1) In the U.S. you can work for years at a company before getting more than 1 or 2 weeks paid vacation.
2) Most Americans don't travel much outside their own state or region, let alone country. Most don't even own passports.
3) Even when not on the job, either at night, on the weekends, or on vacation, Americans tend to stay attached to their job via email or phone.
It's true that American salaries can be a lot higher than European ones, especially for developers. But Americans also typically do a lot of side jobs or have households with 2 or more full-time jobs per family, 2 or more cars per family. So one has to ask if it is all worth it?
I can't help but think that passport ownership is one of the fundamental cultural divides in the US. It's difficult to understand the value of travelling abroad if you've never experienced it and don't know many people who have.
Geography is no excuse - Australians are prolific international travellers, despite the size of their continent and their oceanic isolation. Spending a year abroad is the norm for young Aussies, but it's still regarded as a rare privilege for young Americans.
True but America is a wide enough place that you can have most of that without leaving the continental USA.
Growing up in Podunk, USA makes people from Big City, USA feel like foreigners (and vice versa). I'm not saying don't go outside the USA (quite the contrary!) but there's quite a bit you can do and see here without a passport.
> I can't help but think that passport ownership is one of the fundamental cultural divides in the US. It's difficult to understand the value of travelling abroad if you've never experienced it and don't know many people who have.
Very true and I don't know anyone that's traveled extensively that doesn't comment on it being a positive experience in hindsight (aside from business travelers complaining about going back to the same places they don't particular like month after month).
You absolutely, 100% can't. America has no end of wonderful places to visit, but there are so many parts of the experience of foreign travel that aren't remotely replicated in domestic travel.
Being on the wrong side of a language barrier is profoundly dislocating. A domestic visitor to Big City USA won't find themselves asking for directions in pantomime, they won't have to point at something on a menu and hope for the best, they won't walk into a supermarket and realise that they can't tell shampoo from conditioner. There's a deep sense of vulnerability when you can't communicate effectively, a sense of marginalisation and remoteness.
American tourists have a reputation for assuming that everyone accepts greenbacks. It's a profound experience to realise that the money in your wallet is absolutely worthless to the people around you, that the pieces of paper you sweated to earn might as well be monopoly money to anyone outside of a Bureau de Change. The simple experience of having a pocketful of unfamiliar coins has a lasting effect on your understanding of the nature of money.
Except that most don't make those trips around their own country.
Many, many Americans travel extensively or are children of immigrant parents who travel to their home country often.
Other than the currency part, we've got that in the US...
Except for New Orleans.
If you live in the MidWest where most Americans live, then your report would really surprise me.
If American's were enabled to take the time to see the world a bit more they would be less reliant on media stereotypes to understand it and might question their lot a bit more often but perhaps that's not in the interests of the people who run America.
Americans could use a little less prejudice in their lives.
No we don't.
I have 5 weeks of holiday a year, total. I take 2 weeks around christmas. Maybe a week somewhere in Spring, that leaves 2 weeks summer holidays. Plus, you want to keep a few spare days in case you need an incidental day off for whatever reason.
Most people only get 5 weeks of holiday a year total (4 weeks is the legal minimum) and they usually spread out those days over the year. If you can travel the world for 6 weeks every summer then you have an above-average number of free days and probably an above-average income to be able to afford that much travel.
We do get vacation money (8% of your gross salary, usually paid in may) but that's not nearly enough for 6 weeks of travel unless you saved up a lot.
You say people "only" get 5 weeks of holiday, but that only supports my main point about the huge difference between that and what Americans are used to.