How the things we avoid in real life end up being the things we love doing while on holiday

Text: Denise Ngo

Marketing guru Seth Godin once wrote that instead of wondering when our next vacation is, we should set up a life that we don’t need to escape from.  But for most of us, that’s not enough. You can work in the corner office, occupy the top floor of a luxury condo, employ a bevy of girlfriends, and still be afflicted by a cloud of malaise.

At the risk of sounding schmaltzy, we don’t go on holidays to escape from our lives, we go to escape from ourselves. You can sleep in till 11, guilt-free. You can eat pasta three times a day without incurring judgment from your calorie-counting colleagues. You can scribble in a Moleskine on a bench in Paris, in hope that your musings will become the next Eat, Pray, Love. Like Pinocchio, post-transformation, you’ve emerged from your wooden existence into someone capable of enjoying life as a new person. All it takes to experience that type of liberty is a plane ticket, a guidebook, and a sense of adventure.

Click through to read about the things we can only bring ourselves to do when we’re on vacation: