Welcome to Play Fool, a newsletter about the games we play and the games which play us. This is the third of three pieces about re-imagining the holiday experience, and attempts to provide a not-too-satisfying conclusion. The first is here and the second is here (they aren’t required reading). If you enjoy it, please consider sharing and subscribing.
The conventional holiday, I argued in earlier posts, is a kind of fool’s holiday. The conventional holiday is foolish because it promises us that on the other side of our wanting there is a satisfied having. We falsely believe that a sojourn from the petty injustices of life will leave us renewed, rejuvenated or even changed. This point, I hope, is not a moral one but an observational one. I invite the reader to think of the times where they or those they know have returned from a holiday only to find—within a day or three, perhaps a week—that the same itchiness that occasioned the holiday returns like an old rash. Escaping the benign (or not so benign) dissatisfactions of daily life by taking a holiday is like escaping hunger by binge eating.
The desire to take a holiday comes from a genuine frustration with ourselves that we mistake for a frustration with our surroundings1. We become fooled into thinking that our boorish neighbour or demanding boss is the root cause of our miseries, and so we take flight from them—only to find ourselves facing the same frustrations with the trainee concierge or the vinigrette on our chargrilled asparagus. I suspect this is why the holiday is the abrupt terminus for so many relationships. When we go on a holiday with our partner, all our diffuse frustrations, which we expected to leave behind, become focused laser-like on the person we (supposedly) love. On a holiday, we cannot help but make each other suffer. Trying to make a fairytale happen is one way of encountering its impossibility.
I mention romantic relationships here because it is one area in which we take our holidays a little differently. Where the conventional holiday focuses on where we will go and what we will do, the romantic holiday often focuses on who we will become for the duration of the holiday. This is—I think—a useful kind of holiday to think about.
When we go on a holiday with our partner, we also go on a holiday with ourselves as a partner. For the duration of the holiday we become a heightened, aspirational version of ourselves-in-relationship. We do this, at least in part, because we recognise that the clock-time of modern life makes it difficult for us to know what we are really like with our partners. The difficult and transformative conversations, which come to us only in long twilight hours or over a third consecutive buffet breakfast, only come to us on a holiday. This is why a weekend away with a new-ish partner is one of modernity’s few rites of passage. The holiday can provide an opportunity to learn what we are really like as a partner.
Where the conventional holiday fails to renew us, the holiday with our partner not only renews but transforms us. Again, I hope this point is not moral but observational. Anyone who has travelled with a newish partner will know the holiday as a kind of romantic rubicon. The couple which survives a holiday together is transformed.
One of the things I am interested in here is that this focus on the who of our holidays—who the holiday permits us to become, naturally backgrounds the what and the where. Newish couples are remarkably lassiez-faire about where they go and what they do. A weekend playing board games on the living room floor of a friend’s sharehouse is more transformative than two days of thrillseeking, which for the newish couple may be something of a distraction. What matters for the newish couple is spaciousness. Spaciousness gives them an opportunity to play at being a kind of couple who they don’t yet fully apprehend. It’s not just children who play house.
The newish couples holiday presents us with a different relationship to our desires. Where the conventional holiday focuses on where we want to go and what we want to do, the newish couples’ holiday focuses on who we want to become. We go on a holiday with our partner because we want to be a better partner or a different kind of couple. We may be savouring, or testing, the idea of a bigger commitment like starting an enterprise or moving in together. The newish couples holiday is not a Zen-like experience, free from want and worry, but a reorientation of wanting towards becoming. The goal is not freedom from want, but it’s superposition: The focus of our wanting turns inward (to be a better person) rather than outward (to have different experiences). This means the newish couples’ holiday is a roleplaying game. We become a better partner by pretending to be one.
This desire for becoming is innately human. For all my boilerplate cynicism we are, I believe, fundamentally self-bettering and self-refining creatures. Of course, any innate human desire can be co-opted, perverted or become parasitic.
A few months ago, Disney opened a Star Wars Hotel2. The Hotel promises the tourist an experience of becoming - a “bespoke experience” where “you are the hero.” The experience is structured like a Live Action Roleplaying Game (“part live immersive theater, part themed environment, part culinary extravaganza, part real-life role-playing game”) and—admittedly—even as I sit to prepare to critique it, I cannot help but be seduced by it (it is helpful, at moments like these, to remember the limits of critique). Tourists who go through the overnight experience get to go through lightsaber training, meet characters from the franchise, and even visit another planet and complete missions. The experience is wholly immersive, with themed cabins and high-definition screens providing a wall-to-wall visual experience. The website doesn’t suggest either way, but my sense is that tourists who go through the experience go a few days without seeing the sun.
If the newish couple are playing at being better partners, the Star Wars Hotel promises us the experience of playing at being heroes. At face value, this is laudable—as we rarely get to practice being a fully present partner in life, it is similarly difficult to play at being the hero. Of course, we recognise instinctively that no heroism would actually be asked of us at the Star Wars Hotel. What the Hotel offers us is a thin pretending, like the thrill of an amusement park or VR pornography. The experience of becoming is literally all surface level. We would be unable to forget that we aren’t really on a spaceship and that we’re not really heroes.
Worst of all, we wouldn’t be able to forget that the robed padawan passing us a lightsaber is actually an actor who is being paid to treat us as though we are, like them, a Jedi in training. An overnight stay in the hotel costs a minimum of $1,500USD, which means the actor is creating for us an experience they themselves would never be able to afford. We then must recognise the possibility—though we can never have the surety—that we are probably being entertained by someone who dislikes us, and that we probably deserve their resentment3. We may want to believe we are Jedi, but we recognise ourselves in the eyes of others as rich tourists. Our capacity to feel like a hero, then, is in direct proportion to our capacity to ignore how we are seen. If we fail in our fogetting, we are sure to be disappointed. If we succeed in our forgetting, we are sure to be narcissists4. The foolish promise of the Star Wars Hotel is that a sufficiently visual experience will enable us to experience a certain kind of agency. Yet we cannot escape our suspicion that we aren’t who we are pretending to be.
What makes the newish couples holiday work is that our partner is invested in our becoming, that they are willing to play along with us. The surfaces of the experience matter considerably less than this investment. Indeed, anyone who has watched a child spontaneously develop a sophisticated roleplay with a friend will immediately recognise that the immersive quality of an experience has absolutely zero to do with tricking the visual cortex and everything to do with a shared investment in a make-believe reality. A child can become Luke Skywalker only when their friend agrees to become Darth Vader. I can only become a better partner if my partner agrees to treat me not as the partner I am, but as the partner I intend to become. A proper holiday requires people that care about our becoming.
On my Vipassana meditation retreats, we are asked to observe Noble Silence—this means silence of speech and body. We not only refrain from speaking, but we refrain from eye contact and gestures. We do this in order to approach “mental silence,” one factor of the jhanas in the Buddhist tradition. Importantly, Noble Silence is recognised primarily as something we must do for each other. We refrain from speaking and gesturing so as to not disturb others. We can only experience being truly alone if we do it together.
Of course, I recognise that our surroundings can be genuinely frustrating and inimical to our growth. However, this is a problem that the conventional holiday cannot solve.
Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser website (Disney).
This point has been airlifted from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, an essay by David Foster Wallace (paywalled).
The Hotel seems mostly pitched at families. One suspects the parents’ experience will be one of disappointment (a treasured, nostalgic franchise turned into hyper-commercialised fakery), and the children’s experience will be one of narcissism (being the absolute centre of all experience for two consecutive days). Of course, narcissism, in the long-run, always ends as disappointment.