It’s August, which for many of us means time for vacation. But despite our desire to get away, it’s nearly impossible to ignore the new email notifications racking up on our smartphones. The dread of coming back to an overflowing inbox is enough to ruin a day at the beach.
 
Why is it so hard to unplug?
 
The Puritan forefathers of America held that idleness was a sin. (It was theologian Martin Luther who said, “God . . . does not want me to sit at home, to loaf, to commit matters to God, and to wait till a fried chicken flies into my mouth.”) By the 19th century, however, many doctors advocated time away for the benefit of mental well-being. Changing attitudes, coupled with a growing middle class and railroads that enabled easier long distance travel, led to the rise of what we recognize today as the annual rite of the summer vacation.
 
By 1910, President William Howard Taft was advocating that every American should have two or three months of vacation “in order to continue his work next year with the energy and effectiveness which it ought to have.”
 
Yet today, more than 100 years after Taft’s appeal, the U.S. is still a rarity among wealthy, developed nations in that it does not mandate paid leave. Although the average private sector worker gets 16 paid days for vacations and holidays off, 25% of workers get no paid vacation time at all.
 
Those who do get paid time off don’t always take it. A survey from Project: Time Off found that 55% of American workers do not use all their vacation days. Average vacation time used has declined by almost a full week since 1978. An analysis by Oxford Economics found American workers are forfeiting $52.4 billion in time off annually.
 
The leading reasons American workers don’t take time off? A fear of returning to a horrible backlog of work, and a feeling that no one else can do our jobs.
 
Americans are not alone in our hesitance to take time away. In Japan and South Korea, workers use an even smaller fraction of their allotted vacation days. A survey last year by news agency Xinhua found only 14% of Chinese workers had taken a paid vacation in the past three years.
 
In European Union member nations by contrast, workers get a minimum of four weeks paid vacation by law.
 
Europeans seem to better appreciate the benefits of time away. Research shows that vacations often serve to make us not only smarter, healthier and less stressed, but more productive in the long run.
 
As the British banker, politician and all around Renaissance man John Lubbock so eloquently put it in his book “The Use of Life,” “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”