So here we are, just after Labor Day, meaning that we’ve just passed the prime vacation season. Which gives me a chance to tell you my favorite story about vacations. It involves a guy named Arthur Brisbane, who is largely forgotten now, but who was perhaps the most influential journalist in America in the 20th century’s first decades. Brisbane was both the editor of the New York Journal and the author of a syndicated column that was read by 20 million people. One day his boss, William Randolph Hearst, gratefully offered him a six-month sabbatical. Hearst wrote that it was “in recognition of your outstanding work.”
But Brisbane turned down the vacation.
He wrote to the Chief, “There are two reasons why I will not accept your generous offer. The first is that it might affect the circulation of your papers if I stopped writing for six months. The second reason is that it might not.”
Good point, right? You don’t want to find out the hard way that you’re dispensable.
That’s apparently why more than half of U.S. workers, according to a new Pew Research Center study, don’t use all their vacation time. Why not? Thirty-five percent of those in the stay-at-work majority said it’s because they’re afraid of losing out on a promotion or even losing their job if they take the time off that’s due them.
Of course, not everybody is lucky enough to have a job that offers paid vacation. But among those who do, consider the choice that so many make: There are some 768 million days each year that Americans could have spent splashing on a beach, say, or hiking in the mountains, or taking a nap in a hammock, that they instead spent at the factory.
I’m quite familiar with those folks. I used to encounter one in the mirror every morning.
Not to give you the wrong impression: During my decades of full-time employment, I took time off, and it has left me some glorious memories. But there was always time left in the company’s favor at the end of the year. I will tell you now that it wasn’t fear of losing my job or my relevance that kept me from using all that time; no, I worked because I had a job I loved. But I love my family, too, which makes it odd that I gave up time with them to instead hang with people who — how do I say this gently? — I cared about less. People, you know, who likely also might have wished to be elsewhere rather than with me, the boss.
It's sort of a national characteristic, this vacation avoidance. It shows up in the ultimate test of our expectations: what we write into the law. Three times since 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research has published a study called “No-Vacation Nation,” looking at the vacation time required by law in the world’s 21 richest countries. Workers in the European Union, for example, are legally guaranteed at least 20 days of paid vacation a year. Japan requires 10 paid vacation days and 15 paid holidays. In Spain, the law requires employers to pay for 25 days of vacation and 14 paid holidays a year.
And how many days of paid vacation does federal law require in the United States? Zero. Zip. Nada. No wonder we’re a nation of reluctant vacationers: Officially, it’s just not something that Americans do.
If you often leave vacation time on the table, maybe you find that reassuring: You’re not an oddball, you’re just part of the national norm. But being normal isn’t the same thing as being healthy.
Experts say there’s a cognitive impact when people get away from work – it unclutters the mind. The University of Pittsburgh’s Mind-Body Center found that taking a vacation improves emotions and reduces the chance of depression. And time off can make you healthier, by reducing the production of the so-called stress hormones, cortisol and epinephrine, which can suppress your immune system. That his, vacationing can literally help you avoid getting sick.
Maybe most importantly, time off can stimulate your soul. It can make you a more whole person by expanding your experience beyond your usual daily routine. It can deepen your empathy, and help you find your true self, or remind you of who that is.
Even those of us who are retired or self-employed may find it hard, though, to step away. I know: Since leaving the full-time workplace more than three years ago, I’ve jumped into a lot of tasks — including work for five great not-for-profit organizations, writing, working in a big garden and yard, and — oops, I’m doing it again: I’m making excuses for being part of the vacation-reluctant band.
But I just took a few days away to eat lobster and smell the salt water, and we’re taking another trip this month, and one the month after that, and another the next month. I like to think that this practice of responsibly turning away from some responsibilities is evidence that I’m growing, still. In fact, this business of not working seems to be a fine custom. If it’s alien to your habit, give it a try. You will be rewarded.
Oh, one more thing: If you don’t hear this commentary some day when you expect it, take it as a good sign, please. But if you’d like to complain about my absence to the management of this radio station, that would probably be great: It would suggest that Arthur Brisbane was wrong about nobody caring about time off. Those newspaper editors can sometimes seem like know-it-alls.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.