Vacation Starvation

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'The gap between Europe and America seems to be growing,' agrees a baffled Orvar Lofgren, a professor at Lund University in Sweden and author of an excellent history of vacations, On Holiday (University of California Press). 'I'm a bit amazed at this because Americans love having fun. But what I found out was that the prolonged weekend was the American time unit. You should try to squeeze a holiday into that.'

Don't blink or sleep, and you might be able to stretch those three days to four. So where did we go wrong? We started out on a level playing field, with a week to two weeks in the '30s, when paid vacations were introduced in Europe and the U.S., says Lofgren. But 'there was a decision made at some stage-do you want more pay or longer vacations? The unions in Europe went for longer vacations. The state in many European countries was very much concerned that vacations were good for you, that everyone should have holidays, that there should be legislation about vacation time. I don't think the state played the same role in the U.S.'

After that the Europeans shot ahead of us, adding a week each in the '50s, '60s and '70s. When I called him in Stockholm, Lofgren was enjoying two weeks off for the Christmas holiday, as most Swedes do, which is on top of the five weeks he and his countrymen already get by law. And don't forget the public holidays, he reminds me, which are used to milk the 'squeeze days' between an official holiday and a week-end for an extra Friday here or Monday there. Rub it in, Orvar.

Meanwhile, we remain stuck in a '30s vacation twilight zone of nine days-with a zooming work-hour whammy on top of that. One recent study found that Americans now work 142 more hours a year than in 1973, a full three and a half weeks. The technology that was supposed to have freed us-remember the paperless office and the four-day week?-is imprisoning us in a spiral of workaholism, as we become more and more buried by an avalanche of busy-ness. Job stress is at an all-time high. Stress accounted for 6 percent of workers staying home in 1995; it's 19 percent today. A study that researched the growing phenomenon of healthy people calling in sick calls the trend 'entitlement mentality,' with workers using sick time to take days they feel they deserve.

Houston, we have a problem. Our thrusters are on empty, our lives hurtling by like meteor dust. If we have no time to enjoy, no time to explore, no time for family and friends, no time to refresh and re-create-the root of recreation, after all-no time to think about why we are afraid to think there could be, should be something more then what exactly do we have?

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