Vacation or Bust
I took last week off for a bit of a summer mini-vacation... nothing fancy, but I did my best to avoid a computer or cell phone. Still, every August seems to bring another round of obits for the great American vacation... or any American vacation, really. The numbers are open to interpretation and go something like this: we don't get as much vacation time as Europeans, and we don't take as much of the vacation time that we do get. Why? Walter Kirn took a crack at it in yesterday's NY Times Magazine:
That fewer of us are doing so, it's said, is a symptom of either anxious overcompetiveness (while I'm learning to fly-fish, that new guy down the hall is learning how to do my job); upward-mobility addiction (the cost of a 10-day Alaskan eco-trek is a down payment on a Lexus coupe!); the breakdown of the family (toasting s'mores for bored brats around a campfire is not a father's duty anymore); or, perhaps, a complicated bitterness over the fact that surpassing France's economy will never help us surpass its egotisms, so why bother aping the gourmet loafing that even most Frenchmen must sense has made them poorer? Why else would such slackers elect a hard-boiled president who ran as the champion of "the France that wakes up early"? For me, the strongest of these notions is that it's hard to take time off if it means lying sleepless in your hammock, picturing some whiz-kid "Art of War" type assuming your duties back at headquarters.
I can relate to that last one... this blog never looked better than it did while I was away last week. Not that that will stop me from using up the rest of my time off this year (or from secretly logging in while I'm away, just to see how things are going). There will always be a reason NOT to take time off from work... do you take the time anyway? Is it worth it? And what do you think about cutting the cord with office completely (aka: remote logins, Blackberries, cell phones)?
10:20 AM ET | 08- 6-2007 | permalink
