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Last week, I was sitting on a beach in Spain, gloriously secluded from the social and financial shitzkriegs blighting the real world.
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The beige Catalonian sand was scattered with multi-generational Dutch and Spanish families, many of them on holiday for the whole of August.
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As I watched them slumber and frolic, I realized I’d never seen anything like this in my adopted homeland of America.
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Which makes me wonder
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Why don’t Americans go on holiday?
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Across the pond, it’s called ‘vacation’ – a far more tuneless word than ‘holiday’, which has both a sacred and a joyful ring.
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Vacation’ feels hollow, as befits its Latin root ‘vacare’, meaning ‘to be empty’.
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It’s easy for Madonna and the Dead Kennedys to sing about holidays, but vacation is such an mealy mouthful.
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It could easily refer to a bowel movement.
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I just had a most satisfying vacation.
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Statistics tell the dark story of America’s vacation deprivation
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According to the World Tourism Association, the average Italian gets 42 paid days off a year.
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The French get 37, the Brits 28, and the Japanese 25.
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Uncle Sam metes out a measly 13 days off.
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A separate study, commissioned by Expedia concurs on that 13 day figure, confirming that Americans are the most hard done by, while claiming that the average employed Frenchman is the most pampered, with 38 paid days off:
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I’m with the French and Italians on this one.
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A holiday makes us better workers, giving us physical and psychological space to come up with new ideas and perspectives.
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Even the scarce free time allocated to Americans comes with strings attached.
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Many employers frown on workers traveling too far from home, in case some crisis should require them to be recalled.
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This has led to the creation of another ugly American word — the ‘staycation’.
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Those same bosses have discouraged long holidays, meaning anything more than a week.
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Most American vacations are now just extended weekends.
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Sorry, but a three-day break is just not enough.
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An optimal holiday is three weeks long.
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The first week purges the stress of travel and past work; the second week can be enjoyed living in the present; and the final week is to prepare gently for the future of returning home.
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Many Americans don’t even take the few days off given them.
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According to a recent survey by Ipsos/Reuters, a whopping 43% of Americans don’t take all of the vacation time allotted to them.
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That compares to only 11% of French citizens, and 23% of Brits, who forget or decline to take all their due days off.
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The pressure increases for those who do go out on a limb and leave the country.
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According to another recent poll, by Adweek/Harris, almost 50% of American said they will (or did) work on holiday – monitoring emails and taking phone calls.
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Men are more likely than women to work (54% vs. 37%)
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I wrote the first draft of this piece on my Android on the beach, so I can’t claim to be totally immune from the temptations to work on holiday.
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But after I’d switched off the phone, I was still able to relax completely, enjoying an exquisite black squid-ink paella, as I stared at the Mediterranean, a glass of manzanilla sherry in my hand.
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Only a third of American vacationers say they ever “detach fully” on vacation.
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An aversion to spending time together as a family is deeply ingrained in the American psyche.
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It starts at birth.
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Most of the world concurs that a bonding period between baby and parents is healthy.
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In Sweden, for example, the law guarantees 16 months of paid leave to both mum and dad.
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In the US, the federal government mandates precisely zero weeks of paid maternity or paternity leave.
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Many female executives boast about how soon they return to work after giving birth.
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Indra Nooyi, the CEO of Pepsi, and Forbes magazine's fifth most powerful woman in the wolrd describes her own heroic encounter with American childbirth.
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When I had my second child, I was in the middle of an important project at work.
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The day after I had her, my boss came to see me in the hospital and said.
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Now that you’ve had the baby, can I send in my team to come work with you?’
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I had a C-section, and he said, ‘Your body had the baby, but your brain still works.’
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I said it was OK to send them in to my hospital room.
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The baby was sleeping most of the time, and I was wide awake — it wasn’t physical work, it was mental work so I didn’t mind.”
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After they’re born, children of the Land of the Free are quickly discouraged from free time.
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Once in school, American kids get far fewer holidays than in Europe.
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Primary and secondary schools give no Easter or Christmas holidays to speak of, with the typical ‘winter break’ beginning on Christmas Eve and ending New Year’s Day.
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There’s a short ‘Spring Break’, but no version of the British half-terms.
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Summer vacations last around ten weeks, but, rather than using that period to concoct adventures and shared time, many parents fill that period by sending their kids away so they can – yes, that’s right – work.
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The place to which they dispatch their offspring — ‘camp’ – sounds like a Soviet prison.
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At 18, after leaving school, and before going to university, a scholarship let me spend two years traveling in Africa, and then working as a journalist in Latin America.
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It was a formative period for me, personally and professionally.
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The tradition of the ‘gap year’ is strong in Britain.
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In Scandinavian countries there are public funds to pay for school leavers to travel abroad.
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In the US, that tradition is completely alien.
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The closest there is to a gap year in America is the Peace Corps, where university students donate their sweat to build bridges in Peru; or the kibbutz for Jewish Americans, also structured around hard physical toil.
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Exploration and adventure – let alone the fine European traditions of the Grand Tour, or the wandering of Baudelaire’s flâneur — are all viewed as reckless indulgences
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Once university’s over, most Americans accept the idea that there’ll be no more extended breaks until the distant promise of retirement – ‘golden years’ in Palm Beach spent on golf courses and under the plastic surgeon’s knife.
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To realize that American Dream, they’ll have to work their butts off.
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So why and how has a country founded on the promotion of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ become the No Vacation Nation?
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Sebastian Doggart
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