How to get the most out of your vacation

Issue 126: Why it's better to be a Traveler, not a Tourist on your next vacation

Americans are quite literally, the worst at taking vacation time. According to Expedia, Americans not only receive the fewest vacation days each year, averaging just 11 days, but only half of them even plan to use all their allotted time off. France won the spot as the country that gets the most days off, at about a month.

It isn’t merely a matter of vacation days. Very few US employees even used their very limited earned time off! This suggests the difference between Americans and Europeans is less about policy, than it is about social norms. When your peers take time off, you do too. When they don’t, you feel compelled to stare at a computer screen rather than the beach.

Among academics, it’s much worse. We like to brag by posting pictures of ourselves working on a manuscript from our laptop on the beach. It’s a sort of humblebrag “Look everyone, I’m hard at work from beautiful location!”

These cultural differences are so stark that they have become a popular punch line on social media. Our favorite is this observation about the Out of Office messages:

We think the issue is not merely a matter of norms, but identity. It is one thing to go on vacation, quite another to put away work and truly embrace it.

Dom was on his own vacation when he decided to make a change. He tossed aside the intellectual time he had deluded himself into thinking he would read on vacation and reached for something more exhilarating. The book that came to hand, battered and abandoned by a previous guest, bore the bracing title, 'Assignment in Brittany'.

Lion-hearted British secret service agent Martin Hearn parachutes into Nazi-occupied France on a mission to monitor the German invaders and aid the French resistance. For cover, he impersonates a wounded French soldier convalescing in England to whom he bears an uncanny physical resemblance.

Amazingly, Hearn's knowledge of the region is so deep and his ability to speak the language is so skilled that he convinces even the Frenchman's own mother and fiancée into believing he is the man himself!

Eventually, of course, a plot twist gives the game away.

The ability to inhabit different identities sufficiently to fool everyone around was a childhood fantasy. Wouldn't it be amazing to travel the world as a spies, we thought, able to blend in seamlessly every place we visited?

Childhood dreams get left behind. For better or worse, we grew up and became social psychologists rather than secret agents, and when we travel, we travel as ourselves. And yet, even for non-spies, travel is still very much about identity.

Where people travel, for example, is influenced by the fads and fashions of their peer groups—whether to fit in or secure photogenic bragging rights. Interviewing young Australians about their travel choices, Clifford Lewis and colleagues noted that destinations can serve as "symbolic brands" that "satisfy needs for self-expression and prestige". 

One interviewee said, "…you don’t find many people who are our age who haven’t gone to Europe [or] aren’t planning to go to Europe. If they say they don’t want to do it, you’re like WHY? It’s almost like why wouldn’t you want to go to Europe, why wouldn’t you want to do that? Everyone does it." 

Another noted, "It’s an achievement like you put it up on Facebook and then everyone can see it."

This commodification of travel is now common on Instagram or TikTok. It’s a way to signal social class, cultural sophistication, and a cosmopolitan identity.

At other times, people's destinations reflect a desire to connect with deeper aspects of their ethnic, cultural, or religious identities. They might wish to visit an ancestral homeland or undertake a pilgrimage to a hallowed religious site, steeped in ancient meaning. (Or, like Jay, watch hockey).

Travel is frequently a rite of passage, a transition between life stages. Graduates backpack around Asia, tour European cities, or drive across America to mark the transformation from carefree student life to the more serious identities of adulthood and career.

Undertaking one of the most dramatic rites of passage, some Amish youths go on the Rumspringa, during which they leave their closely-knit sect to spend a year or two in the secular world before deciding whether to return to the Amish community for life. (For a fascinating documentary about Rumspringa, we highly recommend Devil’s Playground).

Even a more modest annual vacation (like that which brought Dom to New England) is an identity involving event. When we turn on our "out of office" message and leave the cat or houseplants in care of a friend, it is not just a chance to escape the routines and hassles of normal life. It's an opportunity to briefly try on different ways of being—different possible selves.

As we tour museums and art galleries, we think, "We should do this sort of thing more often." When we eat in interesting restaurants or try new cuisines, we re-envision ourselves as foodies. After a couple of hours kayaking around the bay, Dom deluded himself into thinking, "I could totally become a boat person."

Many of us also take pains to project the right kind of identity when we’re away from home. We might, for example, be eager not to be classified as mere tourists—that category of camera-clad and phone-wielding visitors despised by locals. Instead, many of us want to be seen as travelers, worldly people in search of authentic food, real culture, the genuine experience.  

Google turns up plenty of advice about how to be a traveler, not a tourist. Be spontaneous. Avoid big attractions. Befriend a local. Don't eat at McDonalds!

Having analyzed blogs and online writing by people who self-identified as travelers rather than tourists, Lara Weeks concluded, "'Traveling' is often taken for granted as being an objectively better way of interacting cross-culturally, on the presumption that it does not cause the same problems as mass tourism." For some people, this is a crucial distinction:

"I am as off the beaten path as one can get when it comes to traveling. My interest is in experiencing the authentic culture and true nature of a place as opposed to visiting typical tourist destinations," wrote one blogger.

"I am not a tourist, I am a traveler and the difference between the two is this: one serves to suck energy, the other to share and to learn with cultures and experiences," said another.

It is easy to understand why people prefer to see themselves as travelers than tourists. It is a higher status identity. It is distinctive, yet bonds you to a group of similarly-minded others. It seems more meaningful. And the sorts of experiences sought by people embracing the traveler identity—far from the beaten path—may be associated with greater psychological richness.

The people most threatened by being misidentified as tourists are probably those who travel professionally and make their living from deep engagement with places and cultures other than their own. These include anthropologists, as well as writers for travel magazines who often adopt anti-tourist narratives, focusing on "authentic experiences that are immersed in traditional customs".

Travel is not just travel. Like everything else, it is loaded with meaning.

Travel can expand our sense of who we are or who we could be.

It can bridge life’s transitions. 

It can connect us to our histories or most cherished beliefs. 

It can be employed as a signal that we belong or an indicator of status.

Far from home, professional travelers and vacationers alike work to project certain kinds of identities. 

And sometimes traveling simply reminds us of past and younger selves who would have been thrilled at the identity-shifting possibilities of a secret agent's assignment in Brittany. 

If you have a chance this summer, try adopting the mindset of a traveler and not merely a tourist. Let us know if it changes your vacation experience.

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News and Updates

We recently received an email from George Jacobs noting that he published a detailed review of our book in the Journal of Educational Sciences. We pasted the first page below, but you can read the entire review for free by following the link.

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Catch up on the last column…

Last week, we shared some thoughts on Independence day and explained how national narcissism is realted to belief in conspiracy theories.