No more vacation: How technology is stealing our lives - Internet Culture - Salon.com

Earlier this month, on my honeymoon in California, I found myself checking my computer compulsively for days, not for fun, but because I was afraid of being professionally remiss. It was simultaneously an irrational and a perfectly sane concern: Every day did bring some new professional demand or question that supposedly could not wait, though I also answered the ones that obviously could. Halfway through the trip, my brain began to ease into vacation mode and my typing fingers stopped twitching. As soon as I recovered myself a bit, I also recovered some perspective on the vortex into which I'd been pulled. I'd catch sight of my innocent white Mac sitting on a hotel room desk, suddenly less a seraphic emissary of important information than a sinister conveyor of work stress. What will you want from me today? I’d wonder as I stared it down. What anxieties lie waiting within you?