In the UK the idea of a paid holiday is a new idea, up until 1938 working men had no entitlement to such a thing. The trade unions were responsible for getting the change although initially the entitlement was for just one week of paid holiday. Eventually two weeks became the norm and then the E.U. laws harmonised the rules to whatever we have today.

There was a need then for taking people's money off them to take them somewhere for this mandatory holiday fun. This provided quite a bonus to the railways and associated industries. Seaside towns in the UK are still littered with the leftover hotels and amusements that got borne into being before the airplane came along. Planes took the holidaymakers away to cheaper parts of the world where the strong pound meant that Spanish and Greek folk could wait on average Brits, accepting wages that nobody would work for in the UK. A lot of such tourism was living for cheap and having other people do the chores for you, not exactly the pinnacle of adventure.

So ingrained is the notion of holiday that it really is mandatory. To stay at home and enjoy the home you have been working fifty weeks of the year to secure is anathema, total crazy talk that would mark you out as eccentric. Just because some trade union people fought for the right for paid holidays in eighty years ago is forgotten and not known by the working man, yet just because of this legislation the act of going on holiday is deemed mandatory. It is a win for capitalism and it means nobody is truly getting off the hamster wheel and enjoying the art of doing nothing. Even in this article - albeit American - there is still a lot of emphasis on doing inane stuff, loitering around local shops, putting effort into doing holiday things but in your back yard. We still seem afraid of an open ended commitment to unstructured self development, taking time out to do nothing. Times of nothingness are great for original thinking, creativity and learning, maybe some people just can't do it.