This Labor Day weekend, I’m savoring the last days of summer, but also feeling that I did not spend enough of it in the right way. I spent too much time working. 

I know I’m not alone. Nearly one in four Americans get no paid vacation at all and no paid holidays. Many who do get paid time off are reluctant to take it because of workplace pressures. 

I was more fortunate than many, however. Over the last two weeks, I did almost no work for nine days. I read two novels. I dropped my son off at college, took long car trips with my husband, saw friends, hung out with elderly relatives. At my father’s house, I had time to help with house tasks: putting up fences to protect fruit trees from marauding deer, moving a bookshelf off the porch. I spent time watching a pond that was, at different times, both lively as hundreds of hopping frogs and still as ramrod-straight little blue herons. I noticed that if you’re quiet enough, the buzzing of a tiny hummingbird’s wings can be surprisingly loud, like a motor, and that it’s funny how a woodpecker thinks everything is a tree. I got lost in mossy forests and admired the surf off the rocky coast. I listened to coyotes at night. I had an incredible Hawaiian massage from my niece. 

When I got back home to New York City, I did not immediately catch up on work, email, or chores; instead, I went with friends to take in the public joy that is the Bronx’s Orchard Beach — the cleanest beach on Long Island Sound — where we swam, enjoyed the weekly Sunday salsa party, and saw a great egret. 

All this enjoyment was justified, but not because I’m especially deserving. Nor was it merited because now, rejuvenated, I’m more productive. I’m probably just the same as I was before: same periodic flickers of intelligence, same woolgathering, same laziness. But the break mattered because there is more to life than work. We all have families, friends, and a beautiful world to enjoy. 

This is not even an insight in most rich countries, but it’s one we’re discouraged from exploring in hyper-capitalist America. Earlier this summer, the media was buzzing with a concept absurdly called “micro-retirement,” which Fast Company called “the latest Gen Z trend.” These cutting-edge young people apparently take a two-week break from work every six months or so. These breaks help them “avoid burnout . . . and enhance their overall well-being.” Whoa, what will they think of next?

No weird new jargon is needed. This is called a “vacation.” Perhaps the young are unfamiliar with this custom because American employers, almost uniquely among rich countries, aren’t obligated to provide any, even unpaid. Europeans, by contrast, thanks to left-wing initiatives of the 1930s like the French Popular Front’s “holiday movement,” enjoy weeks of paid time off even to this day. If you go to Paris in August, few actual residents of the city will be there, and most businesses will be closed. 

The 1936 Soviet constitution included a “right to rest.” In the early days of the Soviet Union, authorities viewed vacation as a way to help workers be more productive on the job, but they came to embrace it as a way for humans to explore capacities and interests beyond work and to bond with their families. While the human capital arguments are legitimate (vacation does help us avoid burnout and work better), historian Gary Cross quotes the British Trade Union Council of the 1930s arguing that the worker is not “merely a machine to be kept in working order but a human being with a life of his own to be lived and enjoyed.” We all have elders, children, and ponds full of hopping frogs to appreciate.

We deserve more vacation, for sure. But we also deserve more free time all year round. Americans work hundreds of hours a year more than Europeans. Imagine if we had more time for our families, friends, the natural world, and our own minds every week. 

One appealing and highly practical approach is the four-day work week, whose implementation Boston College scholar Juliet Schor has been studying in over thirty companies. She’s finding widespread satisfaction among both employees and employers. On Jacobin Radio, Schor told my husband Doug Henwood that workers described huge improvements in their well-being, calling the move to a four-day week, “life-changing, transformational, best thing that ever happened to me.” A UK study found similar satisfaction, with most participating companies saying they would continue, citing decline in workforce turnover and no loss of revenue.

As usual, when it comes to moving this idea forward, socialists are the ones leading the way. Bernie Sanders recently talked about it on the Joe Rogan Experience. Phara Souffrant Forrest, the socialist New York State assemblywoman representing my Brooklyn district, has introduced several bills to advance the four-day week, through both public- and private-sector pilot programs, establishing a tax credit for participating private employers. 

Forrest told Newsweek in June that the research showed that “workers thrive when given more time to care for themselves, their families and their communities.” She hoped New York’s experiment would become a model, “not just for our state but for the whole country.”

Socialism holds the potential to end some of the worst exploitation, bloodshed, and suffering in the world, but it can also help us to live better, fuller lives. With so much else to do, and our time on earth so limited, there’s no reason for us to work as much as we do. 

I’m still thinking about my vacation and how much better I feel after having had some free time. As the long weekend approaches, I probably have to catch up on work. But I’m also looking forward to getting outside, reading, watching birds, and yearning for a world abundant in the leisure we all deserve.