This article is from the Lexington Herald Reader by Tom Walker. This is what I’m hoping will change.
Futurists in the 1970s predicted that, by now, technology would have so shrunk our workloads that we’d all be paddling about in a leisure-and-vacation playland. How wrong they were.
“Vacation season is upon us, and a new survey by employment firm Hudson says more than half of American workers fail to take all their vacation days,” BusinessWeek (May 21) reports. “Thirty percent say they use less than half their allotted time. And 20 percent take only a few days instead of a week or two.”
Among so-called extreme jobholders — what author Sylvia Ann Hewlett calls the professional class upper crust — 42 percent claim they have to cancel vacation plans “regularly.” Americans take even less vacation than the Japanese, the people who gave rise to karoshi — the phenomenon of being worked to death. The always-available executive is dangerous, BusinessWeek says. That kind of chief executive “subtly undermines” employees by telegraphing that they are “incapable of running things on their own.”
Personally, I believe that a lot of this is holdover from the yuppie movement of the eighties. As I was watching Wall Street the other night, I thought how crazy that was to want to work 80 to 100 hours a week. I realize that these people were, and are, making more money than I’ll ever see, but is that really the point? What’s the point of having all that money if you never have time to enjoy it? When one third of workers get less than one weeks vacation, and twenty percent of people plan only long weekends instead of a proper vacation, I think somethings wrong. And there is no such thing as a working vacation, it’s one or the other, not both. I want to be comfortable financially, I want to retire and travel, but I also want to have vacation time (while I’m young enough to enjoy it).
I’m still waiting for my robot.
