August has long been considered the primary vacation month of the year in America, especially for those with children at home. It's the one warm-weather month in which structured summer activities for kids are generally over, but school hasn't yet started (for most).
It seems to me that this year, the second August of the COVID-19 pandemic era has resulted in more time off for more people than ever before. I'll take it one step further and say it seems a lot of folks simply decided to take the entire month off from their normal work schedules -- whatever that means these days.
My perception is based on an unofficial tally of certain random things being at an all-time high:
- People needlessly bragging about their August vacations on social media.
- Number of 'out of the office' responses I get to work calls and emails.
- No production of otherwise live TV shows, and/or vacationing TV personalities. (Some of this comes from the Summer Olympics, which generated hundreds / thousands of hours of new content, and kept other channels re-running old material.)
Yes, a lot of people missed out on their summer vacations last year, and that wasn't going to happen this year. They also probably wanted to compensate for the time and money saved during their stay-cation last year.
But I also get the feeling that the pandemic has changed things to a more European-style, don't-work-too-hard-in-the-summer here. With people 'working' from anywhere, they have more latitude about when, where, and how they work.
Maybe, just maybe, we have a new summer way of doing things, one I wish we'd had when I was younger.
Full disclosure: When it comes to this blog, I also took August off!
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