Most people do work during Dead Week in the United States. In recent years, a few companies have shifted to giving employees the entire week off, a tacit admittance that it is both still part of the holidays and a useless time to expect any kind of productivity. But far more workers have no possibility of taking this time off; in retail, for instance, this is one of the busiest and most hellish weeks of the year.

Even so, it is still the closest thing we have in our society to some kind of a communal pause. Nothing is ever as quiet as it is during those few days, cities emptied out and small towns sleepier than usual, people drifting around not interested in accomplishing anything. There is a collective sense that, for these few days, we are not going to do any more than we must. It doesn’t really matter if you don’t brush your hair, if you stay up all night, if you don’t send that work email. Many people aren’t checking email anyway, and nobody wants to be asked to do more work than they absolutely have to.

Dead Week isn’t a week off for everyone, or at least the thing it is a week off from isn’t work. Rather, it is a week off from the forward-motion drive of the rest of the year. It is a time against ambition and against striving. Whatever we hoped to finish is either finished or it’s not going to happen this week, and all our successes and failures from the previous year are already tallied up. It’s too late for everything; Dead Week is the luxurious relief of giving up.