#LifeWellTravelled

Would you look at the calendar — it’s almost Songkran! Oh, long holiday, how I have missed you.

Public holidays these days are synonymous with travelling. It’s like we can’t wait to get away from our regular lives. Be it a quick trip to Pattaya or a search for auroras in Iceland, we just can’t get enough travelling. We embrace public holidays with the same level of excitement as seeing a solar eclipse.

Legally speaking, we get a minimum of six leave days a year. In reality, however, with deadlines, meetings, target and countless other things that keep us glued to office desks, we can’t really say, “Hey boss, I’m just not going to show up at work for a week. Bye!” Taking a vacation requires careful planning, as your absence can affect your project, your team, your company, your country or the future of mankind, depending on what your job is.

Here’s some interesting information I’ve just received. Expedia (yes, that website you secretly check out a little too often when you’re supposed to be working), released the results of a study called “Vacation Deprivation”, which looks at vacation habits across multiple countries. What did it find? Thailand is the fifth most vacation deprived nation in the Asia-Pacific region — and sixth globally.

In this survey, 64% of Thais say they feel very or somewhat vacation deprived and nearly 50% say they do not get enough vacation days. About 72% say they have cancelled vacation due to work.

And here’s the most gut-wrenching finding of this survey — 35% of surveyed Thais would give up drinking alcohol for an extra day of vacation. Take into account how much we love alcohol, that’s saying a lot.

We are a generation that is exposed to approximately five Pantip travel reviews, 10 travel-related Instagram posts and enough Agoda deals to distract us from work, each and every day. By those standards, not being able to travel is just so unfair. The rest of the world is travelling! Why am I here!?

But here’s another way to look at it. I grew up with a father who worked every single day. There was no such thing as a vacation. We never travelled. From birth to graduation, my family had been on exactly three vacations — two to Chonburi and one to Cha-am. I didn’t have a passport until I was 18. To be honest, I didn’t feel deprived or anything, because most of my friends led pretty much the same vacation-less lives. Remember, there were no budget airlines or Airbnb back then. Not travelling was the norm 10 years ago.

Many of us say we love travelling. I suppose that is partly true — travelling often means leaving behind the boring stuff like doing laundry and beating morning traffic. But has overexposure to other people’s trips redefined what travel means? For many, it only means finding a new background for selfies or a change of place for their chronic Facebooking. With the constant need to report everything to the social world, subconsciously seeking approval through posts, we lose the chance to truly enrich ourselves through travel.

Since vacations are so rare for us working people, make them count for something more than Facebook “likes”. Be in the moment. Talk to the locals, not your Facebook friends. Leave your smartphone and selfie stick behind. You’re not CNN Breaking News — there’s no need for live reports and constant updates.