Philippa Perry: Feeling guilty about going on holiday? Of course. But you should go anyway

How to fly away on holiday without feeling guilty? You can’t. And it’s impossible to be good enough. And resentment builds if you wear yourself out trying to be. Somewhere, someone is suffering, the planet is suffering, and it’s good to think about that so we can feel guilty. Think of guilt as a luxury; it’s the price you can pay for not suffering, or at least not as much as someone else is. Happiness is frivolous. Anxiety is a civic duty. If you are in any way happy, you are entitled to some guilt. 

I haven’t even left Britain for my holiday, but I can still be guilty because I did a socially irresponsible act and bought a second home by the coast. We’ve had it for nearly 30 years. And now I have the habit of spending every summer here. We might not have gone abroad for our summer “holidays”, but we can still feel guilty. 

My husband says he is “on holiday” because he is not doing his usual summer occupation of filming a documentary. He has a studio here and is in it, making work from nine till six with time off for a bike ride twice a week. Or, if he can’t stand the heat of the kiln in the studio while this heatwave on, he’ll occasionally join me in the pool for 10 minutes to cool down before going back to work. Oh yes, I built a pool: we’re only 20 minutes’ walk from a beach but the sea wasn’t heated – at least it wasn’t when I had the pool built, it’s certainly warming up now. I can feel guilty about that. My being on holiday means I have an extension lead for my laptop so I can type in the garden. But if anyone asks, we’re “on holiday” just because we are somewhere else. Many of us don't know how to rest. We have become so accustomed to productivity that lying in a hammock feels faintly suspicious. Can I feel guilty about not having a proper holiday? Hope so. 

So, I’ve got things to feel guilty about but also things to feel smug about. Not only are we not flying anywhere, we are also not using a hosepipe. My friend recently described the landscape he saw when flying (yes, flying, it’s as though he doesn’t care about the planet) over Britain and northern Europe as looking like a Hobnob. It does too. Our lawn here is flattened hay and it makes a crunching sound like breaking Weetabix when you walk on it. The sheep in the adjoining field still seem to be trying to eat this dry scrub. A ewe died in front of our very eyes the other day so I’m not sure it’s doing them much good. A neighbour held a parasol over it while my husband went to find a responsible adult, the farmer, who threw it unceremoniously into the back of her Land-Rover mumbling something about the cycle of life, while her husband declared soon there would be no food left in Britain at all and we’d all die in the riots, but he’s been saying stuff like that for the 30 years I’ve known him and so far, so good. Once our attention locks on to danger, it starts collecting evidence that the world is falling apart. We notice every wildfire, every flood, every species in decline. Our minds are brilliant at confirmation bias. He is especially good at it. I don’t think he’s ever been on holiday; it’s beginning to show.

Anxiety often impersonates responsibility. It feels active, even moral, but is it either? Our ancestors evolved in small tribes. If there was a crisis, it was their crisis. Today our brains are asked to care about earthquakes, famines, wars, fires, floods, temperature rises and elections happening simultaneously across the globe. We carry far more suffering than we can possibly respond to. Our nervous systems have not yet evolved to cope with 24-hour access to the misery of 8 billion people. 

(Talking of 24-hour access, a friend was staying at an Airbnb in the States and the fridge was linked up to the wi-fi with 24-hour news, and when she went near it to get a drink of chilled water in the night, the whole door lit up with Donald Trump’s face on it, ranting. I think that’s sufficient penance for flying anywhere. It’s practically a carbon offset.) 

Suffering is part of life. Not all suffering is optional, but some of it is manufactured by the mind. There is the pain of knowing that terrible things happen, and then there is the extra pain we create by insisting we must never enjoy ourselves while they do.

But maybe, just maybe, we could justify a holiday abroad by declaring that a rest and a change of scene makes us more useful to the people we love, and perhaps to the causes we care about. If we occasionally allow ourselves to laugh, sleep, swim, read a novel and eat an ice-cream without wondering whether we ought not to have flown here, perhaps we’d just spread the joy, and that would save the world, or a very small corner of it. Think of Voltaire's advice in Candide: "We must cultivate our garden." He wasn't suggesting we ignore the world. He was reminding us that our influence begins close to home. (He didn’t have a hosepipe ban though, did he?)

The planet is burning: we need people who are rested enough to pick up a bucket, not people who have exhausted themselves rehearsing the fire in their heads. So go on holiday and feel guilty: it’s the lesser of two evils, the other one being staying home and feeling resentful about it. If the choice is between guilt and resentment, choose guilt. 

Has guilt become a status symbol because it advertises that we're one of the good people? "Look how awful I feel about the planet." But if all we've done is ruin our holiday, I don’t think the planet has noticed. At some point we appear to have swapped "I care, therefore I feel guilty" for "I feel guilty, therefore I must be caring." 

Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist, writer and broadcaster and is the Nerve’s cultural agony aunt. Her Ask Philippa advice column is on Substack, and her debut novel – Shrink Solves Murder, published by Hutchinson Heinemann – is out now