Recently, I heard there is a word called “skillcation.” It is a coined term combining skill and vacation, and apparently refers to a trip where you acquire new skills or knowledge while on holiday.
In other words, even your days off are now supposed to be about growth.
For me, a vacation used to mean lying on the beach, reading a book, eating gelato, and, when evening came, looking at my slightly sunburned arms while thinking, “I really did nothing today.” Apparently, that is no longer the case.
These days, the kinds of activities I often notice when traveling are hands-on experiences such as “making basil pesto” or “ancient-style basket weaving.”
It seems we have entered an age when a vacation spent doing nothing is no longer enough.
For example, if you go to Kyoto, apparently it is no longer acceptable to simply eat the matcha parfait you were looking forward to and call it a day. A proper trip now seems to include sitting in zazen at a Zen temple and facing your inner self. And if you go to Switzerland, it is not enough to gaze at a lake from a green hillside and feel satisfied. Only after milking a goat, making cheese, and having an experience that helps you “reconnect with the earth” does the trip finally feel complete.
At that point, it is less a vacation than a light form of training.
Strangely enough, the less useful something seems in everyday life, the more likely it is to become a popular form of “training” while traveling. Perhaps that is what gets described as a journey to rediscover your true self. It is true that after a vacation, hearing a colleague say, “I went to a spa, sat in the sauna, and otherwise just napped” is less of a hook than hearing, “I tried foraging in Scandinavia.” I have to admit, it’d definitely make me think, “Oh, that sounds interesting!” It would make a perfect Instagram post, and on LinkedIn, it could even serve as a bit of personal branding. “Amazing!” “I want to go too!” Comments like that might pile up, and perhaps even the follower count would grow.
Maybe we now live in an age when the “results” gained from a trip are valued more than the trip itself.
When you think about it that way, this is not just about vacations. When we walk, our step count appears. When we sleep, we get a sleep score. When we exercise, our calories burned are recorded. If we read a book, our reading time is tracked. If we study a language, there is a streak showing how many days in a row we have practiced. Before we know it, our daily lives have come to be evaluated in numbers by all kinds of apps.
Of course, numbers have their benefits. They make our efforts easier to see and can help us manage our health. But as we keep being pushed forward by those numbers, we may gradually be leaving behind the kind of feeling that cannot be measured, like simply thinking, “I felt happy today, somehow.”
In recent years, perhaps we have started seeking “results” even from our vacations and measuring ourselves too much by numbers.
“Doing nothing.”
Perhaps that has quietly become the hardest thing of all.