The 2025 vacation life hack

Or: how to write an article that mentions Donald Trump yet remains frothy and whimsical. (Hopefully.)

Sometimes, when you're working on a big project, and I include in that category, “living your life”, it's useful to take a break. We all know that. We all also know that it can be difficult to tear yourself away. No, “difficult” is not correct. We are all coming to the painful conclusion that, in the modern world, tearing yourself away is simply not possible.

Back in the dim dark ancient mists of time, forty years ago, being unable to tear yourself away from work meant physically staying at your office, or in the factory, or out in the fields, or wherever you did your pointless toiling. Sure, some people could bring work home with them — but once they'd escaped to their home, no-one was going to give them more work. If there was an emergency you might get a phone call in the middle of the night, but that was rare. And anyway, you could always go on a proper holiday, and then you were completely free, and again, even if you were the rare kind of demented workaholic who lugged a bundle of papers with them to the beach, no-one was going to turn up to dump another sack of papers into the sand.

Thirty years ago some people foolishly invested in the means to plug their home computer into a phone line, and dial up a connection to their work, and suddenly discover more shit they had to deal with. But the computer couldn't make it to the beach.

Twenty years ago the computer became easier to move, and with better connectivity to the wider world of pain. It could even go to the beach. Blissful freedom was rapidly reduced to those early morning moments lying in bed, and sitting on the toilet.

Now those are gone. You reach for your phone the moment you wake up in the morning, and indeed in the middle of the night. Even in the sanctity of the bathroom you are at constant risk that a little ping! will sabotage a bowel movement. Taking a real break now means not only rejecting a vast societal expectation that you are perpetually available, but also a vicious addiction — in short, taking a real break requires vastly more energy and discipline than all of the work you need a break from.

Thus, not possible.

And this is where I was saved earlier this year by an unlikely hero: Donald Trump.

Let me explain, for those unfamiliar with this person. Donald Trump is the current President of the United States. He is somewhat mercurial. It is impossible to predict just how his latest enthusiasm will affect your life.

As explained previously, one of my many current predicaments is that I am involved in writing a Very Exciting Scientific Paper, which, in the kind of phrase we Big Project leaders like to employ, involves many people and has many moving parts — much like a bustling metropolis during a magnitude-7.9 earthquake.

(Always say “employ” instead of “use”. It's quite simple. Let me show you. Lowly minions use tools. Professionals employ lowly minions. In our paper writing meetings we have spent a lot of time discussing appropriate word usage. I mean employment. No, that can't be right, we're not paying the words. Deployment? That can't be right, either; they're not bombs. Although, to judge by the passionate views they generate, perhaps they are? You can see how difficult it is to make progress.)

As you can also see, a proper break was clearly in order.

Fortunately, my family had planned ahead and booked a ten-day American vacation over Easter, including five days at Disney World. Woohoo! There’s no place to stow your laptop on Big Thunder Mountain! Doesn't that sound like a perfect break? It would, if you had not already read the first paragraph. What kind of irresponsible moron would leave their laptop at home? Especially when they are in the middle of a Very Important Project? And even if their family accidentally left the laptop in a locked box under piles of old clothes in the forgotten wardrobe in the barricaded attic, there is still the phone. Ah, the phone. If necessary, I could probably still do every single task associated with my job on my phone; it would just take longer.

This is where our unlikely hero comes into the story. A month before our vacation Donald Trump announced a crackdown on bad people entering the US, meaning criminals, terrorists, and anyone who didn't like him. You might make the broad assumption that the latter included every single foreign national, but that's what separates you from a consummate professional like a US border officer. Mistrust, but verify. They have a fool-proof method to see directly into the rotten heart of a dirty foreigner: check their phone to see if they have responded to any news item since January with “Holy shit!”

Hence a sudden trend in travelling with a phone reset to factory settings, or a burner phone, or, in some terrifying deranged incidents, no phone at all.

Surely none of this was true? The cases splashed across the media must have failed to mention that all of the innocent tourists turned away at the border were also carrying a kilo of drugs, or their CV listed their current employer as Hamas? Surely no-one was really being detained for weeks or forced to pay for an immediate flight home or shipped off to the gulag, just because they shared a video of a Trump word salad with the heading, “Look at this bozo!”? Right?

That was my determined view, right up until the night before we travelled. I poo-poohed all talk of abandoning my laptop or my trusty phone. I laughed in dismay at conversations with US relatives that began, “I have a friend who's an immigration lawyer...” I ignored that nonsense, and got on with the usual business of preparing for my trip, which of course has always involved a little tidying up of my files, and deleting a few old WhatsApp messages from November 2016 and 2024, and unfollowing a few social media political commentators who, let's face it, were bringing me down.

Plus, there were more important things to focus on. What was I going to take to read? That tale of a family's suffering at the hands of racial intolerance for three harrowing generations? Nah, not in the mood. Maybe the also harrowing but ultimately heartwarming coming-of-age story of a trans woman? No, I'll save that for the summer. Hmm. They say that middle-aged white men are suckers for a solid political biography. But you know what? I've never really paid attention to politics, and actually I'm just a simple fellow with entirely innocuous tastes and no real opinions on anything.

In the end I packed the new book on the Beatles, John and Paul. Everyone likes the Beatles! (In case anyone asks, I restrict myself to the first five albums. A “Rubber Soul” sounds decidedly subversive.)

Up until the night before we travelled, all was well. My laptop and phone were squeaky clean, and I was all set to enjoy some fun and frivolity at Disney World, and still answer a few emails while riding the monorail.

Then I made a terrible mistake. I thought to reassure myself in the worst place possible. Yes, I did a stupid thing. I logged on to Bedwetters Central — Bluesky. And what did I see? A message from a colleague asserting that we important senior scientists could no longer put our students and postdocs at risk by sending them to conferences in the US. Seriously? It was a response to another message, so I clicked on that. It claimed that at a scientific conference the week before, four plenary speakers were detained at the border and two were sent back out of the country.

I thought back to one of those conversations with freaked-out relatives. “We're especially worried about you, because you're a scientist.”

But not a dangerous scientist, right? I do physics. Or, maybe better to say, I do mathematics. Mathematics is completely useless. And, even better, mathematics about black holes. Who could object to black holes? And not really black holes, per se. I'm really trying to draw more attention to white holes.

Suddenly I couldn't get an image out of my head. It was me sitting, alone, on a flight back to the UK. No, it was worse than that. It was me sitting, alone, on a flight back to the UK, while my family rode rollercoasters at Disney World.

In the end, it was the FOMO that got me. The laptop stayed at home, and so did the phone.

And what happened when we arrived in the US? Were we interrogated about our political leanings? Was my lack of a phone deemed justifiably deeply suspicious? Were we quizzed on our views of the colour orange?

Of course not.

The officer saw our British passports, and responded in exactly the way he thought we would understand: he chatted about the weather.

And then, miracle of modern miracles — I had a real holiday. Thanks, Donald!