You can see this convergence most clearly in our houses. As recently as the 1800s, the home was everything—where Americans worked, and slept, and cooked, and ate, and raised children, and worshipped. For most people, there was no commute; there was no office, or factory. And the agrarian economy ruled out vacations for most families. Then, in the past 150 years, the industrialized world drew sharp lines between life, work, and leisure. It was a period of divergence rather than convergence. Home, work, and hotel meant three different places.

But we’re going back to the past. “Travel, life, and work are blurring together again,” Airbnb’s chief executive, Brian Chesky, told me. He said the home-rental company is seeing firsthand a new kind of travel habit becoming mainstream, in which work time is leaking into vacation weekends and vacation weekends are leaking into the workweek. It is the rise of the work-vacation: the workcation. For a long weekend, or a week, or even several months, you can make a temporary home in the mountains or on the beach, without taking any time off.

Naturally, Homes are the future of travel is exactly what you would expect the chief executive of Airbnb to say. But he has the numbers to back up that view.