The six stages of holiday-making Two weeks off, but how many days of relaxation? Aug 13th 2026 It’s summer, in the northern hemisphere at least, which means emptier offices and fuller airports. In theory, a holiday is a time to properly relax. In practice, there are several stages to pass through before that moment arrives, and several more to experience before you are fully immersed in work again. The preparation phase. You badly need a holiday. In your final couple of days before leaving, you complete your most urgent tasks, like tidying your desk. You tell people on your team that you trust them completely and in the same breath, that they should contact you if anything comes up, no matter how trivial. As a result, they don’t feel trusted at all. You think about setting up an out-of-office message and decide not to: it’s really not a problem to
check your phone occasionally. As you leave the office, you think you feel a cold coming on. The relax-like-hell phase. You spend the first few days approaching the holiday like it’s work. You spend loads of time asking AI models for places to go that are off the beaten track. In a typical morning, you drive two hours to eat breakfast at a place recommended by ChatGPT which turns out to be closed, and then visit a museum devoted to the ancient craft of curing fish. At lunch, you drink wine and then fall asleep. You think of this period of unconsciousness as time that could have been spent relaxing. You are acutely aware of time passing, your days of freedom slipping away. You pick up a book and instead of reading it, worry that you could be enjoying your leisure in even more leisurely ways. You feel very tense for someone on holiday. The letting-go phase. Meanwhile, you check your email every so often, and intervene in things you don’t need to. You get a couple of WhatsApp messages and are asked to join a call, and feel both irritated and pleased. Can’t you do it without me? You can’t do it without me! As you triage messages, sorting them into things that have to be dealt with quickly and those that can wait, you gradually realise just how much of what goes on each week a) doesn’t require you at all and b) has no lasting value. You start to ignore most messages; if it’s important, they will find a way to contact you. You switch on your out-of-office message. The delusional phase. Finally, you start to relax. You lie in a little longer. You don’t look at your phone quite as much. You realise that back in the office the weekly sales meeting is happening right at this very minute, and you laugh out loud at the smallness of your old life. Fairly soon, you start to lose your grip on reality. You think about moving to wherever it is you are, forgetting that you are enjoying yourself because the weather is nice and you are not working. You start trying to figure out how soon you can retire. You fantasise about working outdoors, perhaps in sea-kayaking or doing something artisanal to a dry-stone wall. The motivated phase. The end of the holiday is fast approaching. You realise that sea-kayaking gives you blisters and that the things you are best
equipped to do don’t involve dry-stone walls. You start to look at emails again, but only the ones that matter. You feel motivated to return. You have seen how much time is spent on unimportant things and are determined to prioritise much more ruthlessly. You have some really good ideas about how to improve the weekly sales meeting. The recidivism phase. You return to the office full of vim. You look and feel healthier than your colleagues. Then you have the same conversation 800 times. “How was your holiday?” “Wonderful.” “Where did you go?” [Insert answer.] “What did you do there?” [Insert details.] You soon realise that no one is interested in where you went and start to make up responses. “Where did you go?” “Wakanda.” “What did you do?” “We visited the vibranium mines.” “Oh, I’ve always wanted to do that.” It’s nice to see people. It’s good to have a sense of purpose. But you quickly revert to old habits. An empty calendar feels less like ruthless prioritisation and more like a public display of redundancy; the slots soon fill up again. When emails come in, you answer them indiscriminately. Your desk becomes more cluttered. You attend the weekly sales meeting and dimly recall that you once had an idea for improving it. Colleagues come back from their own breaks and you ask how their holidays were. You are not listening to the answers. They seem so well, so energetic. You think you feel another cold coming on. You badly need a holiday. ■ Step inside the world of work with our Bartleby newsletter. Each week our white-collar oracle muses on the agonies of office life. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/business/2026/08/13/the-six-stages-of-holiday-making
Japan’s downbeat startups need a lift Can past success ever be rekindled? Aug 13th 2026 Morita Akio, a physics graduate, co-founded the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, an electronics-maker, in 1946. The startup’s 20 employees toiled in a small room in a firebombed department store in Tokyo, handmaking heated cushions and voltmeters. Determination and resourcefulness turned the firm into a $140bn electronics giant today called Sony. Other well-known Japanese firms such as Honda, launched in a ruined factory also in 1946, or more recently SoftBank, beginning in 1981 as a small software distributor run by 24-year-old Son Masayoshi, have similar tales of battling against the odds. Yet in recent decades Japan has lost its knack for producing startups that make an impact.
Only six of the current 1,400 unicorns (startups worth over $1bn) worldwide were born in Japan, according to cb Insights, a research firm. The country has yet to spawn a “decacorn”, a startup worth more than $10bn. South Korea and Australia have bred five and six, respectively, and also lead in unicorns by size of population (see chart). A new wave of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, backed by the state, are trying to put that right. They will have to confront three problems. The first is Japan’s shortage of risk-taking venture capital. A decade ago traditional vc funds were rare. In 2015 only $1bn in vc capital was deployed across fewer than 500 deals, according to Pitchbook, a data firm. Though vc fund-raising has grown to around $6bn in 2025, that compares unfavourably with markets such as Australia, an economy half the size of Japan’s which raised $5bn last year. Seemingly natural backers of Japanese startups, such as Softbank’s vc arm, plough the vast majority of their funds into overseas firms. Available capital is spread unevenly across different stages of a firm’s development. “A lack of late-stage risk capital is a big constraint,” says Murakami Yumiko of MPower Partners, a vc firm in Tokyo. Japan is in the top ten worldwide for early-stage funding (ie, deals worth less than $15m) but only 16th for bigger, late-stage deals, says Side Stage Ventures, another
vc investor. In turn, a lack of promising firms in the vc pipeline has limited interest from global investors, the sort more likely to make such big-ticket investments later in a company's fund-raising journey. A second problem is that Japanese startups go public too quickly. A promising young firm is often expected to dash to an initial public offering (ipo). Since the pandemic 57% of Japanese startups that have exited have gone public this way, compared with 23% in America and 13% in Britain. This is, in part, a product of too few mergers and acquisitions, the main way startups cash out in most of the world. Those needing liquidity are pushed to list. Investors quip that going public is Japan’s equivalent of a “series B” fund-raising round in America—a second modest injection of investment, often used to scale up. Some firms thrive anyway. James Riney of Coral Capital, another vc firm based in Tokyo, argues that Japan boasts “hidden unicorns” that eventually cross a valuation of $1bn after going public early. But more often, pressure from vcs to prepare for a quick listing distracts management from building for long-term growth. The result is a profusion of tiny, stagnant listings. At the end of 2025 the median value of firms debuting on the “growth” market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (tse) was a puny ¥10bn ($61m). There is not much punishment for a failed debut. Lax rules for delistings allow corporate minnows to languish on public markets. The rush to list early is also partly the result of the low cultural standing of startups—the third factor holding back the country’s entrepreneurs. A societal aversion to risk means that just 24% of Japanese consider entrepreneurship a desirable occupation, compared with a global average of 67%, according to a survey by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a research consortium. Startup founders and employees, particularly those quitting cushy jobs, face scepticism from family and friends. One result is to reinforce the rush to an ipo. “Stigma pushes founders to go public,” says Jordan Fisher of Antler Japan, another Tokyo-based vc firm. On all three counts, matters are improving. There has been a rise in homegrown unicorns, helped by the ai boom. Last year Sakana ai, a model- maker, became Japan’s most valuable unicorn, with a valuation of $2.6bn. The government has given some assistance, too. In 2022 it launched an