How to Stay Sane on a Business Trip

A specific condition afflicts business travelers: Call it hotel gloom, an amorphous melancholy that seems to thrive in the perfectly serviceable hotel rooms of the $200-a-night-and-under variety. Al Jackson has experienced it many times.

Mr. Jackson, 38, a stand-up comedian who has been touring for more than a decade, has stayed in Red Roof Inns and Wyndham hotels across this land. Inserting his key card can be like a gateway to existential dread. “When you open the door, there’s that rush of air, always that same kind of stale smell,” he said. “Sometimes the door shuts behind you. You’re in this semidark room. You drag your bag to where everyone sets their bag and it’s, ‘How did I get here again?’”

The hospitality industry tries its best to counteract this adult version of homesickness. Everything about the guest experience, from the smooth jazz playing in the lobby to the earth-tone décor, is designed to create a veneer of contentment and belonging. But hotel gloom has recently slipped into the cultural conversation nonetheless.

First there was “Hotels of North America,” a novel published last fall by Rick Moody told in the form of online lodging reviews. Then came “Anomalisa,” the Oscar-nominated animated film written and co-directed by Charlie Kaufman, which centers on a businessman’s stay in an upscale Cincinnati hotel that Tad Friend, writing about the movie in The New Yorker, described as “oppressively functional.” (Picture the best Hampton Inn you’ve ever stayed in.)

Curiously, both the novel and the movie center on drifting middle-aged motivational speakers. They use the hotel stay as a metaphor for emotional estrangement and societal disconnectedness. It’s a dark night of the soul rendered through free continental breakfasts and nightly turndown service.

“I used to stay in this Radisson in New London, Conn.,” Mr. Moody said. “I still have nightmares about the Edward Hopper-esque loneliness.”

He spoke of the “dread of the key being demagnetized” and the “mounting anxiety” that “whatever little shred of home or idea of home that you can carry into that room” will be lost. In this way, Mr. Moody, 54, resembles his novel’s narrator, who, while staying at a La Quinta Inn in Tuscaloosa, Ala., undergoes a “profound personality change” brought on by the hotel’s “nauseating pastels” and “faux-Mexican décor.”

Perhaps the artistic temperament is not suited to hotel life. The cartoonist Charles M. Schulz told his biographer: “Just the mention of a hotel makes me turn cold. When I’m in a hotel room alone, I worry about getting so depressed I might jump out of a window.”

By STEVEN KURUTZ

Source New York Times