Why Taking A Career Break To Travel Is A Good Idea.

Editor’s Note: This editorial draws on more than 25 years of independent travel, first-hand experience and publicly documented evidence and regulatory changes. Many of these editorials were written years before the issues became mainstream, and have been updated to reflect current developments while remaining true to their original arguments.

Career breaks are not some reckless indulgence for busy people who have become a little burned out. They are not just gap years with a mortgage, midlife crises with a backpack or an irresponsible escape from ‘real life’. For a growing number of adults, professionals and exhausted human beings who have finally had enough of being told to postpone their own lives, career breaks are becoming one of the sanest decisions they can make.

And frankly, it is about damn time.

I have spent more than 25 years travelling the world, and I have done so while getting my education, building successful careers and still managing to juggle all the mundane responsibilities life throws at you. I managed that because I saw life differently to most of the people around me. I stubbornly refused to be swayed by the dogma of a society that does not care about you, and never understood why I should care about its judgement as a result.

Decades later, my Gen X cynicism and deeply self-sufficient work-to-live mentality, always at odds with the generations before us and even some that came after, is now being heralded by younger generations entering the workforce as the ultimate blueprint for corporate survival. It has just been rebranded as quiet quitting, radical work-life boundaries and refusing to give your entire self to a job that would replace you in a week.

Who would have thought Gen Z would become the spiritual successors to the fuck-you mentality of Generation X? Maybe the generation everyone was too afraid to manage, and mostly just left alone until the street lights came on, had a point all along.

And now, with career breaks, sabbaticals and remote working becoming increasingly normal, I feel more vindicated than ever in saying this: your career is nowhere near as important as you’ve been taught to believe. Your loyalty to it or your employer will not be thanked or rewarded. Your life belongs to you. Not your employer, not your job title, not some outdated social script that tells you to work yourself into the ground now and maybe enjoy yourself when you are too old, too tired or too broken to do half the things you dreamed of.

Apparently, work/life balance is a good thing now. Who’d have thought?

Career breaks and sabbaticals are not pipe dreams anymore. They are not fantasies to file away for retirement, lottery wins or some mythical point in life when everything is finally convenient. They are practical, powerful ways to take control of your time, protect your health and build a life that actually feels like it belongs to you.

Because your career should fit around your life, your values and the things that give you purpose. It should support the person you want to become, not consume everything you already are. And if taking time out to travel helps you remember that, then maybe it is not an escape from real life at all.

Maybe it is the first honest step toward building one.

Look After Yourself, Because No One Else Will!

I have not exactly lived what most people would call a conventional life. With two separate degrees, various postgraduate qualifications, two wholly different professional careers, countless career breaks and sabbaticals, and more than 25 years of backpacking around the world under my belt, my defiantly obtuse attitude to work, life and travel has always put me at odds with the traditional life script society tried to force on me. And with many of the people around me who accepted that rigid path of school, work, bills, mortgage and kids, more bills and death very early on.

And honestly, I am very glad it did.

Because that life script was always a con. Work hard. Be loyal. Do as you are told. Wait your turn. Build your life around the needs of your employer and maybe, if you are very lucky, you might get a few years at the end to enjoy whatever is left of your health, your energy and your dreams.

Screw that.

I always had a sense that there was more to life than that. Even as a child reading my old cloth-bound copies of Around the World in Eighty Days and The Odyssey, I had a sense that the world was much bigger than the narrow path society quietly expected us all to follow, much bigger than the neat little script we were all expected to stick to. I learned very early on that if I wanted to see that world, if I wanted a life that was bigger than work, bills and waiting for permission, then I had to take it. I had to build it myself. No employer was ever going to hand that to me. No manager was going to sit me down and say, “You know what, Mike, you have given enough of yourself to this place. Go and live your life for a while.”

Quite the opposite.

I have had annual leave refused during heavy periods at work, so I rang in sick a few days later. From the Philippines. I have had extended sabbaticals refused because there ‘wasn’t enough staff’, so I quit, because that was not my problem. It was a management issue. Hire enough staff. Plan properly. Treat them well enough that you can retain them. Do not build your workforce around guilt and then act surprised when people stop playing along.

And the funny thing is, I knew exactly what would happen when I came back. They were still short staffed, my skills were still in demand and I could walk into another job whenever I needed to. Which is exactly what I did. Usually into a higher-banded, better-paid role too.

And yes, it pissed off colleagues who saw that as being rewarded for refusing to play the game properly. But that was their problem, not mine. That was the point. I was not cheating the system. I was refusing to let the system cheat me. Their anger was never really about me taking a career break or coming back on better terms. It was about the uncomfortable realisation that perhaps they had more choice than they had allowed themselves to believe.

That is not recklessness. That is understanding your own value.

The world my parents and grandparents grew up in, where you could get a good job for life, afford a decent lifestyle on an ordinary wage, buy a home without selling an organ and retire with a comfortable pension at the end of it, has long gone. In its place we have a world of rising costs, insecure work, endless pressure, vanishing benefits, devalued education and employers who will happily talk about wellbeing while squeezing every last drop out of you before throwing you away the second you are no longer useful.

I’m sure no matter what you do, where you work or what career you had, we all know workplaces like that.

So why would you devote your entire life to it?

Why would you work yourself into the ground, postpone every dream you have, sacrifice your health, your time, your relationships and your chance to see the world, just to prove loyalty to a system that would replace you without a second thought.

That is batshit crazy.

And perhaps this is the rebellious, leave me the fuck alone Gen X spirit talking, but the idea that your career should fit around your life, not consume it entirely, is starting to look like the sanest mindset of all.

You can see it now in the way younger workers are forcing the conversation around work-life balance, remote work, flexible hours, mental health and meaningful employment. They are not asking for work to be the centre of their identity like Boomers or Millennials did. They are demanding work fit around the lives, values and futures they actually want. And if an employer cannot offer that, many of them are far more willing to walk away.

Good.

If employers thought Generation X were difficult because we popularised ‘work to live’ and refused to put up with their bullshit, they have a huge shock coming with Generation Z. We were considered rebels, outliers. Now this attitude is becoming mainstream.

Because, like many of my fellow Gen Xers before them, the younger workforce now are starting to realise where the power really sits. Careers are not sacred. Employers are not owed your entire existence. Work is a transaction, not a religion. And when your skills, labour, experience and time are what an employer needs, you have far more power than you were ever taught to believe.

Because this is your life. Not your employer’s, not society’s and not the property of people who still think working to exhaustion is a virtue. You do not owe your best years to a job, a title or a set of expectations that leave you a martyr to your career.

And that is why I created the life I wanted to live for myself instead. Now don’t get me wrong, I wanted an education, so I fought hard to get one. I wanted certain careers, so I went after them. I worked my arse off, built skills, climbed ladders, took responsibility and did all the things we are told we are supposed to do in those careers.

But I never forgot that the point of doing all that was to build a life, not surrender one. That is why career breaks, sabbaticals and long stretches of travel were never distractions from my life. They were how I made sure I was actually living it.

Doing It For Yourself

And that meant making a conscious decision, over and over again, to put my own priorities ahead of everyone else’s expectations. Every career break I took, every gap year or backpacking trip I went on, and every plane I boarded despite people telling me it was irresponsible was a deliberate choice to build my life around travel, not spend my life trying to fit travel into whatever scraps of time work decided to leave me.

Did that suit my place of work? Who cares?

Did my bosses like it? No, but so what?

It was not their life I was living.

Is that selfish? Yes, probably. But one of the perks of being selfish is that I don’t really give a shit.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being selfish when it means protecting your own time, your own health, your own dreams and your own chance to live a life that actually feels like yours.

There is a huge difference between being selfish because you do not care about anyone else, and being selfish because you finally realise that you are allowed to care about yourself too.

And I still live that way now. I have deliberately built my work around the life I want to live, not the other way round. I work hard, I create opportunities for myself, I make more than enough to pay the bills and keep a roof over my head, but I never lose sight of why I am doing it in the first place. Travel has never been something I squeeze into the gaps between work. It has always been one of the reasons I work at all, and now that paradigm has given me a very good life.

It is an old trope, but it is still true. I work to live. I do not live to work.

In essence, I have been able to build the best of both worlds because I had the mindset to say, “No. I am not giving all of myself to work. I am doing what I want with my own life.”

There is no way I am missing out on everything I want to do, everything I want to experience and everything this world has to offer just because I am waiting for some mythical perfect time when work finally gives me permission.

That time may never come.

So take the career break. Plan the sabbatical. Use your annual leave properly. Reshape your life around the things that actually matter to you. Do it sensibly, do it responsibly, but do it for yourself.

Because no one else is going to live your life for you.

Why Career Breaks Are Good For Employers Too

For years, employers treated career breaks, sabbaticals and extended time off as some kind of inconvenience. Something awkward to manage. Something indulgent. Something that disrupted the rota, the team, the project or whatever fragile little staffing model they had built around everyone being permanently available.

But the world has changed, and employers are finally starting to realise what a lot of us worked out a long time ago.

People are not machines. They burn out. They get restless. They reassess their lives. They stop believing that a job title is enough compensation for exhaustion, stress and never having the time to do anything that actually matters to them. And since the lockdowns forced millions of people to rethink where, how and why they work, that old idea that everyone should just be grateful for a job and organise their entire life around it has started to look more and more ridiculous.

You can see that shift clearly in the younger workforce too. Deloitte’s 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that work-life balance is the top career goal for both generations in the UK, while fewer than 5% said leadership was their primary goal. Randstad’s 2025 Workmonitor found that, globally, work-life balance had overtaken pay as the most important motivator for workers for the first time in the report’s history.

That matters, because employers can either adapt to that reality or lose good people to it.

Career breaks are part of that adaptation. Giving staff the freedom to take time out to travel, rest, reset or pursue something meaningful is not some fluffy wellbeing perk. It is a practical retention tool. It gives people breathing space before they burn out completely. It allows skilled employees to step away without having to sever the relationship entirely. And it shows that an employer understands something very simple: people are far more likely to stay loyal to a workplace that does not try to own them.

Training people is expensive. Replacing experienced staff is expensive. Losing institutional knowledge, qualifications, confidence, judgement and hard-won experience is expensive. If someone valuable needs time away, it makes far more sense to give them a structured way to take that break and come back than to force them into a choice where quitting becomes the only sane option.

And when they do come back, they often return with more than just a suntan and a few stories. Travel builds resilience, independence, confidence, communication skills, cultural awareness, logistical problem-solving and the ability to stay calm when things do not go to plan. Those are not abstract soft skills on a CV. They are real-world abilities that make people better, broader and more adaptable human beings.

So yes, career breaks can benefit employers. Not because employers deserve to be the centre of this conversation, but because even from their point of view, allowing people to build lives outside of work is not a threat. It is common sense.

But Career Breaks Are Even Better For You

As much as employers might benefit from career breaks, that has never really been the point. The real benefit has always been yours, because somewhere between deadlines, mortgages, responsibilities, endless emails and trying to keep up with everything modern life expects of us, it is remarkably easy to forget that you are supposed to be living your life as well as managing it.

Travel has a way of reminding you of that. Not because it magically fixes every problem in your life or wipes away every responsibility you have. Your bills will still need paying when you get home, the difficult decisions will still be waiting for you and whatever you left behind will still have to be dealt with. Travel is not an escape from reality, no matter how many people try to frame it that way.

What it does give you is perspective. It gives you enough distance from the constant noise of work, routine and other people’s expectations to remember who you are when your entire identity is not wrapped up in your job title, your inbox or the version of yourself you have to perform just to get through the week. Sometimes that means coming home with a renewed appreciation for the career you already have. Sometimes it means realising you desperately need to change it. Sometimes it simply reminds you that life is far too short to spend every waking hour waiting for the weekend.

For me, every career break I have ever taken has reinforced the same lesson: the world is far bigger than your workplace, your life is far bigger than your career, and the experiences, friendships, perspectives and confidence you gain from stepping outside your everyday routine will stay with you long after another promotion, another appraisal or another quarterly target has been forgotten.

That is why I have never once regretted taking time out to travel. The only thing I would have regretted is not doing it.

So Why The Hell Wouldn’t You Take One?

Quite frankly, even without all of that, the simple fact that you are out there living your life and filling it with experiences beyond the usual Monday morning commute should be reason enough. You do not need to justify every dream in terms of productivity. You do not need to prove that every journey will make you a better employee. You are allowed to want more from life simply because you are alive.

So if you have the chance to take a career break, take it seriously. Plan it properly. Save for it, protect yourself with the right insurance, think about what you want from it and be sensible about how you step away and come back. But do not dismiss it as irresponsible just because it does not fit neatly into the life script you were handed.

Your career will still be there in one form or another. Work will still exist. Bills will still need paying. But the chance to take time for yourself, see the world, reset your perspective and remember what your life is supposed to feel like will not always be so easy to grab.

So do it. While you still can.