Vacation, all I Never wanted?

According to this AP article more and more people are "choosing" not to take vacations, at least the 2- and 3-week types of vacations many of us may have grown up with.

Instead, people are opting for either vacations lasting a week or less, or eschewing the idea of week-long vacations altogether, in favor of taking "off" a few hours here, a half-day there, a three day weekend now and then, etc.

A quarter of those people surveyed said they felt discouraged from taking vacations by their bosses. I'd be willing to bet that the actual chilling effect is much greater, and probably much more subconscious.

As more and more people become employed as "knowledge workers" as opposed to traditional manufacturing and service industries, the whole concept of workload changes and with it the vacation dynamic.

"Knowledge work" simply isn't fungible. Someone who works in retail doesn't have to worry about coming back from vacation to find a big pile of unsold TVs just waiting for him or her to deal with. The short-order cook doesn't have to worry about a stack of raw hash browns or uncooked eggs piling up while they're gone. Presumably, if they're lucky enough to get (and afford) vacation [a quite separate and equally troubling issue], someone else steps in to take care of that work.

The typical "knowledge worker" now has to spend a good deal of the week or two before a vacation trying to reduce the number of land-mines that might blow up while they're gone. They have to spend the first few days after vacation cleaning up the mess that's accumulated while they were away, including hundreds of e-mails, voicemails, memos and general piles of shit that land on their desks.

Perhaps we've lost the ability to appreciate leisure and leisure-time because our society places absolutely no value on it whatsoever. Not only is leisure not treasured, it's derided as "laziness" or "slacking off".

I don't think the people in the survey reported in this article are making conscious, voluntary decisions in favor of shorter "mini-vacations" as they are using these "mini-vacations" as a passive-aggressive response to the fact that they've had the traditional vacation taken away from them.