Vacation Starvation

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One tired nation. Estimates are that about half of all U.S. workers suffer from symptoms of burnout. Pam Ammondson, author of Clarity Quest (Fireside) sees the wreckage in her Santa Rosa, California-based Clarity Quest workshops, designed to help burnout cases reclaim their lives. 'I see a lot of people who work 12 to 14 hours a day routinely. They want to make a change, but they're too tired to know how to do it. 'Overwhelmed' is a word they use a lot. It's interesting that we allow downtime for machinery for maintenance, but we don't allow it for the employees.'

We all play our part in this marathon, though, seduced by the culture into believing that who we are is what we do, and that if we stop doing it even a little bit we won't be anybody anymore. It's this lack of nonwork identity that allows so many of us to be consumed by the frenzy. 'Americans compared to almost any other society are encouraged to achieve and display identity through labor,' explains Mark Liechty, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. 'Most Americans labor to consume and construct the self.' In Europe, he points out, there's more of a separation between identity and work, with work life subordinate to other kinds of social spheres.

The leading casualty of our sprint to the death is time, that commodity we seemed to have so much of back in sixth grade, when the clock on the wall never moved. Time is the fastener of friendship and family and gives us the space to explore more than the buttons on the snooze alarm. Without it, we're a nation of strangers, even to those close-outs to us-and to ourselves. 'People are spending less time with their family,' observes Barry Miller, a career counselor at Pace University in New York. 'They're not taking the time to rejuvenate and connect with their family members. Intimate relationships are falling apart. Their relationships with their children are falling apart.'

I was thinking all along that the whole issue of more time off was complicated. There's the no-no of government regulating the private sector, runaway consumers needing to overwork to support their habit, the lack of nonwork identity, the fear that global competition would turn us into roadkill-and just plain ignorance about the kind of vacation time the citizens of Europe and Australia enjoy. But I've changed my mind. These are all just projections and pretexts that, like all excuses, crumble with a hard look in the mirror and at the facts. For instance, business can be regulated for the good of the citizenry without jeopardizing profits. Some of the most basic tenets of the working world come out of federal legislation, from Social Security to minimum wage to the 40-hour week-passed by Congress in 1938 in the Fair Labor Standards Act. Business was dragged kicking and screaming every time, but today all of these laws enjoy universal support.

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