How to Get Away

Here’s the summary:

In How to Get Away, Jon Staff and Pete Davis consider our troubled relationship with technology, urbanization, and work. When and why have we become so dependent on our cell phones? How do green spaces—and the lack of them—affect our minds, bodies, and relationships? Why is it so hard for us to set aside our work and take a real vacation? Blending cultural history with contemporary research and insights from scholars and trend-watchers, Staff and Davis present a compelling case for restoring balance between technology and disconnection, city and nature, and work and leisure. Along the way, the authors draw on their own experience, the lives of pioneers and innovators like landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and conservationist Margaret Murie, lifestyle trends like homesteading and hygge, and the wisdom of philosophers, poets, and scientists ranging from Aristotle to Oliver Sacks. How to Get Away offers a nuanced perspective on our past, a call to action for our present, and a hopeful vision for a more balanced future.

Fast Company published an excerpt of How to Get Away. Here’s how it begins:

Before the Civil War, the Sabbath was the only time that most free, working Americans had off. In the late 1860s, while there were a few unenforced eight-hour-day laws on the books, most Americans worked 10 to 12 hours a day. In fact, the word weekend did not even exist until the 1870s. The first documented use of the word was in 1879, when a British magazine explained, “If a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance, he is said to be spending his week-end at so-and-so.”

However, before the weekend, many workers were already taking an informal second day off. They called it “keeping Saint Monday”—skipping work to recover from drinking all day Sunday. The practice was so common that Benjamin Franklin once bragged that he’d gotten promoted simply by consistently showing up for work on Monday: “My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday) recommended me to the master.” There’s even a 1793 folk song about it, “The Jovial Cutler,” which begins:

Brother workmen cease your labour,
Lay your files and hammers by.
Listen while a brother neighbour
Sings a cutler’s destiny:
How upon a good Saint Monday,
Sitting by the smithy fire,
Telling what’s been done o’ t’ Sunday,
And in cheerful mirth conspire.

In some factories, a protoweekend was created when factory owners traded a half-day off on Saturday in exchange for ending St. Mondays.

With the Industrial Revolution, fewer people farmed, a form of labor that had a natural stopping point at sundown. As laborers moved into factories, working conditions became harsher, and the workday became more regimented. With the growth of industrialism came the growth of the labor movement, which pressed for worker interests.

Early, Jon and I published an essay in The New York Daily-News about the need for more vacation time:

"HOW LONG SHOULD A MAN'S VACATION BE?" asked the New York Times in an all-caps headline in 1910. The question was prompted by a recent statement by then-President Taft calling for three months of annual vacation for every American.

If we only vacation two weeks annually, the President warned, we will "exhaust the capital of (our) health and constitution" and be unable to return to our work with "energy and effectiveness." His countrymen, he pleaded, "ought to have a change of air where they can expand their lungs and get exercise."

With Taft's comments a century behind us, the Times' question remains relevant. To begin to answer, we must first consider how much — in fact, how little — we are vacationing already.