The French, on average, work 300 hours less each year than we Americans do. I find that fact absolutely astonishing, stunning, virtually inconceivable. Divide 300 by the supposed American 40-hour work week and you get almost 2 entire months of every year that Americans spend working, while Europeans spend living. 2 months! Imagine every one you know - retail clerks, business folks, bus drivers, scientists, computer programmers - virtually everyone with an additional 2 months of free time in their lives each year. Frankly, as an American, I find even the fantasy staggeringly difficult to accept. It seems like such a simple thing - this exaggerated vacation (as Americans view it), but it implies so many day to day implications about how to live one's life that the result is a fundamentally different approach to living and to what we value in our lives.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference in the way Americans and Europeans live their lives lies in their relationship to work and the relative importance of its bi-products - money, fame and success. So much of our life as Americans is defined by the work we take on - our daily schedules, relationships to co-workers and friends, time with our children, how we describe ourselves to others. Simply put, we dedicate most of our energies to work and spend most of our lives working. Henry Thoreau tried to remind us that time was the ultimate currency of our lives. If he was right we may be the poorest of all modern nations.

There are many reasons why Americans work so much more than Europeans do: Americans favor business-friendly, rather than worker-friendly labor laws, which seem to result in more jobs all around with substantially less benefits and a huge and ever-increasing gap between rich and poor. Americans are an immigrant culture and among immigrants, who lack the type of social networks available to natives, hard work is fundamental for survival. Our country was born and thrived from leaving its citizens with a large degree of freedom from government interference and that legacy remains with us. But I think the most important reason of all is that for us, adopted sons and daughters of Max Weber's Calvinist Puritans, success matters above almost everything else. As the Puritans worked hard and looked to the fruits of success as a sign of God's divine love for them, Americans remain driven by the equation of success (money, fame, prestige) with moral good and the good life. In America, if you want to live the good life, all you have to do is work your ass off for it - or at least that's how the story's supposed to go.