Why Do People Do This? Assessing What Drives Sabbaticals and Gap Years
Some academics have answers
This week’s Substack discusses the driving motivations behind sabbaticals, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t start by sending a huge thank you to Alex Karplus at Business Insider for featuring my story (and Travelries’ founding story) this week. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it here. But now let’s get to our weekly Substack…
I remember when my husband and I were breaking the news to family that we were going to quit our jobs to travel around the world for a year. We got a LOT of questions – about safety, vaccines, diseases, communication, logistics, money, etc.
Only one question really surprised me: “Why go?”
It hadn’t occurred to me that the idea of temporarily abandoning responsibilities and traveling around the world would be distinctly unappealing to anyone. While I was envisioning a life-changing trip, punctuated by pizza school, wildlife encounters, and relaxing days on the beach, the person who asked the question — let’s call him George — was thinking about all the downsides. The questionable bathroom situations, the less-than-comfortable accommodations, and the very real risk (which turned out to be completely false) of the break hurting our careers.
For us, the dream outweighed the risks. But why do most people take these breaks?
If you ask Kira Schabram, Matt Bloom, or DJ DiDonna, you’ll get a clear answer. In 2023, they released “The Transformative Potential of Sabbaticals” — a study analyzing sabbaticals and found these big breaks tend to follow three paths, with their own distinct motivations, patterns, and results. They’ve named these paths:
1. Working Holidays
2. Free Dives
3. Quests
Let’s dig into each of these one-by-one.
Working Holidays:
People who take working holidays are driven by a desire to complete a personal project or a goal. Picture a professor taking a beat from their day-to-day to write a book. Though they may spend some time at the beginning of their sabbatical “recovering,” their breaks soon allow them to dive into their non-routine work.
Free Dives:
Those completing free dives are driven by a desire to experience the world through travel. Read: big adventures. When they begin their breaks, they immediately throw themselves into exploration, taking breaks as they need.
Quests:
Quest seekers, ironically, are less running towards something than they are running away from something else. They are motivated to take their breaks because they feel pushed out of a system that doesn’t feel sustainable. Think: toxic work environments. They consequently begin their breaks by recovering. They also spend time intensely exploring and then applying what they’ve learned through that exploration to their own lives.
When we started our trip, I would have told you we fit squarely into the second category. We wanted to explore the world, and that felt like our primary motivation. I certainly didn’t feel like I was “running away” from anything.
A few years on though, and with a bit more time to process everything, it’s hard not to put myself in the “quest” bucket. After all, I have spent the past two years thinking about what our trip meant to me, what I learned from it, and even wrote a book about it. (Psst… that book is coming out next year.) Plus, I was super burnt out at work and truly didn’t know what to do. I loved my job, but I knew I was collapsing inside.
Not surprisingly, those “quest” seekers are most transformed by their travels. Free divers are modestly changed, and those on working holidays return largely to the same lives they enjoyed before. This is yet further proof that I am, begrudgingly, a quest seeker. Two years out from our trip, I launched Travelries to help other people take transformational trips. (If you haven’t chatted with us about your long-term travel dreams, you can schedule a free consult with us here.)
Of course, understanding all of this in retrospect, I doubt I would have changed my answer to George’s question at the time. Why go?
My answer: Why the heck not?