There’s a line by Seth Godin that I keep coming back to:
“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”
It speaks to me, and since you’ve clicked on this article, my guess is it speaks to you too.
Your next vacation might be the main thing keeping your work week tolerable, and the part of you reading this already suspects the trip won’t actually fix it. It’ll patch it. You’ll come home. The week underneath will still be the same week.
You’re probably not on your own in this, by the way. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report put global employee engagement at 20% — meaning 80% of workers describe themselves as either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged”. I’d bet that fantasy of the next holiday is doing a lot of structural work in a lot of people’s weeks.
I’ve spent more than a decade working on this — a few different careers, a few different countries, plenty of trial and error. What follows is three moves that have done real work for me.
Find what you actually want to escape from
The instinct, when you’re burnt out or stressed or uninspired, is to plan the trip. A week somewhere quiet. A change of scenery.
The instinct is honest — your body is asking for a break. But it also obscures the diagnosis, because a trip is a temporary subtraction of the whole week. After a few days off, you can no longer tell which parts were the actual problem.
And the relief doesn’t last. A 2009 meta-analysis led by psychologist Jessica de Bloom, reviewed seven vacation studies and concluded that vacation has positive effects on health and well-being, “but these effects soon fade out after work resumption.” Put plainly: the trip works, briefly, and then you are back in the same week. If the week is the problem, the trip won’t be a permanent fix.
So before you book anything, sit with the week as it is and answer one question: what specifically would I most want a break from? Not “work” or “life” — too big to act on. Which meetings? Which commute? Which commitment you said yes to nine months ago and have been quietly resenting ever since?
Find the specific things. Until you do, the trip is just a delay.
Subtract before you add
The default response to burnout is often to add. A course, a productivity app, a habit, a holiday — sometimes several of these at once. The trouble is that the week was already too full. Adding rarely calms it. Subtracting usually does.
I’m slow at this. Most of the real change in my life has come from subtraction, and I’m still better at identifying possibilities than eliminating them. Adding feels like progress. Subtracting feels like loss, even when what you’re losing is something you actively don’t want.
A starting question: if you could remove one thing from your week with no replacement, what would it be? Then, separately, what’s stopping you from removing it? Not the easy answer (“I need the money,” “I can’t say no”), but the real one. Often it isn’t an impossibility. It’s that you haven’t given yourself permission to subtract without something to fill the gap.
Give yourself the permission. The gap is the point.
Move the trip into the ordinary week
This one is the most practical, and the one I’ve gotten most wrong. The instinct after a great trip is: I need to do this more often, meaning more trips.
The better question is: what about the trip can I bring to my day-to-day?
The things I’ve missed most about vacations aren’t dramatic. A slow morning. A walk that isn’t a commute. A meal eaten properly, with no laptop in sight. None of these require a flight. Almost all of them are available, in some form, on a normal weekday — if you set the week up to let them happen.
For you, it could be getting a massage, going for a swim, spending more time in nature or having breakfast in bed.
You need to figure out which two or three things are doing the most work for you, and how many of them you can move into your normal life.
It’s a process
Book the trip if you need it. You probably do.
But while you’re at it, sit for an hour with the question of what about your week you’d most want to escape from. Pick the smallest specific thing. Subtract it if you can. Then, move one piece of the trip into your normal week. Then do it again next month.
A better life is rarely built in the week you escape to. It’s built in the week you come home to.
