Yes, not leaving my employer in the lurch is important to me, but I do feel like they expect me to be around for a while. I'm glad to hear of your positive experience.

In this case, I don't want to leave, just there are things that I want more than I want to stay. Not that it couldn't be improved, but they probably can't offer anything to change my mind.

Even your dislike for deceit is part of the deceit mechanism. If you unilaterally decide to stop playing the game, it most likely means you lose.

I think I ADBOC. It's not like the "disliking to be deceitful" gene evolved to make its bearers lose the game.

Certainly there are risks to being honest, but there are also benefits. Admittedly, the most salient one to me right now is "I don't want to treat my current employer poorly", and I'm not sure that lying about going to interviews is actually significantly worse than merely not telling them about interviews.

This reminded me to ask about a similar question: I am currently interviewing. Assuming I get an in-person interview, that will involve a long flight. I feel like I shouldn't tell my current employer that I'm interviewing until I have an offer, but in order to hide it I presumably will have to take holiday on fairly short notice, have a plausible reason for why I'm taking it, and generally act like I'm not taking a long flight to an interview. There's a chance that I'll have to do this multiple times. (Though ideally I'd take multiple in-person interviews in the same trip.)

I don't particularly like the idea of doing this. It feels deceitful and stressful. How bad an idea would it be to just let my employer know what's going on?