitting sparked made a lot of people want to coin similar ‘work trends’, because this is how a lot of online journalism and marketing works (hence my coining of chronoworking, because I know that if you come up with a term it has a good chance of spreading). Oddly, a lot of brands attempted to recapture the magic specifically through the use of the word ‘quiet’, as though that had been the secret sauce all along rather than the fact that quiet quitting had neatly captured a previously unnamed sense of disillusionment coupled with the backlash against the girlboss hustle culture era before it. Over the last two years, people (predominantly recruitment companies who want to have their brand mentioned in online articles to boost their SEO) have tried to make ‘quiet hiring’, ‘quiet promotions’, and ‘quiet firing’ happen.
Now, the hot new quiet work trend is - so people online say - quiet vacationing. This is when a worker travels abroad but pretends they haven’t, or takes the day off and pretends they’re sat in front of their laptop, diligently toiling away. Sometimes said worker will use scheduled messages or a mouse-mover or strategic Slack statuses to maintain the illusion, or they might blur their background on video calls to disguise the fact that they’re in a hotel. You might be reading this and thinking hmm, that sounds familiar, and you would be right. This trend is in fact recycled and reheated, having previously made the rounds last year as ‘hush trips’.
Are people actually quiet vacationing in hordes sufficiently large enough for this behaviour to be a trend? Probably not. Is this a new behaviour? Also no, not really, although the increased prevalance of hybrid and remote work makes it an option to more workers. There are almost definitely some workers who are indeed furtively booking flights and sending emails from the airport.
But quiet vacationing is a trend because people say it is, and people say it is for two main reasons: to get traffic for publishers (and, to be clear, fair enough! I’m all for it!) and to up paranoia among bosses and managers and further push the idea that really, this whole working from home thing was a big mistake and we need to be back in the office now. To be clear, that latter reason is not fair enough and I am not all for it. When this type of discourse spreads, I feel a slight sense of dread, because I promise you it does have an impact. Every article positioning quiet vacationing as a trend, every video of someone talking about their hush trip that inevitably goes viral, every casual mention of quiet vacationing as though it’s a ‘thing’, all of it builds a picture in the minds of those in charge. If you tell someone enough times that something secretive is happening in a widespread way, of course they’re going to suspect that workers at their company are involved. Of course they’re going to start seeing quiet vacationing as a genuine looming threat. Trust in workers goes down, and all the unhealthy attitudes towards workers - that they’re lazy, that they need to be monitored, that they’re all out to cheat the system - go up, up, up.
But if we do accept that quiet vacationing is happening (even if it’s on a much smaller scale than what’s being suggested), we need to investigate what this says about work culture. The chief takeaway? Things aren’t great, folks.
Some thought starters. Why is it normal (particularly in the US) to not have enough vacation days/annual leave to actually enjoy life, to be able to rest and recuperate and to live? Why is it accepted that you have to work five days a week, 9 to 5 or longer, if you’ve got the essential work done in three days, or in the mornings? Why do you need to be at home or in an office to get work done, rather than in an Airbnb in Copenhagen? Why is it that in some jobs all that actually needs to be done to be seen as ‘working’ is sending emails and appearing online? If that’s all that’s actually required of those jobs… why do people have to work 40 hours a week? How have we got to a place where bosses would rather have someone idling about on their laptop rather than them just having a day off?
From an individual perspective, quiet vacationing is, of course, a terrible idea. The stress of being found out will dampen any joyous holidaying. You won’t be able to enjoy the sights of you’ve got to drag your laptop around the museums with you, if you’ve got your eyes glued to Slack just in case someone asks something of you that needs to be done ASAP to maintain the illusion of you working. Your intended rest will not be properly restful and the idea that you’ve spent money on a hotel and transport just to half-work, half-stress-about-not-working, will make you feel vaguely nauseous as you have your patatas bravas.
In an ideal world, none of this would be necessary. Efficiency would be valued above presenteeism. We’d be able to work from wherever we’d like without any secrecy required, to clock off whenever we’re done for the day, to take holiday as we like. In a less ideal but still more ideal than the current state of affairs world, the moment we thought we needed to quiet vacation, we’d take that as a sign that the job we’re in is not right for us and we would quit and find a new role where the work/life balance is better. Alas, jobs are not falling off trees and this is not an option for many of us.
Also in this more ideal world, I would say something along the lines of: I understand the temptation to quiet vacation, but please don’t do it because it will just add to a negative image of workers and bosses will order everyone back to the office and presenteeism will just get worse, and perhaps instead you could be honest about wanting to be elsewhere or to not toil away in the hopes of encouraging change for everyone. But this is a very optimistic view and one in which honestly saying to your boss that you’d like to work reduced hours and take a week off wouldn’t lower you in their estimations and perhaps get you sacked. This is not the reality for many, many people. So, I’ll be more pragmatic and say this instead: if you have annual leave, use it! You need proper rest and relaxation, not the stress of a ‘workation’ (I hate ‘workations’). If your workplace sucks and won’t give you adequate time off, meaning the only way you can try to unwind is to lie and do mad things like secretly go to Paris, do try to find a better job where you’re valued for more than just the number of hours you spend with your bum in an office chair, but in the meantime do whatever you need to get by.
Work-related reading recs:
Why we get so scared of being ‘told off’ at work (I VERY MUCH RELATE)
I love this story of novelists staying motivated with a daily video call at dawn
Why trying to get people to work more hours is dumb
Do you have a work woe?
Want advice on a work problem? You can get it here! Ping your problem to workingonpurposenews@gmail.com or message me through Substack and I’ll give you some guidance, with the help of additional experts where needed. Don’t worry, you will remain anonymous.
"Why is it accepted that you have to work five days a week, 9 to 5 or longer, if you’ve got the essential work done in three days, or in the mornings?". I loved this whole paragraph. Shows how strong we are conditioned to maintain the status quo. The problem is there's always more work, more 'busy work' to fill your time. The cardinal sin is to say you're "not busy".
God forbid if organisations trusted employees with their own time and created an environment where people want to do good work.
PS. What did you make of the new Man United owners telling all their staff to do 5 days in the office, or have voluntary redundancy? I get the impression it's an easy way to 'show' something is changing - first thing to blame for organisational-wide failures is Alan in Finance working 3 days at home.