15-20 More Federal Holidays

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

I noticed that my happiness level was the same on both weekends. When I stayed at home I felt good and when I went on a trip I felt the same. There wasn’t much variation. I was glad I could take a break. It didn’t matter what activities he was involved in.

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 vacation a lot. It is true that they do not make much money. But they generally seem happy and see their holidays as part of their culture and not optional.

Americans don’t take vacations. But this is not 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. This is not normal in other places. But this also means that we have an excessive work culture here.

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

Anti-holiday sentiment isn’t even about work. It can also extend to the culture wars.

America has a strange relationship with leisure.

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

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

In particular, the amount of leisure is one area that people say could be improved.

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

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

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

My proposal is 15 more federal holidays per year. In this newsletter I explain why this is the fastest solution to our problems.

1) The history of the holiday program:

There is a famous meme. How true is that?

2) Lindy’s guide to maximizing happiness

3) Europeans do not give up their holiday schedule

4) Federal holidays work better than relying on the private sector

Industrialization changed everything. No wonder Marxism and utopian socialism didn’t really exist before industrialization. Peasants crowded into the cities and faced cramped and overcrowded work spaces, dirty and dangerous mining and factory operations, low wage levels, long working hours, and a lack of basic health care, education, and rights. Industrialization completely cutting off the worker from his past privileges.

“Think of a typical working day in medieval times. It extended from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as Bishop Pilkington noted below, the work was intermittent, stopping for breakfast, lunch, the usual afternoon nap and dinner. Depending on the time and place, there were also mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of the workers, which they enjoyed even during the harvest seasons. The medieval working day did not exceed eight hours. The worker who participated in the eight-hour shifts of the late 19th century was simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked for four or five centuries ago.

Returning to the medieval peasant holiday calendar before industrialization was an important battle of the labor movement. You still see it emphasized in some European political parties. This is different than in America, where the emphasis in the labor movement is on higher wages.

If you are someone who is an employee, this means that you have to be consistent in your work all the time. If you screw up too much, you’ll get fired. I call this the coherence space. It can be an exhausting mental space to be in without taking breaks. I’m not sure that humans are meant to be totally consistent throughout our lives. When we take a vacation, at least we get to get out of that mental space.

That’s why taking days off from work feels good even when we’re not even doing anything. I stayed at home one weekend, and the next weekend I took a trip to Spain. I felt the same. It just wasn’t working. I was not in the space of consistency.

One of the rules for the wise conduct of life that Aristotle mentions in Ethics in Nicomachus it is freedom from pain, not from pleasure, that is what the wise should aim for. Aristotle directs us not to secure what is pleasurable but to avoid, as far as possible, all the evils of this world. A man who must think of happiness must consider not only the pleasures of his life which he has enjoyed, but all the evils from which he has escaped. The happiest people are not those who have experienced the greatest delights but those who have ended their lives without great pain, neither physical nor mental. Solon and Croesus. Failure to recognize this truth is the source of much unhappiness.

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

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