You wouldn’t know it from a trip through Five Corners in Vineyard Haven, or the Triangle in Edgartown, but most Americans don’t take the time off they deserve. It’s not just hard-working laborers who are not permitted paid vacations by their Scroogian overlords, either, though that’s a huge problem and injustice: one in four Americans does not get a single paid vacation day. According to the U.S. Travel Association, an industry group, Americans don’t take advantage of 429 million paid vacation days every year. Divide that by 365 days and you find that otherwise rational people are donating 1.2 million years of their valuable time to their jobs, for free. They are doing this when they could instead be inching along Beach Road toward the drawbridge. 

All joking about traffic aside, it’s a curious thing. According to the study there are all kinds of downsides to not taking a break from work, for both the individual and the employer alike. You can guess most of them: higher stress and related health issues, lower productivity when on the job, declining morale, damaged personal relationships.

And there’s one more downside that I haven’t seen a study about but that I’m pretty willing to bet is true and a fate worse than lower back pain: winding up being boring. Remember the proverb “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”? Write that down a hundred times ... or maybe, on second thought, don’t do that, Jack. But do remember the proverb.

The decline in downtime seems to have begun around 2000. Between 1976 and 2000 Americans on average took around twenty vacation days a year: last year the number was down to sixteen. The French, meanwhile, get and generally take thirty-one days, the Germans thirty-four days, and the Austrians thirty-five days. You can probably guess some of the usual reasons Americans give for not taking the time off they were promised by their bosses and have earned. “The company doesn’t really promote taking it,” is a big one. But there’s also “No one else can do my job,” and its rather more pathetic sidekick, “I don’t want people to think I am replaceable.”

You know what? You are, except to your kids. So turn off your “smart” phone, stupid, and take your vacation. Maybe don’t everyone take all of your vacation at Five Corners in the first three weeks of August, but really, how hard can it be to take the time you’ve earned?

I mean, I know how I would use 1.2 million years of accrued paid vacation. I’d do a little fishing. Read a book. Maybe evolve a little.

My wife might like that.