#EPHEMERAL MEANING HAPPY HOW TO#
Emphasis is on achieving something on the vacation that is not achievable in work life, and the ideal is to be active while away, for example by learning how to cook, losing weight, getting in shape, finding oneself, challenging oneself, living primitively, finding balance in life, volunteering to help less fortunate people or reconnecting with oneself or one’s family. the kinetic elite of knowledge workers) as well as to workers with no self-realization options in their career. These vacations can pertain to workers who are seeking self-realization through their work (i.e. What is under scrutiny here is ‘self-realization vacations’ – vacations with a focus on personal fulfilment. It therefore seems that the institution of vacation offers no mobility when it comes to being a wage earner in the contemporary neoliberal economy. When the worker faces a demand for self-realization in the office as well as out of it, work comes along for the vacation even when the worker manages not to bring a laptop. Secondly, it seems that workers also face an ultimately stressful self-realization imperative when going on vacation (du Plessis, 2014). Particularly in the U.S., where vacations are not a law-given right of the worker, vacations are often oblique, mixed into terms such as ‘business travel’ and ‘working vacations’. Also, those who travel as part of their work are faced with ultimately stressful allure of new avenues of self-realization (Costas, 2013).ĭoes the institution of vacation offer some relief in this desert of work? Well, firstly it can be difficult to get a vacation these days, as current vacation practices are also fragmented due to increasing periodic employment and growing flexibility in the labour market, and the previously well-defined boundaries between work and vacation are corroding (Anttila, 2007). Rather than ‘freeing’ the worker, decentralization and anti-bureaucratization has resulted in massive work-encroachment, seemingly unsolvable issues of work-life balance, and skyrocketing numbers of people diagnosed with stress and depression (Sennett, 2006 Petersen, 2011 Honneth, 2004).
#EPHEMERAL MEANING HAPPY FREE#
It seems though, that the ideals of ‘work as play’ that came forth in the late 1960s have not lived up to their promise that workers were now free to become whomever they wanted, as claims to self-realization have become yet another source of surplus in the capitalist economy (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005 Rose, 1999 Taylor, 1991 Willig, 2009). Self-realization demands in and out of the officeįor ‘privileged’ workers, mobility and self-realization is now attainable through work. In this way, the mobility exercised in travelling away binds workers ever closer to their labour.
This article posits that ‘vacation fantasies’ – fantasies that portray the illusion that vacations will bring about personal actualization or wholeness in the subjects who pursue them – promise workers the self-fulfilment they are perhaps unable to achieve through their work, and by doing so, these fantasies ultimately function to keep the workers libidinally invested in their work by allowing them to be more well-adjusted to their own alienation.
The main object of analysis is the bestselling self-help memoir Eat, pray, love, but also the film version of the novel, advertisements, newspaper articles and guidebooks are included. The analysis draws on the toolbox of Slavoj Žižek to examine fantasies and practices of vacation travel as they relate to contemporary neoliberal demands for self-realization. Questioning a view that celebrates vacation travel as a little nugget of freedom, this article analyses how workers are accompanied by a pressure to achieve happiness or personal fulfilment when they travel away for rest and pleasure.
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