Since I'm happily on the leisure beat lately, I was glad to run across this article laying out the evidence that vacations are actually healthy for us. They reduce the rate of heart attacks, reduce stress levels, lower blood pressure, and so on. None of this is shocking, and it's hard for a study to show causality rather than correlation, but its suggestive, and intuitive, data. It's possible that, like with Social Security payments, being forced to do something we may forget, or be unable, to do on our own would actually be a good thing. Paternalism, baby. It's the wave of the future.
Indeed, we tend to evaluate work almost entirely in terms of how much money it makes us, and maybe, secondarily, whether it contributes to our happiness. But there are other factors as well. Blood pressure rises linearly with hours spent at the office. The more a society works in the aggregate, the more carbon they release into the atmosphere. The more parents work, the less time they have to spend with their children. Etc, etc. I'm not suggesting that folks shouldn't work, or that I know how to balance these tradeoffs, but there are downsides to more time at the office, and our culture is often peculiarly resistant to examining them.
