Seeking salvation in the “no-vacation nation”
A FEW things about life in the U.S.A. are very “whacked.” 
(ONLY a few, but they have a disproportionately large impact….)
Most of my employers (most, but not all) and their groupthinking managers in information and technology created microenvironments that attempted to DENY (as in, “in denial“) some of the fundamental needs of human biology. (Such environments are especially tough on a former biologist like myself! 😉 ) Either the job requirements themselves, or the demands of the individual manager, were at odds with human needs for things like: sleep, food, and a “life” outside of work. Sometimes, the individual manager actually BELIEVED in the “corporate line” (scary! ), and sometimes the managers (for reasons of their OWN survival) only PRETENDED to believe.
Some examples include: skipping lunch to spend another fruitless (and hungry) hour in “free work” for the employer or (shudder! meetings!), expecting employees who had about three hours of “awake time” at home to spend all or some of that time working online for the company, requiring “terms of employment” that exclude part-time jobs in the employee’s “free time” (because there is not supposed to BE any “free time”), and jobs that have built-in requirements for being “on call” and available for customer emergencies (sleeping with a pager or cell phone is overrated). One of my former directors (French, who thereby OUGHT to “know better”) told me that she actually respected the fact that I tried to eat lunch every day, AWAY from my desk. I told her that “when you don’t eat breakfast (I don’t), LUNCH becomes “the most important meal of the day!” It looks, from her resume, that she may have been a victim of a layoff at the company where we worked, so the place must not have valued her “dedication.”
Dedication is only ONE quality that is not generally valued by American businesses. Other include (but are not limited to), in no particular order: creativity, balance, wisdom, knowledge, experience, education, “people skills,” and intelligence.
So… I was delighted to see articles on CNN’s site about the human need for vacation and about America being the “no-vacation nation!” In the first article linked above, Mary Kole, a literary agent for children’s books in Brooklyn, New York, who works from her home office and “loves her job” (don’t we ALL, if we want to stay employed? 😉 ), but has “been feeling like she’s lost the line between “work” and “not work.” (This is a VERY important line to draw, for your own sanity, PARTICULARLY when you work from home and ESPECIALLY when you are in a relationship or have a family.) Kole has clients worldwide (as I did) (CORRECTION added May 31, 2011: And I still DO…! ) and receives calls from writers in the middle of the night. As Janice Joplin said at Woodstock, “It’s all the same damned day.”
CNN quotes a very perceptive young woman:
The article quotes several experts who cite the importance of GETTING AWAY from your current environment, and ESPECIALLY the benefits of immersing yourself in a different culture in another country. A professor of psychology at Harvard, Ellen Langer, sees the benefits of vacation as part of being “mindful.” Mindfulness is a concept from Buddhism that is central to meditation in that tradition, which involves being present and observant in a nonjudgmental way. I surely hope that Langer works with folks at Harvard Business School, but I fear that the “gulf” may be too wide! 😉
The second article asks, “Why is America the ‘no-vacation nation?'” The article starts out:
“Let’s be blunt: If you like to take long vacations, the United States is not the place to work.”
The statement echoes sentiments from a former manager of mine who was European and South African and who, I suspect, only PRETENDED to “drink the corporate ‘Kool-Aid.'” A manager of a consulting group with whom I worked LOVED to take vacations and long weekends in the Sierra Nevada, in places BEYOND THE REACH of cell phones!
For Americans who “don’t get out much” (and it LOOKs as though NONE of us DO! ), an American in Weinheim, Germany, Nancy Schimkat, who is married to a German engineer reminds us that he gets SIX WEEKS of paid vacation each year, plus bountiful national holidays, and that his company MAKES SURE THAT HE TAKES IT! (… I know, accountants… it gets the days off the books….) She notes that it is typical for Germans to take off three consecutive weeks in August when “most of the country kind of closes down.” (If your company has European branches, you have seen this firsthand.”) When she tells Germans that Americans get only two weeks of vacation each year, they CRINGE!
To “work like robots” is an apt simile, ESPECIALLY before robots had any “brains” at all! Working like robots is only amusing when seen from the outside, as in Charlie Chaplin‘s “Modern Times.” U.S. government figures show that ABOUT 25% of American workers do not have paid vacation, since employers in the United States are not obligated under federal law to OFFER paid vacation.
The U.S. is the ONLY “advanced” nation in the world that does not guarantee its workers annual leave, according to a report entitled “No-Vacation Nation” by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive economic policy think-tank.
John de Graaf, the national coordinator for Take Back Your Time, a group that researches the effects of overwork notes that “There is simply no evidence that working people to death gives you a competitive advantage.” He notes that the United States came in FOURTH in the World Economic Forum’s ranking of the most competitive economies, but that Sweden, which by law offers workers FIVE Weeks of vacation, came in SECOND! I have noted several times in this blog that Myers-Briggs “Thinking-Judging” types who run most corporations prefer making “snap judgments” on the basis of preconceived ideas to doing extensive analysis of objectively-gathered data themselves. They would rather “drink in” corporate “Kool-Aid” than data.
So now, I “seek salvation” mostly for other people, especially the young. A label on a bottle of soap bubble solution that I kept from “Club Net” at Netscape reminds me: “You work hard – play harder!” I tend to drive myself pretty hard, but much more productively than when I worked in environments that were built upon delusions.
You probably work pretty hard, too! Take a vacation!
-Bill at
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