Business Trip Blues

I am on a plane coming back from my business trip. The plane is just about to take off, and the flight attendants have shown us how to inflate the vests, put on a mask, and pointed out the emergency exits. Not that anyone was paying any attention — to be honest, I do not think we would notice the fire with the earphones on, let alone find an exit.

There is a man across the aisle holding the laptop on his knees, still on what seems to be a business call. He argues angrily into his large headphones about sunk costs, filing a claim, legal fees, and DocuSign.

The plane’s nose is already in the air when the attendant walks over to remind him to close the laptop. I swear he continues the call on his phone, probably using some kind of VIP-aircraft-defying Starlink membership.

And I was thinking — god almighty. When did people travelling for business acquire the aura of the most important people in the universe?

You see it everywhere you look at the airport — groups of older males in impeccable suits and rimless glasses tapping each other’s backs and smiling. Happy to reach a position that does not require much work anymore but pays way more than you can spend, even if you have three airport flat whites every day.

Young aspiring businessmen like the one on the plane, feeling this is the moment he will be acknowledged as the rising star of the firm, just so one day he can become one of the older men in impeccable suits, earning a tap or two on his back.

Or if not this time, then next time for sure.

And then I realised I was looking at them from a very different place than I thought. Not just because I was also travelling for business. But because I had spent the entire trip feeling that what I was doing was enormously important.

Business trips, regardless of whether they happen once in a while or every week, carry a strange feeling of utmost importance and at the same time make your life feel really insignificant.

Mine are usually tied to shipping an MVP, early feedback sessions, or new client onboarding. It is all related to intense pressure from deadlines and the fear of humiliating myself if things are not as ready as they should be. The trip itself almost always becomes a small deadline on its own.

The increased urgency of delivery rises every day, the work days are prolonged, the loose ends are tied up.

The mental rehearsal of every scenario makes me so immersed into the whole situation that not much else makes sense. Everything points to the moment when the client starts trying something that was carefully tested only by me and my team, just to probably break it with a first click of the mouse.

This is nothing unusual and any other PMs will agree with me — the more scenarios you get ready for in your head, the higher the chance you can avoid looking unprofessional despite all the effort of your team. You are just a bit more unlucky because you will be standing right there if anything goes wrong.

These are the reasons I can rarely imagine what is going to happen after a business trip — and that the dark blur hanging over the week after I come back is not the end of my life, but just another normal work day.

Everything went well. Prepared scenarios saved my and the company’s reputation, I delivered sessions on a high level and managed to give the product a human face they can recall if they want to complain.

But when I come home…. There is only emptiness.

Turns out, you can come down from a business trip.

You spend days ascending into this heightened state of importance, and then suddenly you’re back in your bedroom, pyjamas, with no applause, and realistically no real achievements. Just more deadlines.

I call this feeling the business trip blues.

The anti-climax of my ambition.

I used to blame the pandemic for a lot of the empty feelings. No human connections and not seeing anyone truly in touch with my product made the whole reason why I do this job disappear.

We lost accidental conversations.

Physical presence.

Reading someone’s face.

Having a coffee together.

The little human things around the transaction.

So we went back looking for them.

Nowadays, people fly left and right, the connections we established during the pandemic remotely must be fully nourished by now.

We sit across tables from clients.

We shake hands.

We drink coffee together.

We fly across Europe for a two-hour meeting.

But the feeling is still there… you come back, waiting for the sense of achievement. And all you get is a feeling of hollowness. So much energy spent and the result is as intangible as calling someone on Teams through your phone. You may not even remember it in a week. What is still missing?

My partner, also travelling a lot for business, missed his flight the other day because of an all-day meeting overrunning by 30 minutes.

When you think of it… What is so important in your line of work that missing a flight home is an acceptable consequence of a meeting running long?

Why are the meetings allowed to expand indefinitely? Have we collectively decided that the work must always win against everything else?

Maybe the problem isn’t that business trips are exhausting.

Maybe the problem is that I keep expecting them to prove that what I do matters.

We blamed the emptiness on the distance. Then we closed the distance and found that the emptiness had travelled with us.

Every interaction remained evaluated through transaction value, regardless of the fact we started meeting face to face again.

Every person chases busyness, achievement and external validation as proxies for meaning.

The things that used to make work feel meaningful — creating, solving, knowing people, being proud of something, building something together — have become increasingly difficult to distinguish from the machinery surrounding them.

A machinery where transactions are everything.

I squinted, looking into the evening crimson sky through the plane window.

And then I came home.

And there was another Monday.