In the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation, Tom and Donna keep an annual day for spending money lavishly on things they do not need. They call it Treat Yo’ Self day. The episode, “Pawnee Rangers,” first aired on October 13, 2011.
October 13 is now promoted as Treat Yo’ Self Day, a day for shopping, brunches and spa treatments.
In 2019 Oregon passed a law that allows students to take mental health days as excused absences from school, up to five in three months. Utah had passed a similar law a year earlier. The Oregon bill was championed by an 18-year-old student, Haily Hardcastle. “Why should we encourage lying to our parents and teachers?”
In 2023 the Pew Research Center found that 46 percent of American workers with paid time off take less than their employer offers. Asked why, 52 percent said they did not feel they needed to take more. Forty-nine percent said they worried about falling behind at work. Forty-three percent said they would feel bad about coworkers taking on extra work.
In 2014 Gallup reported that “Adults employed full time in the U.S. report working an average of 47 hours per week.” Nearly four in ten said they worked at least 50 hours. Salaried employees averaged 49 hours.
In October 2022 the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, published a Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being. It names five essentials. One of them is Work-Life Harmony, which covers autonomy, flexible schedules and paid leave.
In its own words, the framework “offers a foundation that workplaces can build upon.”
In 2018 Jeff Bezos said in an interview: “I get asked about work-life balance all the time. And my view is, that’s a debilitating phrase because it implies there’s a strict trade-off.” He continued, “It actually is a circle. It’s not a balance.” He added, “This work-life harmony thing is what I try to teach young employees and actually senior executives at Amazon too.”
Since 2017 the U.S. Travel Association has promoted National Plan for Vacation Day on the last Tuesday in January. It encourages Americans to plan the vacation days they already have. In 2021 American workers earned an average of 15.6 days of paid time off and used 11.0.
Bare minimum Monday: doing “the minimal amount of work necessary on Mondays.” The TikTok creator Marisa Jo Mayes coined it in 2022 as an answer to burnout. One business news site warned that it “could derail your career.”
Lazy girl job: a flexible, often remote job with work-life balance, a phrase made popular on TikTok by Gabrielle Judge. “There’s no one that tells us to do less,” she said. A Boston Globe writer called the name a “colossal branding error” and wrote, “Setting a boundary between your work and the rest of your life is far from lazy.”
In 2021 Gallup asked 13,085 American employees what mattered most in their next job. Sixty-four percent rated a significant increase in income or benefits as very important. Next came “greater work-life balance and better personal wellbeing,” at 61 percent, up from 53 percent in 2015.
In the Apple TV+ series Severance, first shown in February 2022, employees of Lumon Industries undergo “a procedure that splits a person’s memories between work and their personal life.” At work the “innie” has “no knowledge of the outside world.” At home the “outie” lives “without any knowledge of their job.”
The creator, Dan Erickson, got the idea while working at a door factory. He wished he could “skip the eight hours of the workday, to disassociate and just get it over with.” In 2025 the series became the most watched in the history of Apple TV+.