15-20 More Federal Holidays

I started working at a new company recently and they gave me Juneteenth off. Which I never had before off before. They also gave me 5 days off for the 4th of July. Again, this was a new experience for me. For the Juneetenth weekend I mostly stayed at home, took a longer bike ride and read. For the 4th of July Weekend I traveled to Madrid and Barcelona. I had a great time.

I noticed my level of happiness was the same both weekends. When I stayed home I felt good and when I went out traveling I felt the same. There wasn’t much variation. I was happy to be able to take a break. It didn’t matter what activities I was engaged in.

I’m not alone in that feeling. The happiest days for Americans are holidays.

For most of my working life, like most Americans, I’ve only had a week or two off a year, plus federal holidays. I have cousins who live in Greece who seem to be on holiday a lot. It’s true they do not make much money. But they generally seem happy and see their holidays as part of their culture and not optional.

In America it’s different. Only one country in the world, Micronesia, has less holiday time than the U.S. Americans get an average of 10 paid vacation days a year. If you zoom out and look at 3-4-5-6 hundred years of history, the contemporary American worker takes less holidays than most people who have ever existed. This is truly a unique situation we do not discuss very much.

Americans don’t take holidays. But that isn’t irrational. America is unique because it is a country where someone who works for a living can enjoy a great life and retire with millions of dollars at the end of it. That is not normal in other places. But that also means we have an excessive work culture here.

You can see this as you rise through the corporate ladder. The higher you go as an employee, more is expected of you. Many people log in to their phones or laptops during vacations. Or some people don’t even take them. Work is considered a virtue.

The anti-holiday sentiment isn’t even just about work. It also can spill over into the culture wars.

America has a strange relationship with leisure.

Is America as Happy as it Should Be?

Measuring happiness or satisfaction is difficult. Life is dynamic, you could be in a period of your life where things are bad and they may change. But generally speaking, Americans should be happier people. America looks pretty good. There are no enemy nations at the borders (Pakistan/India situation). Billions of people would move here the next day if we let them because we are incredibly wealthy compared to the rest of the world. We also have amazing amounts of nature in this country to visit.

Even with all these good things here there is strangely negative cultural trends. For example, the obsession with “catastrophizing” that is popular in online culture. It’s about obsessing with a potential decline of America, “late-stage capitalism” or finding things to be deeply problematic or constantly be in a victimhood state. This isn’t good for mental health.

There’s other evidence of unhappiness. 1 in 5 Americans have been diagnosed as having depression and they reached new highs in 2023.

A recent gallup poll noticed a slight downturn in satisfaction with Americans’ personal life during the last 20 years.

Notably, the amount of leisure is one area that people say could be be improved upon.

Let’s focus on leisure. A Lindy compatible way to increase happiness.

In This Newsletter

Happiness in America is mostly focused on the commercial aspect. Everyone wants to sell you a product or a pill or therapy or whatever. Happiness as something you can buy or rent. I’m skeptical this is the correct way to approach the problem.

What if increasing happiness is really just about fixing the modern misalignment we find ourselves in?

My proposal is 15 more federal holidays a year. In this Newsletter I cover why this is the quickest fix to our problems.

1) The History of the Holiday Schedule:

There is a famous meme. How true is it?

2) The Lindy guide to maximizing Happiness 

3) Europeans are Not Giving Up Their Holiday Schedule

4) Federal Holidays Work Better than relying on the Private Sector

The Peasant and His Holidays

There was generally a continuity in the amount of holidays all the way up to the Industrial Revolution. If you look at the contemporary Catholic Church feast days and compare it the old Ancient Roman holiday calendar they have about the same amount of days off per month. Holidays were plentiful. 

Holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English worked harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year. There was even non-official holidays.

Industrialization changed everything. It’s no surprise Marxism and utopian socialism didn’t really exist before industrialization. Peasants crowded into cities and faced crowded and cramped workspaces, dirty and dangerous factory and mining operations, poor levels of pay, long hours of work, and a lack of basic healthcare, education and rights. Industrialization completely cutting off the worker from his past privileges.

“Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted below, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. The medieval workday was not more than eight hours. The worker participating in the eight-hour movements of the late nineteenth century was simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago.”

Bringing us back to the medieval peasant holiday calendar before industrialization occurred was a major battle of the labor movement. You still see this emphasized in certain European political parties. This is different than in America, where the emphasis on the labor movement is on higher wages.

The Lindy Guide to Happiness

If you’re someone who is an employee that means you have to be consistent at your job the entire time. If you mess up too much you will be fired. I call this the consistency space. It can be an exhausting mental space to be in without taking breaks. I’m not sure we humans are meant to be fully consistent our entire lives. When we take a holiday we at least get to exit this mental space.

A 2018 study by the American Psychological Association found that vacations significantly reduce stress by taking people out of situations that they associate with anxiety. Other research has shown vacations can also help to prevent heart disease.

This is why taking days off from work feels good even when we don’t even do anything. I stayed home one weekend, and the next weekend I took a trip to Spain. I felt the same. I was just not working. I was not in the consistency space.

One of the rules for the wise conduct of life that Aristotle mentions in the Nichomachean Ethics is freedom from pain, not pleasure, is what the wise man should aim at. Aristotle directs us to not secure what is pleasurable but toward avoiding, as much as possible, all the evils of this world. A man who must think about happiness must not just account for the pleasures of his life that he has enjoyed but all the evils he has escaped. The happiest people are not those that have experienced the greatest delights but those that have brought life to a close without any great pain, bodily or mentally. Solon and Croesus. The failure to recognize this truth is the source of much unhappiness.

There are expressions in many cultures which point to the same idea. English: Keep well enough alone. French: le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

 Or Horace in Latin:

Europeans Are Not Giving Up Their Holidays

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