Why Do Americans Resist Vacation?
Guilt and fear
It's the new year, and I hope you are all vision-boarding your travel goals for 2025. I try to use January to manifest plans to go somewhere to feel more like myself or somewhere I think will help feed my creative brain.
Mostly, I plan to travel during the offseason for quiet, or more precisely, the lack of human voices. I have never gotten so much writing done as I have while sitting in earshot of the ocean in the fall when all the beach tourists are long gone. Windows thrown open, I listened to the waves roll in — both in times of surges that slam the water against cliffs, spraying everything along the shore with tiny, salty droplets, and quieter times when the shallow lapping plays like a meditative loop in the distance.
In 2015, when Boston was buried under record snowfall for more than Four. Weeks. Straight. I went mad. In a desperate attempt to get out, one of the cheapest flights I found was to Paris in March. And it was one of my favorite trips to the city. Sure, it was chilly, but I lingered on dark bridges after early sunsets, watching the Bateaux Mouches glide down the Seine without anyone else around. I ducked into wine bars toute seule for evenings of deep thinking.
There's a slight problem with this plan to travel during the offseason. Often, the biggest reason airfares and hotels are so discounted during the offseason is not just weather but because those times generally don't lend themselves to people traveling. Most corporate organizations schedule new projects and kickoff meetings for late winter and early spring, and frown on employees taking vacation right after winter or summer holidays (prime offseason times). Parents with young kids need to adhere to vacation schedules.
More recently, several articles detailed the strategy of maximizing vacation days by turning a sad number of paid days off into more than a month of travel by booking trips adjacent to national holidays. The math is great, but the rest of the plan has drawbacks. The biggest is that you're likely to turn up at overtouristed spots simultaneously with hundreds of thousands of other people.
But this whole discussion has a fatal flaw, at least for my American friends. We are terrible at using all of our vacation days. Yes, the number of people traveling is set to increase further in 2025. But y'all, you're not even taking advantage of your insultingly little vacation time.
In 2023, 62% of workers with PTO did not use all of their vacation time, letting a third of it go to waste. What?!?! And that stat has remained relatively the same over the last few years across different surveys from different sources.
I really wanted to understand how we, as a nation, got here. But that research could fill an entire book. Instead, I'll leave you with links that help explain why Americans are guided by fear and guilt when taking or not taking time off.
But remember, we don’t call it fear. Instead, that feeling in the pit of our stomach was long ago rebranded as the bubbling of grit and determination. Spoiler: it's not.
When Pew Research dug deeper in 2023 to understand why Americans aren't using their PTO days, the reasons were grim but unsurprising. The answers perfectly detail the widespread anxieties of US work culture. Here's how it broke down.
About half (49%) say they’d worry about falling behind at work if they took more time off. Some 43% of workers who don’t take all their time off say they’d feel badly about their co-workers taking on additional work.
Workers’ reasons for not taking more time off also vary by demographic and job characteristics, including race, gender and years with their employer:
Women are more likely than men to say that feeling badly about co-workers taking on additional work is a reason they take less time off than offered (48% vs. 39%). Women ages 18 to 49 are especially likely to say this, compared with men of the same age group (53% vs. 43%).
Black workers are more likely than White workers to say that the risk of losing their job is a reason they take less time off than what is offered (21% vs. 13%).
About a quarter (24%) of workers who have been with their employer for less than a year say that the risk of losing their job is a reason they don’t take more time off. A similar share (21%) of workers who have been with their employer for between one and five years say this.
From a 2024 Harris Poll
85% of American Workers agree that “America has a culture that glorifies being busy.”
66% of American workers dread the backlog of work awaiting their return.
Nearly half of workers say they feel guilty for taking days off.
63% of American workers said, “The pressure to meet deadlines and maintain productivity often deters me from taking extended time away from work.”
From 2024 Bloomberg Report: The True Cost of Layoffs
Just one-quarter of US firms said all of their employees were eligible for severance in the event of a layoff, according to a survey Globally, it’s 42%.
From around the web:
Americans are suddenly finding it harder to land a job — and keep it
In 2024, it took, on average, 5 months to find a new job
The average cost of COBRA health insurance is $703 per month.
US court nixes order barring Amazon from firing pro-union workers
Accused of violating worker rights, SpaceX and Amazon go after labor board
Looking Back On When President Reagan Fired The Air Traffic Controllers