Vacation Is the Plan of The Man to Keep a Brother Down
In a world where nothing remains undiscovered or otherwise original—everything seems within reach after a quick “search”—I was surprised to Google the phrase—
It's the plan of the man to keep a brother down.
—and get zero relevant results.
ChatGPT did, however, tell me that I'm not crazy. The melodic sentence was popular, as part of Black American slang, when I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. I didn’t need ChatGPT to tell me this. For whatever reason, it’s one of the things I recall from my very white childhood.
Anyway, while not on vacation in Paris, I came to the conclusion that vacation is the plan of the man to keep a brother—and really most Americans—down.
As you know, my wife and I spent April in Paris. All month I worked in the morning and a little here and there in the afternoon. The deeper into the month we entered, the more it felt like we were “living” there.
Just when the barista knows your name and you’ve followed the same route back to the apartment enough to look for a different one, it’s time to go home.
I didn’t view this as a vacation.
In fact, I don’t view any of the travel we do as vacation. I view it all as an extension of our life into other settings. My job—self-employed freelancer who often writes about my experience and what’s happening around me—helps create this effect, but I don’t think that’s the only factor.
The whole two-weeks-off-and-a-handful-of-holidays setup has never sat well with me. And it shouldn’t sit well.
Think about it. Like so many other toxic elements, small amounts of vacation time—how much you get, what you’re going to do with it—has become uncritically baked into American culture.
People have become to numb to the way most U.S. companies structure vacation—as if it’s all good. There’s little more than an it is what it is shrug of the shoulder when Americans compare their situation to how “vacation” works across Europe.
During the first half of April, we saw a ton of Americans in Paris. Like a ton.
It took me a few days to put two and two together. Spring break. They were on spring break.
I wondered how many of these families coordinated their vacation “requests” with their kids’ time off school.
When we came home, I saw this post on LinkedIn (which I recently saw someone refer to as a digital homeless shelter for the unemployed):
In Spain, it’s puente. But if the holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, some people take a very long break and call it an acueducto.
There’s something not-so-subtle in all of this.
Americans often joke about all of the vacation they take in countries like Spain and France.
Many people in the United States treat it like an amenity—something to be grateful for, like health insurance—rather than a basic part of how life should work. Some even feel guilty for taking vacation.
Much of this discussion pertains to people with full-time jobs.
I don’t follow a holiday schedule. Never have. I likely never will.
I work—at least a little—pretty much every single day. Even here, full-time employees don’t understand my schedule. A few can’t seem to comprehend that I work on a holiday, but, again, my gig is different.
What’s not different is the way we view not merely time off and what to do with it, but how it gets assigned to us.
The American perception of vacation isn’t freedom. It’s a coping mechanism for a system that makes everyday life harder than it needs to be.
In places like France or Spain, you don’t escape from life. You live it—consistently—without waiting for permission.
And if your physical environment, your social norms, and your institutions don’t support that way of living, it’s long past time to question not just how you take time off, but why you need it—as a departure from “real life”—in the first place.
