“And now, our superintendent will say a few words.” There was a smattering of applause followed by silence. A chair creaked on the concrete floor. And then the head of our park began to speak.
I was at a meeting for all park rangers. Our superintendent was nearing retirement after a long career in US national parks, and she had wisdom to impart.
We were crammed into a garage, the only indoor space in the park large enough to seat the entire staff. I was a seasonal ranger, new to the park, eager to hear what my boss had to tell us.
She rambled a bit about how annoyed she was that some staff complained about recent federal cuts to our budget. “What kind of person struggles when they have 5% taken out of their budget? People who’ve made the wrong choices in life, that’s who!”
“Or the working poor?” I thought. Many people live paycheck to paycheck through no fault of their own, and their finances would collapse with a 5% cut to their pay.
Plus, this budget slash meant impending staff cuts, something I was pretty sure the staff had a right to grumble about.
She next made some remarks about safety that caused tension to ripple through the room (I would later learn that she was continually threatening to cut programs she deemed “unsafe,” which was pretty much everything we did at the park).
It wasn’t a very rousing speech, in fact some of her comments were patronizing. She came across as out of touch with everyday workers and their work and life issues.
Maybe it was a good time for her to retire.
I was sipping my tea and thinking about lunch, when she started talking about herself.
“Some days are difficult,” she told us. “Some days I can’t get up and do what I need to do. And that’s when I take a Karen Day.”
Her name wasn’t Karen, but I’m not going to share her real name here. What I will say is that Karen gave her own name to the days when she decided to take time for herself.
Karen Days were her version of mental health days. She said that she would call her staff, a bunch of people who worked for her, and tell them she wasn’t coming in. Then she would go for a walk in our lovely park or rest or do other things that made her feel better.
Karen was taking care of herself, which was admirable. But she was not advocating that we do the same, which was less admirable.
She was not unveiling a new policy that allowed employees to take a few mental health days a year. She was not telling us that we were allowed to take time off for mental health using our sick leave. She was announcing her own privilege.
Karen was trying to tell us to care for ourselves and our mental health. But she was also making sure we knew that we couldn’t do it the way she did. “Obviously you can’t take days off like I do, but take care of yourselves out there!”
Karen Days became a joke that summer among my colleagues. One of us would be having a difficult day, and we would say “I think I’m going to take a Karen Day.” Haha. Big laughs.
We wouldn’t say a day with our own name, because we were not superintendents, not people who got our own days. And we didn’t take the time off. Because, unlike Karen, we would have been fired.
And that was wrong. It is wrong for bosses to take mental health days but not secure them for their employees. It is wrong for an organization’s culture to support the unequal treatment of workers.
Everyone deserves a Karen Day. Everyone needs and deserves time off for their mental health. Especially when they work challenging jobs. And working for the National Park Service is challenging.
The 2022 survey of federal employees conducted by the Partnership for Public Service ranked the NPS 371st out of 432 of the best places to work in the federal government. Job satisfaction and engagement for NPS employees scored in the bottom 15% of all federal workers.
NPS employees surveyed were especially dissatisfied with their leadership: only 47.9% felt empowered by their leaders and over half were unhappy with senior park leadership. (Perhaps many of them have sat through speeches similar to the one Karen gave us.)
But not all senior leaders are like Karen, and it’s not just the ones who are that are responsible for the abysmal morale of the NPS: a quarter of all NPS jobs have been cut in the last two decades (from 16,000 to 12,000 employees), due to budget cuts like the one Karen wanted us to stop whining about. Over the same time, US national parks have seen record and ever-rising visitation.
NPS employees are doing more with less, and, unlike Karen believed, it’s not their fault that it’s hard.
And the difficulties of their jobs bleed into all facets of their lives: work/life balance ranked the worst for NPS employees out of any category surveyed, putting them 406th out of 432 federal agencies. Having a terrible work/life balance is exactly what mental health days are meant to address.
I would argue that with morale this low the NPS desperately needs to address the mental health of its employees. And Karen hit on a great solution, although not in the way she intended. When we wake up and are not okay, we should all have the right to take a Karen Day.
And that’s true no matter what organization we work for. The NPS, where I spent 9 years of my life, is an extreme example of employee misery, but no job should harm our mental health.
If you work at a job where you’ll be fired for caring for your needs, ask yourself if you are willing to sacrifice your well-being for a job.
Better your organization if you can, but if you can’t then go out and look for a better job, a better organization. Or create your own job, and give mental health days to yourself and the people who may one day work for you.
Above all, don’t believe the Karens when they tell you that they deserve wellness and you don’t.