Trends and Entertainment

Recession Lexicon: Lazylancing

n./ Just when we wondered whether we might be running out of new downturn words, we got a Tweet from adventurous polymath Christina Davidson: “They miss what all my laid off journo friends R doing now. We call ‘lazylancing’ a way to justify travel.”

Lazylancing is when you subsidize your travel with freelance work, as Davidson did last year after being laid off from her job. “I decided to take a couple of months and go backpacking through Turkey and Syria,” she says. A story she wrote for The Atlantic ended up covering a good part of her expenses for the three months. “You may be hard pressed to get anyone to admit to this,” she says—writers want you to think they’re working hard. At the same time, more people may be lazylancing; they might as well. “There are so few regular jobs out there, and it’s a lot cheaper in the third world.”

She’s not quite lazylancing at the moment. Davidson spoke to us from Iowa, where she is in the middle of a Recession Road Trip for Atlantic, writing almost daily about what she’s seeing around the country. “Four months and 48 states,” she says. “I’m a couple of states behind so it might be longer than that.”

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