# Recognizing the Holiday Slow Down By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-11-22 Before a significant holiday, work tends to slow down. Some of the slowdown is due to early vacations. Many people take a few extra days before a holiday to travel or prepare. However, this hardly explains the slowdown, as most people still work until the holiday. Something else is happening. One may conjecture that starting major work on a short workweek is impractical, so most people decide to delay. Therefore, this delay causes all work to slow down accordingly. The problem with this explanation is that work is interrupted all the time. At least every five days, work is paused for two. Does it matter if work happens three or four days before being halted three or four days? This argument doesn't hold water. Instead, unintended, subversive, and collective action is manifesting itself. This emergent worker behavior contradicts the values of a capitalistic society and organizations. It matters little who is working and who is not. Everyone is replaceable. It matters little what the work schedule looks like. One is paid to work efficiently at all times. The only reason breaks from work exist is to spend money, so one needs to keep working. Yet, around the holiday season, people collectively stop working hard. People start having more conversations about one's humanity and life outside of work. This does nothing to generate profit, so organizations should ban this activity. But they never will because people run organizations; if everyone decides to stop working, the organization stops. No manager or organization survives long if they fight against this behavior. This emergent holiday behavior highlights the power of collective action but also the undefeatable drive of humanity to connect and evolve toward something better. This is but a taste of the future of work that humanity strives for. One sees a lighted path beyond managerial power and works without purpose when one recognizes this. Furthermore, one sees how little it matters whether today's "urgent" tasks are delayed by a week or two. The holiday season does not care about what imaginary things need to be done, and everything ends up being just fine. One may wonder, what if every week was a holiday week? What must be done? The short answer: not much. The sooner the unintended, subversive, and collective action enters public conscientiousness, the sooner we'll be on our way to better. #### Related Items [[Work]] [[Capitalism]] [[Management]] [[Organization]] [[Vacation]] [[Purpose]] [[Subversive]] [[Economics]] [[The Human Condition]]