Vacations are often thought of as a time to get away from the daily grind and recharge our life-batteries. But is it enough? I remember taking vacations and just beginning to feel somewhat relaxed on the last day before returning home and to work.

At the last company I consulted for the employees regularly worked 10 to 12 hour days and often came in on the weekends for “special projects.” One of the project managers I worked with took his family to Disney World for ten days. When I asked him how his vacation was he told me that he spent every day on his laptop working. The only time he spent with his family was dinner. This wasn’t his choice. The company called him constantly with problems that needed his immediate attention.

It appears the prevailing corporate strategy is to work the least amount of people the most. It’s only a matter of time before employee burnout takes its toll. But why should the company care when employees are so easily replaced?

A better question might be why do the employees care. Why do they continue to work so hard and long? I suppose it’s in our nature to want to be productive and contribute to something greater than our individual self.

When I was young I spent much of my free time alone in the fields and woods that surrounded my small hometown. There wasn’t a great deal of pressure or stress in my life, but that time alone somehow seemed necessary. Laying in a field of grass watching the clouds pass by connected me with something greater than myself. I was grounded and happy.

Many years later I had lost touch with nature. I worked a lot. Sometimes I was happy. More often I was simply stressed out of my mind. Sometimes I’d daydream about escaping to the middle of nowhere.

Maybe that’s the type of vacation we need, a few months in the middle of nowhere. No electricity, no lights, no internet, no television, no telephone. I suppose many people would consider this torturous. But it might be just what we need to break these painful habits we’ve come to believe are normal and necessary. One of these is work.

In reality, there would be quite a bit of work to do to survive alone in the wilderness. Yet, the necessity of our efforts would be clear and the benefits would likely be immediately evident. Subsistence requires an altogether different type of work.

We believe we need to work to survive in the modern world. That type of work is usually far removed from what we actually need. So we work for money instead. And the money buys us what? Happiness? Freedom? Security?

Shopping for what we need is much easier than working for it directly. Most of us don’t want to be farmers and the like. Maybe we don’t need to escape to the middle of nowhere to find some sanity. Maybe we just need to find something besides work to define our image of self.