Clocking off! The rise of millennial life sabbaticals

From tech tycoons and politicians, to mere mortals alike, Gen Y have had it with the grind and who can blame them?
The Millennial life sabbatical offers this generation the opportunity to think, do nothing and do everything
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Charlotte Lytton21 August 2023

In November, aged 31 and a bit, I became a fully-fledged millennial cliché — by going on a sabbatical. While a marriage, mortgage or kids might once have been the typical next steps for those in my cohort, an extended break is becoming an increasingly common option for tech tycoons, politicians, actors and mere mortals alike; a much-needed time-out not just from work but, well, life.

Last month 32-year-old LADbible co-founder Arian Kalantari announced that he was stepping away from his £160 million empire — a decision he reached after a seven-month break realigned his priorities. It’s the same story (though likely with less in the bank…) for a string of millennial politicians who have announced they won’t be returning to Westminster come the next election, including Dehenna Davison and Mhairi Black, once the UK’s youngest MP when she was elected aged 20 in 2015, who is ready to part ways with her “poisonous” workplace. Actor Tom Holland also recently spoke of taking a year off work following a role that “broke” him — he’s now living in a house share and playing golf with pals.

Call it millennial burnout — on which books have been written and a study earlier this year found affected 40 per cent of over-thirties — if you want, but the laundry list of reasons for a life hiatus abound. A backlash against two years of Covid-enforced boredom, an ever-extending retirement age (after a decade already at the grindstone), no chance of home ownership and the raft of well-documented life milestones we should be hitting but simply can’t.

An extended period of travel is calling for many of the “job-hopping generation”
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While older generations might once have been able to press pause thanks to sabbaticals offered by workplaces to long-serving employees, the benefit appears to be dwindling — or immaterial to most thirty-somethings, who have itchier feet than their job-for-life parents. Dubbed the “job-hopping generation” by workplace consultancy Gallup, a fifth of millennials swapped roles in the past year — three times more than any other age group — while research last year confirmed that we stay in situ for an average of just 2.75 years.

I was four months into self-employment (after a comparatively lengthy six and a half years at my last job) when I boarded a flight to South Korea — the first stop on a trip that would last more than five months. An extended period of travel had been an ambition since I entered the school-university-job cycle some decades earlier, and while I had until then crammed trips into every available window, routinely returning to the office from an overnight flight (so as not to waste a second of potential adventure time), this, finally, was it.

A few of our friends were going off travelling, and it really inspired us to just want to do the same

When I’d set off, filing from the back of Guatemalan minivans, writing columns with half a functioning keyboard on a Tongan island and waving my arm around for signal atop a Texan mountain had not been on the agenda.

But unlike Kalantari and the politicians changing lanes entirely, my career break instead turned into more of a round-the-world reporting jolly when I realised that I rather liked working after all — and that travelling on a whim does not come cheap, no matter how many budget flights and one-star motel rooms you frequent along the way.

Going cold turkey from work when your career is in full swing is an altogether new prospect for the majority of millennials, many of whom graduated in the thick of the 2008 recession and have slaved away with little to show for it since. It’s entirely unlike going on holiday — even the best fortnight of all time is far too brief to offer a proper real life reprieve — nor the gap years of old where teenagers would spend a year pinballing between Full Moon parties in Thailand or making some now likely-cancellable attempt to “build” a school in Africa. An avowed non-crier, I sobbed twice on the day I left. The trip so surpassed every expectation; a period where, for the first time, I actually had time — to think, do nothing, and do everything.

Being surrounded by people doing the same has prompted marketing director Sara Hailan to book a four-month trip across South and Central America and India, for which she sets off with her partner in two weeks.

“A few of our friends were also going off and going travelling, and it really inspired us to just want to do the same,” the 32-year-old says, adding that “if we’re going to do this, we have to do it now.” The timing is right, as “we feel like we have absolutely killed ourselves for the last 10 years… if I just continue this way, this is all my life is going to be until I retire.”

This supercharged pre-midlife (or perhaps mid-lennial) crisis has hit Hailan’s entire circle. “Every single one of my friends, regardless of what industry they work in, feels exactly the same. There’s a mentality in big cities like London and New York where you could always be doing more and you should be working harder, and you should be hustling... and it’s a bit never-ending. There’s just so much more to life.”

Running her own business left Harriet Newton, 30, feeling much the same way. “I was just run into the ground consistently; my life was consumed by work.” Trying to redress the balance, she bought a camper van, spending weekends in the Peak District and Snowdonia in an attempt to switch off — but rather than helping her to unwind, it convinced her that “enough is enough. I need to explore what’s on the other side”. She closed down her hair studio and took a year out, travelling to Turkey and Iceland, Spain, Thailand and Tenerife, as well as UK trips to Cornwall and Scotland.

The older generation underestimate how much harder we have things… I can’t afford to buy a house.

That time away from work was well-needed, says Newton. But after a while, she was surprised to find herself craving routine. “I think you start chasing these dopamine hits; the next thing you do needs to be bigger and better to make it more exciting than the last thing. And it got to the point where every day was so exciting that you didn’t get those same hits or same feelings that you would normally get from a trip away.”

A nomadic lifestyle had left Newton “exhausted”. She says: “I could see how maybe I was repeating some of the patterns that I’d had in work. I had actually replaced that busy working lifestyle with this travel lifestyle.” That realisation proved formative: since her recent return to the UK full-time a couple of months ago, Newton works two or three days a week in a rented space, rather than running her own studio — and evenings and weekends are a no-client zone.

Living without a proper salary reshaped her attitude towards wages, and how many hours she needs to put in as a result. “It’s been quite liberating to understand that you don’t need to spend anywhere near as much money as we think we do half the time… if we can live for a lot less, then we can work a lot less.” The other major take-away from her sabbatical has been an “empowered feeling”. Newton says: “If something in your life is not working, you can change it at any time.”

Two years to Covid have meant shelving long-hoped for sabbatical plans for some Millennials
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Of all the generational differences between our parents and ourselves, these trips are surely chief among them, with the notion of going on a months-long holiday — and possibly changing course altogether at the end — anathema to those who would have now been ensconced in family life.

But expecting today’s thirty-somethings to follow that same path is all but out of the question says Hailan, adding that the older generation “underestimate how much harder we have things… I can’t afford to buy a house; it’s something that’s so out of reach. So I feel like people are just thinking of alternative ways to live their life and spend their money that brings them happiness, rather than really focusing on those things which don’t even feel achievable”.

For others, losing what would have been two carefree years to Covid have meant shelving long-hoped for sabbatical plans. Josie Moore* was due to take a six-month trip spanning New Zealand, south-east Asia and India when the pandemic hit — and with travel restrictions repeatedly making that impossible, last year she and her boyfriend “sat down and had a bit of a chat about whether we still wanted to go traveling, or whether we wanted to have a family. And we decided that we would want to start trying to have a family”.

While the 33-year-old teacher wishes their break could have gone ahead as intended, she is optimistic that their former and current ambitions may one day blend. “When we do manage to have a family, we are both keen to continue traveling, and exposing kids to the world,” Moore says. “We’ll just need to travel in a slightly different way.”

*Name has been changed

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