15-20 more federal holidays

Instead of fixed-date holidays, just mandate 15-20 days of paid vacation. Why is this so politically untenable in the USA? Why would voters (besides the relatively few business owners) vote against this?

Seems like such a sad existence to be looking forward to holidays. My dad told me not to look forward to weekends because it will make life fly by too fast, and it will make your weekdays miserable.<p>I took it to heart, and maybe its because I found a good career, but I like working. I even like working on side gigs after work. Sure bugs can be frustrating, but so is playing Zelda. I find solving the bugs more rewarding than grinding on BOTW.<p>I imagine people indulge on holidays, drinking and eating unhealthy foods, of course that is fun. The next day when you are dealing with the hangover and now have to diet&#x2F;be in pain for ~3 days to make up for the excess calories; is less fun.

I may put my foot in my mouth but is the weekend considered a holiday? You get a 100 days off a year just from that + the 2 weeks or whatever that most professionals get which make up the bulk of hackernews readers.<p>I know in some other countries like the middle east, they operate more like what the writer of this article suggests. They work weekends but they get many many more random holidays.

Idk how anyone can be functional on the long term without at least 5 or 6 weeks of vacation each year.

It&#x27;s amazing how batshit crazy blogs like this pop up to the top of HN so frequently. Imagine the people who are so deluded as to believe that more vacation days is all it takes to cure mental illness. Or that vacation days would offset a culture of overworking, underpaying, underbenefits, underrepresentation, etc. Your shitty work life is still waiting for you when you get back. The bills aren&#x27;t getting paid any faster. You&#x27;re still on the bottom rung. But you can sure sit around your house longer worrying about things.

I&#x27;ll escalate things by saying that even the European standard of say 5 weeks is in no way excessive. It still means working 90% of the weeks of the year.<p>You could also look at it from another angle and explore what makes work so miserable. More often than not, it&#x27;s not the hours, it&#x27;s the intensity of it. Very high-paced, full of thousands of distractions, limited control over outcomes making it not rewarding, politics, the increased speed of change, etc. Modern work has the potential to burn you up much quicker than in simpler times.<p>As for this last point, I cannot emphasize it enough. A recent study in my country revealed 30% of workers being close to a burnout and the vast majority of actual work disability cases to be burnout related. These dropouts creating even more pressure on the remaining work force.<p>I truly believe we&#x27;re at or near the peak of what the human mind can endure, even more so if you expect people to ride this out until the age of 70.<p>This world is too complicated and too fast.

15-20 more holidays for whom?<p>The sort of people who hang out on r&#x2F;antiwork aren&#x27;t getting paid time off even for Christmas. They certainly aren&#x27;t going to get 20 days of paid time off, plus the existing holidays.<p>For them, would it be a solution to mental health, or would it aggravate even more when it makes it more difficult to make rent? That is, supposing their jobs just don&#x27;t work through anyway. I suppose legislation could mandate the day off work, but this isn&#x27;t a net win at all... then they tweak their hiring practices so as to avoid paying this. More part-time workers who are schedule off that entire week&#x2F;month so as to not be paid for the day off either. In extreme cases, just hiring fewer workers still, skeleton crews, throughout the year, such that payroll stays the same, but that those who still retain a job are more overworked for it than when they didn&#x27;t have these extra holidays. Is that net gain on any of a) paychecks for those still working b) rest for those still working c) total paycheck across the entire workforce?<p>I mean, I think this really does increase time off for some large fraction of the workforce, but not in the way that the OP intends.

Holidays are already tiered - I&#x27;ve never worked anywhere nor know anyone who worked at a non-governmental business who got EVERY federal holiday off. Very few people get Washington&#x27;s Birthday, Columbus Day, or MLK jr. Day off.<p>I&#x27;ve also noticed that, again, for non-governmental businesses, the more holidays you get off the less vacation time you get.

I&#x27;m noticing that an increasing number of people are taking advantage people&#x27;s general lack of interest in history as a means ideologically rewrite it.<p>Just because some nobles and bishops said that peasants had it easy doesn&#x27;t mean that they actually had it easy. Anyone who has actually tried homesteading or even garden knows that the this lifestyle isn&#x27;t leisurely even with the wonders of modern technology. This isn&#x27;t even considering all the chores they had to do by hand: washing clothes, making the soap used to wash clothes, rendering the fat used to make the soap, making the lye used for soap, chopping the firewood used to make the lye, and carrying water that you require for all these other chores. This was what peasants did with their &quot;leisure&quot;. It was until the Victorian era when the modern concept of leisure

Some things the author didn&#x27;t consider:<p>* In the US, there&#x27;s no mandatory federal holidays for states and private companies.<p>* This doesn&#x27;t include essential employees, who typically get floating holidays in lieu of federal holidays (usually used at a later time)<p>* Are the differences in happiness actually caused by holiday time - or are there other factors (and what are they) that account for other countries having seemingly higher happiness levels<p>* Is this happiness or contentment we&#x27;re talking about - there is a huge difference<p>* My understanding was that the high and late middle ages the RCC did whatever it could to placate many of the lower classes because of the pressures brought on by the Ottoman and Eastern Orthodoxies

Please note that many european countries have between 30 and 50 days paid leave.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...</a>

As European, it&#x27;s insane to me that American get so little time off. In my country we get 4 weeks leave mandated by law plus public holidays.

I think I&#x27;d prefer for (some of) the states in the US to make it illegal to work on Sundays (with the obvious exceptions of medical care and emergency services) like we used to have in the West for many centuries in a row (except this time justify it as the voter&#x27;s will, not God&#x27;s will). Also make it illegal to make noise a la mowing the lawn on Sunday like Germany does.

I would have always preferred to have had less holidays and more vacation.

I want to know what&#x27;s so special about July 19th that it made this list.<p>Probably not this:<p>&gt; 2014 – Gunmen in Egypt&#x27;s western desert province of New Valley Governorate attack a military checkpoint, killing at least 21 soldiers. Egypt reportedly declares a state of emergency on its border with Sudan.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;July_19#1901%E2%80%93present" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;July_19#1901%E2%80%93present</a><p>Edit:<p>For real though, this is kind of a strange article once it starts comparing 2019 and after.<p>&gt; A recent gallup poll noticed a slight downturn in satisfaction with Americans’ personal life during the last 20 years.<p>&gt; <i>[graph showing a tick down in this poll on satisfaction from somewhere around mid-60s to ~50 from 2019 to 2020]</i><p>Gee, I wonder what happened from 2019 to 2020 that caused a dramatic shift in Americans&#x27; satisfaction with personal life. Hmm. Let me think...<p>&gt; Notably, the amount of leisure is one area that people say could be be improved upon.<p>Changed from 42 <i>up</i> to 43 from 2019 to 2023. Personal health went down from 54 to 41, family life from 76 to 66, community as a place to live from 61 to 51.<p>I don&#x27;t know why the article presents this data at all because it doesn&#x27;t support focusing on leisure. The dramatic tick down is quite clearly people pissed off or affected by COVID-19 <i>and</i> government&#x27;s response to it (both impacted people negatively). Given that data, leisure seems like a non-sequitur. Leisure definitely is important and has been consistently poor regardless of COVID-19, so why present this particular data? Just talk about leisure.<p>I&#x27;ll add that one thing I think about leisure in the US is that without longer vacations, our leisure time is used in a worse way as well. A lot of peoples&#x27; leisure is filled with consuming television. It&#x27;s like the junk food of leisure. Heck, if you&#x27;re watching TV shows where characters are frequently angry and yelling at each other or committing murder, I&#x27;m going to guess that might actually have a more negative impact on the viewer&#x27;s mental health. To each their own of course, but I find that when I listen to sad or angry music, it makes me sad or angry. It&#x27;s like the Bill Burr bit on his dog&#x27;s temper (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GnjGyOQ7FcU">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GnjGyOQ7FcU</a>). Not suggesting we need to regulate how people use their leisure, I just think this is probably another piece of the puzzle when discussing Americans and our dissatisfaction with our lives in terms of leisure.