It’s August, the peak of the traditional summer vacation season, and Santa wants to know: Have you taken your vacation time?
If not, you’re typical for an American, but not typical in a way you want to be. Let others live boring lives. You don’t have to.
Earlier in the summer, Expedia came out with its 24th Annual Vacation Deprivation Report. It said, “Roughly half of Americans don’t plan on using all their time off this year (53%), despite receiving just 12 days off annually — the fewest of any country surveyed.”
The report drills into it, but no matter how you slice and dice those statistics it just drives the point home that Americans take far less vacation time than our counterparts in other developed nations. European travelers get weeks of paid vacation time, and they use it. In America, a majority does not even take the measly 12 days that is standard.
This is unfortunately, not news. It’s very old. It hasn’t changed much ever. During COVID it got worse, of course. And in the bounce-back after COVID it got a little better for a while. But right now, in 2024, 53 percent, a majority of Americans are not taking their allotted vacation time.
When asked why not, the top answer was “Life is too busy.” Too busy to take a vacation.
This is a sad story. To have no travel in one’s life is to be impoverished. It’s not healthy. And it’s not good for the world to be populated with mostly homebodies who have never been anywhere.
I’m always appalled to hear that persistently recurring statistic. I struggle to find words for how bad it is. It’s bad for us as individuals, as families and communities. It’s bad for the nation, and bad for the world.
Please forgive me if you’ve heard this quote by Mark Twain a thousand times. Even so, it bears repeating:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
This alone would be enough in this strife-torn world to make travel an obligatory national service, like the military. In fact, one of the things about military service that “makes a man [or woman] out of you,” is that it causes people to travel.
If what Mark Twain said is true, and I believe it is, it’s reasonable to assume that if more people traveled, we would have a more peaceful world.
So, any time you travel, and any time you assist someone else in traveling, you are doing something good. You are doing your bit toward bringing about a better world. I believe travel industry professionals, who help others to travel, stack up a lot of good karma. So, if that’s you, reading this: congratulations. And thank you.
Helping to promote world peace should be enough. But that’s only part of why travel is important. It’s highly important to the individual who travels in terms of their lives and purposes. Isn’t this self-evident? Travel expands people, brings joy and insight.
What words could knock someone out of the conditioning that makes them think that it’s normal and acceptable to work practically all the time?
We Americans are a little obsessed with work. We’re under a spell that is like a working frenzy. You may not recognize our peculiar conditioning until you travel abroad and run into people from other countries who have many weeks of paid vacation every year. And they take it and go on extended journeys. It shows you that another way is possible. And it’s a way worth looking into.
I would say it’s a spell we should wake up from while there’s still life to live. I’ve heard it said that “No one on his deathbed regrets that he didn’t spend more time at the office.” I think there’s something to that. We Americans are very focused on being productive, making money and so forth. But if you take that too far, at some point you aren’t living at all.
The tendency to restrain your urge to travel in favor of keeping your nose to the grindstone is worse than a bad habit. Given the harmful effects on health of stress, and how travel alleviates stress, the chronic suppression of the urge to travel is almost a pathological condition. It’s highly self destructive. Human beings were born to travel. Our species has roamed around the whole globe for millions of years. Travel is in our blood. It’s not natural to restrain it too much. And it’s not healthy.
I think the health and happiness benefits of travel are self evident. But for those in doubt, there is plenty of scientific information linking stress to health problems. People under stress have lower resistance to cancer. According to the American Psychological Association, chronic stress is linked to all six of the leading causes of death: heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver and suicide.
Seventy-five percent of doctor’s office visits are stress related. Chronic stress affects the brain, suppresses thyroid function, causes imbalances in blood sugar, decreases bone density, reduces muscle tissue, raises blood pressure, compromises immune system function and hampers the ability to heal. The list could be endless. On the other hand, laughter strengthens the immune system.
In modern societies, the worst penalty for crimes besides the death penalty is incarceration. Being restricted in space is the worst punishment. So why do we do it to ourselves?
Back in 1932, the philosopher Bertrand Russell denigrated the mania for work in an essay called “In Praise of Idleness.”
In agrarian societies, he said, there was some validity to putting such a high value on work itself. But in an industrial society, he said, most work that is done has little value or is ultimately more harmful to the world than good.
“I think that there is far too much work done in the world,” he said, “that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.”
Modern technology, he said, “has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community.”
Since 1932, as we have evolved from the mechanical age to the electric age and then to the cybernetic age, there has been a huge proliferation of labor-saving devices. And still we labor like domestic work animals. So why do we work so much that we don’t have time to travel? Maybe we need a national attitude adjustment.
“The morality of work is the morality of slaves,” said Russell, “and the modern world has no need of slavery.”
More travel would be the best thing for the world in many ways. When you travel, or when you support travel by someone else, you are doing something good for the world. You should sleep well knowing that.
David Cogswell is a freelance writer working remotely, from wherever he is at the moment. Born at the dead center of the United States during the last century, he has been incessantly moving and exploring for decades. His articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Fox News, Luxury Travel Magazine, Travel Weekly, Travel Market Report, Travel Agent Magazine, TravelPulse.com, Quirkycruise.com, and other publications. He is the author of four books and a contributor to several others. He was last seen somewhere in the Northeast US.
