In a recent column, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, knocks European workers for “trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day.” Lazy Germans and French have “grown used to six-week vacations.”
Oh, the decadence.
It’s been 15 years or more since stories began to appear about the vacation gap between Old and New worlds. Expanding leisure time had always been a key ingredient of the superior standard of living America bragged about. It was something of a shock to be told that those whose continent had not long before been in ruins from World War II were now working shorter weeks and getting three times the vacation of their American counterparts.
The average American vacation has actually been shrinking in recent decades. It’s down to something less than two weeks. Compared with those decadent Europeans, we have become a nation of workaholics.
A lot of us here on the Outer Cape are rather French ourselves in our attitude toward vacation. We believe in vacations—the longer the better. Our financial investment in the seasonal tourist frenzy is only part of it. Lifestyle is, if anything, more important. Many of us don’t believe in a life dominated by work in the usual sense (i.e., work done just to make money). Surrounded by a national park, we make a point of mixing a generous sprinkling of vacation in every day of the year.
We are, of course, grateful that many of our summer visitors, in order to afford their week or two among us, subscribe the rest of the year to a regimen of 60-hour weeks and two-income families. Many of us pulled out of that scene for fulltime access to the best things in life that, as the old song goes, are free.
What better time than high summer tourist season, with ants and grasshoppers temporarily cohabiting vacationland, to debate the question: How much vacation should there be? Are we born to work or to play? What ratio of work and play works best?
We all know what all work and no play makes Jack and Jill a dull couple. But is a frantic two weeks of all-out pursuit of recreation enough to change that? Would J and J be better off with the six-week European vacation (and long weekends) disparaged by Friedman?
I’m talking, of course, of the sort of work defined by contrast with weekends, vacations, retirement. We work to live, as the saying goes, to pay the bills. But, as the saying goes on, we don’t live to work, most of us. We live to play, if we’re lucky, for two weeks on Cape Cod. This sort of work—let’s call it the Type A variety—is what we look forward to stopping ASAP, in the form of an early retirement, with as much life left in us as possible for non-work.
Those relatively few who insist on Type-B work, that is, whatever it is you would do anyway even if it didn’t ay money, don’t retire. They just go on doing what they love to do, what gives their life meaning, as long as they are able to.
Clearly a society that can arrange for you to live decently and do less Type-A work is doing better than one that goes on requiring 40 or more h ours a week, 50 weeks a year for most of your years.
I like to think the Outer Cape has more than our share of those committed to maximizing the role in our lives of the creative, inherently rewarding Type-B work; and wangling as much time off as possible from inescapable Type-A work to enjoy our ponds, beaches, restaurants and galleries.
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