A lot of us use those "vacations" to schedule appointments, do home repairs, and other things we couldn't find time for during the rest of the year. I've never had a real vacation.
Only time I had real vacations was when I was in the Marine Corps. Now I make enough money but there is just never enough time to actually take a real vacation when my schedule can line up with the wife and kids. Best I ever get is a week to stay home and relax a little more than normal.
Ooof i see lots of these comments on kids and family. Another guy was missing the days of dating his gf/wife after work in 20's. I.... want to do that in my 30's too i think? I dont like chores as it is
As someone approaching middle age, not having kids seems to be a life hack tbh. Taking a half day on a random Friday to get the margarita party started never gets old.
I'm 35 and from my experience it isn't bad, but it will be missed. We get some of that time on weekends when our kids have things like girl scouts, parties, ets line up and then it's just the two of us. Unfortunately it doesn't happen often though, so we rarely get to take advantage of it. Usually the only date we go on is our anniversary where we have our friends watch the kids for a few hours. Most often we just take the kids out with us as we have very well behaved kids. We do miss the intimate dates though, we have talked about it from time to time.
After the kids go to bed, take some wine or a few beers, go in the back yard or on the stoop or porch or whatever you have and play a game of Battleship. or Scrabble or Uno. I dig those kinds of date nights too, when we can't go out.
You say you make enough money, why not prioritize time for you and your wife. My partner and I are of similar age with two kiddos under 10 and sometimes you just have to put it on the schedule. If you do your budget together put date night in there and put it on the calendar. Eventually your kids will be out on their own (I hope anyways) and you have to keep your relationship strong for the decades of just the two of you.
Yeah man. Call me selfish, but one of the biggest reasons I never ever want kids of my own is because of the massive time and money commitment of them. It seems like 30 is the age by which most breeders really want to have their kids... but I'm only a a handfull of years off of that and have zero desire to put my life on hold for them.
Like, do people just have nothing they want to do or places to see after their 30s? I literally can't concieve of a way that I could afford to both have kids and have nice things and life experiences. Like I can either tour an entire continent, or have a baby. Same amount of money (assuming the baby is 100% healthy, if it's not then the baby is more) I know which I'm choosing
You could try moving to Europe. Here (Finland) there are strict laws around vacations. Basically of you have been working in a company for a year you get 2,5 days of vacation per month so basically you get 28 days of vacation each year. I actually get 3 days per month.
This time is also purely meant for holiday activities as for example got extra day off for activities such as moving to a new apprtment. Another example would be funerals of a close ones.
Sure you propably make more money than I do eventhough I make more than an average finn. I could never work in the USA. Not after being accustomed to being treated like a human by both government and my employer.
We might make more than you on paper, but you probably don't have to turn around and pay $1000 per month for health insurance that doesn't really cover that much anyway.
Before retirement my UK employer gave me 32 days paid holiday, 8 public holidays, 3 days for volunteer work. A maximum of of 186 days sick leave in any 4 year rolling period. All on full pay. Not to mention 6 months maternity leave and 3 months paternity, if necessary. A 5 day 36 hour week. Retirement on two thirds pay for life after 30 years.
Did I mention there was a union?
Meanwhile, I had 5 vacations last year which ranged from 3 days to 2 weeks each and which I spend in 5 different countries. But it’s easy when you have 5-6 weeks of vacation time each year and can combine them with another 2 weeks of paid holidays.
You guys need to revolt, and fuck shit up. This is not normal.
I live in France, work at a decent but nothing out of the ordinary big-company, I can (must) take 32 vacation days (6w+) per year, we have also unlimited PAID sick leave (with confirmation from a doctor ofc) and that not even taking into account kids sick days, PAID parental leave (literal months, for both parents, with guarantee that you get your position/salary back when you come back) and such.
You live in a dystopia and need to do something about it.
Édit: typo + parental leave part
Édit2: also, the work week here is usually 35h sometimes 39h, not sure how that compare with yours but I have some ideas...
I knew someone in Nevada that did this exact thing, I saw them back at work and I was like didn't you JUST have a baby? And she told me she didn't have any sick time and Nevada doesn't have any state paid leave for having a baby...
Yep. I know someone who got yelled at for unapproved time off. What was she doing? Oh yeah, giving birth to her 2.5 months premature baby. Ended up getting fired for refusing to come back to work that day. And in a state where she had no protections for this so it was legal.
I think here it's paid leave for a few months and after that you can extend to a few years but with no pay (just state benefits) and still go back to your job afterwards.
2 years would be nice indeed, always good to have a precedent somewhere to show that it works.
Well here it’s 2 years paid leave, but you get like 70%-80% of your salary I’m not sure about the number but still you’re quite ok for that period of time
I work full time, salaried with the expectation that I stay late and simultaneously don’t *ever* clock overtime. My company gives me zero vacation time for the first year, and I accrue one hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked. I’ve been there for almost a year with zero breaks.
I’ve had to use unpaid leave for doctors appointments, breast tumor surgery (I did field work the next day), an upcoming impacted wisdom tooth surgery and recovery, and a week-long vacation I’m planning to take a month before the anniversary of my starting date for a family event that will never happen again. The three whole days of unpaid leave I’ve accrued my entire time working for them won’t even cover the shortest recommended recovery for the oral surgery. At least they let me take the unpaid time, I guess.
And people wonder why capitalism get so much hate.
Capitalism has some upsides for sure, but when it get to the point where it's just full on worker exploitation bordering on slavery... Truly evil.
Until we reverse years and years of hyper individualistic propaganda and teach the police and military not to use high tech weapons against their own people I honestly never see it happening. Not in my lifetime any way
Yeah thing is your system is design to be very hostile against strikes which does not help...
Like most thing the problem lies on the government side that does not properly take care of workers.
As a comparison here the law mandate that every company with more than a few employees MUST have an union. And union duties happen during working hours and are therefore paid for by the company. I've literally never paid union fees or wtv, but I still have unions managing things for me(us) by discussing with high-level exec and/or organizing strikes when necessary.
People are scared of losing their insurance. THIS is the only reason your insurance is tied to your employer. So they can control your life by dangling your health in front of you. Until that changes and people can leave their job without fear of losing their healthcare a general strike won’t happen.
Absolutely, it's no accident that insurance is tied to the employer. My wife was looking around for a new job because she was massively underpaid but she was pregnant and some complications made us think we may have a surgery costing many tens of thousands of dollars once the baby was born. Lots of new jobs make you wait 90 days until you can start their insurance. Completely fucked.
Whether the police, military, and government like it or not, we maintain every single service they need to live. We create, process, package, and distribute the food, build the housing, clean the water, make the clothes, guns, bullets, roads, and cars they use, and they know it. And yeah, we'll need to undo individualism. But for the first time in a long time people are realizing that things can't keep working like this, and the tipping point is coming very soon.
Keep protesting for your rights, even though the rest of Europe is making 'fun' of France for rioting and protesting to keep your pension age the same.... The rest of Europe needs you, we're weak. Bring us the next revolution, it is time.
Not in UK the way the French protest is admired by a lot of people and there’s loads of strikes currently. Although older people think protesting is inconvenient to them so should be banned entirely
It will likely never happen in the USA. The government and ruling class has a done an excellent job over the last 200 years of ensuring that enough of the population is too poorly educated to be able to see through the propaganda they have been fed about "the American dream". As for the rest, decades of police militarization (especially thanks to the disastrous "War on Drugs") has made certain that the police are armed to the teeth and willing to kill civilians for any reason.
People can lose their livelihoods here if their kid is sick a couple extra days. White collar workers are the *lucky* ones with 10 days of sick time and maybe 10 vacation days. Factory workers get completely fucked, 5 minutes late is the same as a full day off in my area, makes no sense. People get stuck at a train and decide they may as well drive back home
My company in the US has 22 days regular PTO, 4 days PTO for volunteer work, an entire week off for the whole company around the holidays, I think 6 other holidays paid? That shakes out to about 6 weeks paid, it's not all bad. It's fucking sad that's a rarity though.
To be honest, on the whole it is normal, even though it’s not right. The countries where good conditions are a norm are actually the outlier. On the larger scale, the majority of humans are abused by those who have more money and power than they have and most don’t have much choice other than to accept it or starve and that’s basically a pretty fucked up situation. Our money in North America and Europe largely goes to companies that perpetuate the cycle in countries that rely on exports or foreign business where worker protections are not a priority.
Years and years of propaganda and conditioning has caused this problem. The average American is so against things that would actually help them if they really understood more than what they were being told by their political party. Like being against taxation of the wealthy and labour unions. Those two things would literally solve a massive chunk of the problems. The Cold War made the term socialism so anger inducing for Americans, it’s really sad. You can have a hybrid of capitalism and socialism… but they don’t understand only the rich really get socialism
With the 35h work week, is that that you work a true 9:00 AM - 5:00PM (9:00-17:00?) With an hour lunch in the middle? The norm in the US seems to have become 9 hour days with an hour unpaid lunch (8:00am-5:00pm)
They tend to shoot at us when we revolt. Other than that, we’re too divided and too large of* a country. It would be incredibly difficult organizing a strike/protest across the US over this.
> They tend to shoot at us when we revolt
They tend to do that in every country. No country has worker rights that were won bloodless.
I'm not saying that anyone should be willing to get shot, I just wanted to clarify that this part is not uniquely american.
I told my husband when we were "off" at the beginning of covid that it was our retirement. I doubt either of us will be able to or live long enough to retire.
Tbh if I took a month long vacation I would never want to go back to work. Idk how people take vacations and come back relaxed and energized. It just makes me hate work even more.
Im also like this. One day I would like to take a sebatical or something to just have like a year when im still young for myself. So I can be creative and write a book/make digital drawings for it. I cant create when im under pressure or if there is to much hanging on a treath. I do not need vacation, I need a balanced life where im just allowd to live and exist.
They got rid of sebaticals where I work because too many people didn't come back 😔
Edit: I spelled Sabbatical wrong but I'm leaving it because it made some people salty.
I've had jobs that'd be happy to hire me back after I left, so if you have that you save 25% of your pay cheque and then after 3 years you can take your sabbatical for a year. Obvs you need to make enough to save that much in the first place but if you can scrounge it, it's possible.
There is a hidden, “for the same position at the same pay level” in the “we’d rehire you…”
And we know you can’t afford that or you wouldn’t have moved on.
So this really is a moot point.
I also want to point out that old employers couldn’t afford me now. I know why all their “we do it this way because,” is bullshit.
I have some rich in-laws. When they graduated university they took a 3 year sabbatical before starting their finance jobs prepared just for them. Some years later they took another 3 year sabbatical and their jobs just smiled and kept the positions open.
Man, what a life.
I have 4 friends from business school who started a firm where every founder got 3 months a year off in a rota. So always 3 guys running the business and always one off somewhere on a decent vacation, on full pay.
But I thought rich people worked 865x harder than everybody else? Cuz that’s why they’re rich, right?
… Tell me the in-laws are at least aware of their privilege, and don’t think they’re superheroes for having life on easy mode?
I seldom interact with them as they are my wife's extended family. One lives fairly frugally and donates a lot of money to charity. He's a really good dude and very down to earth when I do talk with him. The other two married other rich people and live pretty lavish lives, I don't know much past that.
All three work at three different places. But their dad is very wealthy and has connections in a lot of places with a lot of influential people. Basically, they always will have a secure job *somewhere*.
About five years ago I had a breakdown. The pressure of work, anxiety, depression, no time for creativity, uncertain future (I have no clue how I am going to survive retirement), not affording to see a doctor, housing going up (I am 35 and had to move back into my parents a few years ago because rent kept going up) etc etc. It caused me to be a no-show at work until I was fired. The breakdown itself was obviously bad, but the few months I was off in between jobs? It the best time of my life. I helped clean up a lake and some neighborhood streets unprompted (a local news person learned about it and came to interview me, but I don't think it ever aired). I started worldbuilding a fantasy series. I am passionate about film and got back into watching a ton of movies, and started outlining a TV show. I did some light traveling by train to another state, and stayed overnight at a hotel. I was rested enough to get up earlier than usual and go for a walk-run mix exercise. It was amazing. Went back to work, and I feel a breakdown for the same reasons coming on again.
Edit: spelling. I'm sure there's more
Im 30 end of may. Im defenetly going to take some time soon to think about the next 10 years. I want to feel good when im still youn and capable. Really settling in my life. Im still studying abd probably finishing my ba when im 32. I have no problem not being 21 and start working for the rest of life. I was 19 when I started working, 23 when I moved countries and had a chanse to get a degree. Pandemic fucked shit up for me bigtime so at 28 I was like okeee lets go for a BA. So now im here, hehe. Im trying to find a balance with work/life. I want a very simple future. I think keep thinking what is best in your situation is the best you can do.
20-29 seemed to last forever to me.
30-40 goes by in a flash because I spent so much time focusing on getting to the weekend or the next vacation I didn’t appreciate the little things that make up the majority of the year in between those things.
When my wife and I were dating in our 20’s every day after work was “our time” and I missed just going for a walk together after dinner especially during the spring or fall months.
Then I ended up in a job I hated, became depressed and lost years of my life into World of Warcraft to compensate.
Now we are both 51 and we are back to how we were back when we were dating and I don’t take every day for granted.
I agree. I am turning 36 and time has been speeding up for me. I have a 4x10 schedule and it feels like I am driving to work Monday and driving home on Thursday. All of the days between are a blur. On the bright side, the terrible people that made me hate work are gone and I enjoy being there more now.
Great comment, obviously coming from real life experience. Thank you for writing it and know that it gave at least one person (and I suspect more than one) some pause. I have filed it away in my "remember this" cabinet. 34 now and the past 4-5 years seem to have gone by so quickly it almost seems like they were simply skipped. The pandemic of course also has something to do with that but I suspect even without that, those years would have blinked past. I'm focusing on work, professional growth and success so much that I need to consciously think about what you wrote above or I don't give it the attention it deserves. I will keep it in mind as much as I can though. I also likely need to focus more on "our time" too
I am turning 38 this week, I quit my job of 12/13yrs because I hated it, 6 days a week, travel, never home to spend time with my partner. I took a year off to clear my head and am fortunate enough to be able to afford working part time. Best decision aside from getting married I've ever made. I now have hobbies!
For anyone feeling this way
**TRY NEW THINGS**.
The reason life speeds up or slows down is a lack of new experiences. When you're young every day seems to be it's own unique event because you do new things all the time, you're constantly exposed to changing environments and new ideas and new events. As we age we tend to find things we like that are comfortable; but if you do it over and over there's nothing to break up those periods of time when we look back on them which gives the illusion of speeding through life.
Try new stuff. Life will slow down again.
I can tell you at 38, with being a husband and a father, it all moves very fast. Work is always going to be there - enjoy your youth while you can and make lasting memories to hold onto when life gives you shit.
As a 36 year old husband/father I’m not at all ready to say good bye to my youth. I’m not into cars so am still trying to figure out what to do for a mid life crisis.
Man a 2 acre hobby farm like 2 hours out of town costs about 1.5 million for me. 10 years ago this was much more dooable but now I’d be going ~8h away and I don’t want to leave it all :p
I was thinking more like taking up more recreational drugs and hiking.
I think I’ll have a youthful resurgence in a 5 years when I can leave my kid home alone for a weekend :p
as a wife and mother who is 53, I'll throw in that there that it can and does get even more exhausting, especially if any of your kids have heightened needs and if you wind up also responsible for a parent as well. And we just get more and more tired. If I could travel back in time I would just sleep. well, also eat right and get into really good physical shape! but mostly ... SLEEEEEEEEPPPPPPP
I was in a similar situation. College directly after high school, work directly after college. Been helping support my mom and my sister the whole time, so on top of not making enough to live a decent life, I had even less.
Living with a physical disability and depression that I've had since high school, I've just done my best coping, since there's really no other choice except to be homeless. But within the past 5 years we got benefits, so I was hopeful.
I have no energy left after work, and spend the rest of the day sleeping, and the weekends recovering. As a result I basically haven't had a life since I started working. I don't want to live like that my entire life. I don't even make enough to save for retirement, so I don't even have that to look forward to.
So I'm using our benefits and applying for long term disability. My mom owns a house in the middle of nowhere that I'll move to so I won't have to pay rent. I might be able to actually live some semblance of a life that way.
I’m 59 and also live with both a mood disorder (depression/anxiety) and a physical chronic illness. It’s likely that I’ll be able to retire at 62, but only because my dear late father was a saver, and I’ll be inheriting a portion of his wealth.
I say this to you because LIFE GOES SO FAST, and it sounds like moving back home actually gives you an opportunity to live a richer, fuller life. So once you get to the “middle of nowhere” where your mother lives, find your people. Whatever it is you love to do, find people to share it with. If you don’t know what you love to do, take some free/cheap community college classes to find out.
I moved from NYC to a rural area when I was 35. It gave a good portion of my mid-life real meaning and joy, and I have a beautiful group of friends from those years. I live back in NYC now, but I live a much more balanced life than I did when I was a younger woman.
Middle-of-nowhere living can be great for a person with limited energy. Life moves slower, expectations are less career-driven, and you can do a lot for little or no money. I hope you can find your people, and find time to give yourself the life you deserve.
Imagine if our billionaire overlords decrees all profits from robots and AI be equally distributed to all, freeing us to pursue artistic and scholastic endeavors. Wouldn't that be something?
I took a year off from college myself and it was life changing. I went back and finished but my family was pissed. I still worked full time. I was suicidal at the time, taking a break from college saved my life.
I quit my job last year and recorded like 90% of a pretty good album (anybody that wants to do some overdubs hmu), but when I ran out of money, the inspiration stopped. I got another job, the inspiration is still stopped. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t…
Something I've realized is there's never enough time off. It all passes by much faster than you would expect. I think even a year off would - and then what? You go back to work and you had that one year of creativity but then your done until you die or retire?
I think a much more sustainable way to go about things is to do a little every day, even on days you work. Figuring out how to create the free time and balance and mental separation to allow for it can be tough, though.
But if you do a little every day, it adds up very fast. Then when you do get some time off, you're equipped to actually use it productively: you just do what you normally would, but more of it. Otherwise I think when people get some free time they have analysis paralysis on how to spend it.
I was unemployed for 3 months at the start of the pandemic, and it was the happiest I've ever been in my adult life. It was also the worst thing that ever happened to my mental health because I started having panic attacks when I was forced to get a job again. I suddenly found myself staring down the barrel of having no free time during the week again, limited vacation days, and a forced schedule of waking up early to commute. Probably for several decades before I can't afford to retire anyway.
I got to experience what life is like when you don't have to give up most of your waking hours to working, and it absolutely broke me.
I keep saying if there is ever a time for a general strike in the US it's now. Most people realized how much of our lives are taken over by our jobs, and that we deserve a better work/life balance. Now the government and corporations are pushing for a needless return to the office, despite knowing it's horribly screwing over the workers for no reason.
People are pissed, and clearly see how we are fucked over for the ruling class time and time again. Now is the time. But there is no one to organize it. How does France organize this shit?
Well, for one, their cops (and bootlicking conservatives) aren’t armed to the damn teeth… it really helps when people aren’t literally afraid for their lives when taking direct action. Lot easier to get shit started in that environment
Theres a reason no modern protest movement has had a name attached to it like we did with MLK. Anyone charismatic enough to start organizing gets disappeared quick
Edit: I meant a person, not that a movement doesn't have a moniker. Leaders get squashed at protest rallies, with police explicitly trained to quickly suppress anyone who appears to be in charge, regardless of any actual illegal action being done by said person or not.
I was layed off 2 months ago. My days have been spent writing music, gardening and petting my cats. It feels like I'm retired and I'm loving it and I am dreading september when my unemployment benefits run out and I'll have to be a marching robot once again.
I did a year, it was nice but my anxiety skyrocketed about 6 months in. I planned to do something useful during the time, but I pretty much just watched YouTube all day.
>a year not being enough for serious cases isn't uncommon.
"Best we can do is 1 week off at a time if you're lucky, and only twice a year, for 45+ years. Oh and you'll feel guilty the entire time because you've been indoctrinated to believe you're inconveniencing everyone around you while looking after yourself."
General strike towards [universal declaration of human rights, article 25.](https://www.humanrights.com/course/lesson/articles-19-25/read-article-25.html)
I took a most wonderful week off last month but came back to two weeks of work to catch up on. It was so stressful coming back to all that that I felt like I never had the time off. The week was unpaid so it was good to get extra hours in when I returned but the stress was not worth it. Definitely need a few weeks paid and just come back to regular amount of work.
It doesn't help that so much effort is made to make work a living hell.
Back in the glory days, Google used to have a livable playground as a work environment. Also, they used to have a 20% 'creative time' at work.
Tell me honestly: how many work places even have gyms anymore? Did they go out of trend back in the 2000s?
I researched it: turns out much of this cutback (35% or so?) was a casualty of Covid. More people are working out solo and outdoors than we used to have.
> Tell me honestly: how many work places even have gyms anymore?
Granted seen from Sweden.
Seems like over 50% of offices, rest have deals with gym chains for either free or cheap membership. Many allow exercise during work hours and most will fully subsidize a gym membership so its free to go to any gym.
Because in that month you forget how pitiful of existence people live just to work/sleep/eat so the 1% could have life long vacations and more leftover.
So enjoy the little time you get to the fullest even if you have to work like a rookie after it.
Yeah or work ruins my vacation. Spend my precious 2-3 weeks anxiously thinking about how I have to go back to work and then depressed that life can feel so much better without it.
I only get a week, no one will be doing my work while I am gone. Based on my coworker, she took her week and was texted 42 times while gone about stuff she left detailed notes on.
I’m stressed before I have even taken time off. I sort of want to ask if they text me if that means since I’m working I get that day of PTO refunded since I’m not actually “off”.
That's a good idea! No one should be bothering you during your time off. I don't get paid vacation anymore and my phone will absolutely be on silent when I'm off. I am not working for free on my vacation time.
I took 3 months off this year, not for the best reasons, and it put me in a decent financial hole, but in retrospect it was a really good thing to happen to me. I got to explore some hobbies I had forgotten about and get myself straightened out. It’s been an adjustment getting back to work, but I have a new perspective now, but I imagine by the time I work myself out of the financial hole from doing this, I will be just as burnt out as I was before
Well most people who take months long vacations are set for life and have no worries, so their jobs are usually a cushy high level fuck off and have people do all the work for you positions
Same deal in speech therapy for children. We know that pacing the session appropriately and including play makes the session more effective. However, our employers insist on scheduling us back-to-back sessions with no breaks, which decreases our productivity. They don't care about how effective our day is, just how many reimbursable sessions we bill.
Dont want to brag but in developed countries we have minimum vacation days.
Guaranteed by law:
Sweden 36 Days
Denmark 30 Days
The Netherlands, Czech Rep,Finland, France, Norway 28 Days
Poland 26 Days
[....]
I could go on with this list but i think my point is clear. I am from Germany and have 35 Days PTO per year.
This is what I get. I worked at my last job almost a decade and only had 7 days pto. The job i work at now has 5 days until you’ve been working there 5 years, then you get 10 days.
I’m exhausted. I don’t know how people say they “get bored” because I always have places I want to go. Things I want to do. Most are nearby, some are further out… but at the same time, almost everything costs money so you have to work to do the things, but anymore the only things you can afford to do are survive for the next day of work…
Just like the other reply, I've been at myjob 3.5 years now and I finally got upgraded to 3 vacs and 3 sick days a year...
And you get treated bad if you use them for anything less than a death in the fsimily (no bereavement)
Like a lot of western European countries, which are comparable to the US in terms of economic standards etc.
In Sweden you have at least 5 weeks of paid vacation regardless of type of work and then some public holidays, but many have 6 weeks.
Elementary schools have approximately 8 weeks of summer break, 3 weeks around Christmas, 1 week in the autumn (way back the so called 'potato leave' to help harvesting), 1 week winter/sports leave and 1 week for Easter
I think the 'Muricans need to think things through and start voting accordingly.... Otherwise they will still be complaining about their vacation situation in 50 years...
It's largely a generational thing in the US. In 50 years the old workaholics will all be dead and the majority of eligible voters will be the millennial, zoomers, etc. Don't worry, though, there will be something dumb that today's younger generations will think tomorrow's youth are stupid about.
It's unfortunate all the misinformation is getting upvoted on this, because it's fits what people "feel" is right, instead of your post.
It's not like there's magically more work on the form from June-August. Busy times are planting and harvesting. Those happen spring and fall, not summer. Animals need care year round, but would have been birthing in the spring usually, and slaughtered in the fall before winter.
Common sense gives a more obvious reason: it's really fucking hot in schools in the summer and even today many schools don't have AC.
Interesting:
>Long summer breaks have been shown to cause children, especially lower-income children, to lose ground academically. It’s a phenomenon known as “summer slide,” where students return to school in the fall having lost a full month of learning, on average.
That's an oft-quoted myth. And one that doesn't even make much sense. Extra help on the farm would be most needed for spring planting and fall harvesting.
The actual reason was affluent city folk escaping the hot summer weather to the cooler countryside.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/debunking-myth-summer-vacation
This isn't true, actually, it's a really weird myth.
My family farms, so I was a farm kid, and I always found it... Baffling. Why would they give farm kids the summer off when they made us go to school straight through the busiest times of year on a farm: planting and harvest, which are usually done before May and after September. This is also when most calving happens with cattle, spring births or fall births; I'm not, admittedly, familiar with other animals. About the only thing that farms do more of during the summer would be baling hay.
This myth works really well because for some reason even farmers don't question it often. It was parroted by my peers who were farm kids too. And when I asked them or their parents "but then why have us in school during the busiest, most time sensitive times of year for the farm?" I'd be met with "huh. Good question. That is weird."
It's because it was never about farmers.
Prior to compulsory education laws, which weren't really a thing until the late 1800s and early 1900s), many schools were summer term and winter term, some were basically year round with short breaks (Detroit had 260 day years! Wow!! That's way more than the standard 180 today!) and then upper class families sent their kids to boarding schools or to schools with different calendars. Because there wasn't an actual standard school calendar yet.
But there wasn't cheap, widespread AC yet when compulsory education came about, nor when the standard school calendar was developed. Many educators thought that learning in hot weather was both difficult and unadvisable. Schools had difficulties cooling their buildings, especially in the southern parts of the US.
Homes were pretty hard to keep cool when it got into the 90s and above for weeks at a time.
Well, guess who didn't stay in those areas for those months. Rich families. They'd go up north for their summer home where it was cooler. When trains were cheap, middle class families started summer vacations as well because it was better to go somewhere cool then to sweat constantly in your own home.
So summer wasn't a good time for the most privileged children to have to attend school. It was, really, quite inconvenient. Sure, poor kids didn't have anywhere better to be, but those rich kids did, and you couldn't very well expect them to go to school while at the family's summer home. And the middle class kids were possibly traveling, so how would you even know where to send them?
Well, no one wanted to be in the hot school building anyway... And America's most privileged weren't about to stop going on vacations over the summer. So might as well not inconvenience them. Summer's off, the farm kids will just have to be told they'll be charged with truancy if they ditch school to help their families with harvest, planting, etc. Plus it conveniently forces families who could rely on their teenage children to help with the busiest time of year to now need to either hire workers *or* sell all their land to those who can afford it.
That said, many agriculturally inclined states had rules allowing kids past a certain age to take days to help their families farm. Hell, you can drop out once you're older than the compulsory education requirements, so really farm families just needed to wait until their kids could drop out. After all, from the perspective of those in charge, the people who have to drop out to support their families weren't going to use their education well anyway. Might as well make it convenient for the most privileged and not worry about the less privileged.
Why do we say it's because of farmers though? No idea.
Hi, someone from a farm family here.
It's not exploitative to have your own children work with you, it's a survival method done by people who can't afford to hire help. Further, for many farm families, it was training for what you were going to do as an adult: take over the farm when your parents were too old to keep it up.
Importantly, though, it's not actually why we have summers off, as I explain here: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/13fhbl7/need_a_month_long_vacation_asap/jjvj9ye/
I see your point having been an agricultural child-laborer in Nebraska when I was twelve, however I think the net result of children’s *entire role in society* being a source of labor was probably not great! Like you said, it was a survival strategy and training for future labor - Big difference in my mind between helping dad around a modern farm and toiling in the fields from birth ‘til death because you didn’t have any other choices.
There’s a quote by Jay Gould that I like:
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
I don’t like how he frames agricultural labor as a waste of a brilliant mind, since I grew up around many farmers who easily blew the PhDs I met in university out of the water in terms of raw intelligence and many of them actively chose their profession (versus inheriting it), but the social mobility people have now is undeniably better than how things were in the past.
When children are given no other options than working the farm for their entire lives, I feel comfortable calling it exploitation. When a kid in modern times lives on a farm and does chores or even works for pay, that’s a totally different story imho.
EDIT: To be clear, I understand the Jay Gould quote is alluding to forced labor, but given the context of the conversation relating to economic exploitation, I felt it relevant because child labor and forced labor share many ethical problems. I didn’t intend to draw comparisons to the transatlantic slave trade or American chattel slavery, and I apologize for not being more specific and delicate in the comparisons I drew.
Yeah and let’s not disregard how messed up the American education system is for kids anyway. I mean I get what OP is saying, but we need new structure for both kids and adults.
You don't even need strong unions or a developed status. Once it's the norm in the country it falls into place.
I live in a 3rd world country and we have way more paid vacation than Americans.
The companies who employ US citizens are the same companies that lobby Congress against fair treatment of workers. Money talks and they have more than us.
I just asked my boss how much holiday time I get a year. His answer was "Obviously the 4 weeks statutory, but really whenever you need off so long as you don't take the piss with it".
I thought about becoming a teacher, and then became a librarian instead specifically because I could not, in good conscience, lend my energy to the institution of school.
Last year I had 3 paid weeks off.....then our company got bought out by a bigger company and now I only have 2 weeks of vacation. Which I've already used a week, so I have 5 paid days off the rest of the year. Yay for me.
Reading the comments about how America is backwards in almost every way and then just seeing Americans shrug and putting up with it and then expressing how free they are, more so than the rest of the world.
It's crazy to witness.
Around Christmas my boss gave me an extra day off because things slow down because of the holidays.
Fast forward to February, which is when we have to submit our time off requests. I ask for 10 days off to go back home to visit my family, only to be informed that I only have 9 days available of PTO because I already used one in December.
I still took the 10 days, however, I was not paid for that one day. Companies that force you to take time off but then take those days out of your accrued PTO should be burned to the ground.
If school is supposed to train us to be good workers then I want the exact same amount of time off. I want 3 months off work. Half days. And ideally be able to call off on snow days.
Don't worry, the GQP are trying to remove all this nonsense and reintroduce good old-fashioned child-labor. Soon all this liberal nonsense will be nothing but a distant myth!
/s
My company offers 4 weeks paternity leave and I used 3 weeks of PTO after it. On Monday I will be going back to work but still don't feel rested enough. I'm grateful for the time off but holy crap work sucks.
I always wanted a job where I could alternate between doing something physical and being outside half the year and at a desk doing my programming/computer work the other half.
Or... even better each of those a third of the year, and FREE TIME/Vacation/Not working at all the other third.
My IT job is like that at times. It's a mix of remote work and field work depending on what is going on. It's mostly a bit of both each day but I have had 2 week remote stretches from time to time.
Plus, about once a year I may even get to fly to another major city for some training. There isn't always time for sightseeing unless it goes more than a week, but it's nice to be able to eat out at nice restaurants and have the company pay for it.
I also think it’s insane that we have children spend all day at school and then come home and do more schoolwork, and that missing scheduled school is totally not tolerated.
Children don’t get summers because it’s recognized they need a break. They have summers off because so many families kept their children home to work farms during those months, it wasn’t worth it to keep the schools open.
Then it just became habit.
Don’t let anyone fool you.
America doesn’t give a fuck about kids.
America is an absolute hellscape. We've handed the entire country over to psychopathic billionaires, aka deranged hoarders.
America used to know that you had to tax such filth at 70 to 90% otherwise all their excess money would end up funding lying think tanks, propaganda, and also used to bribe judges and politicians.
The ultra wealthy are sick sick people. We can't afford them and have never been able to. We used to collectively know this. Slowly though the billionaire filth managed to brain wash most of the nation.
Think about it. Most Americans are in desperate need of universal healthcare and higher wages but they keep voting against it. You couldn't make this plot point up in a screenplay. It wouldn't make sense unless you spent countless hours explaining how brain washed all of society had become by a pretty incredible endeavor waged by psychopathic wealth hoarders.
Teachers are overworked and underpaid but one benefit of the profession is summers off. If I switched careers I’d struggle hard with so little vacation time. We should all have the schedule school kids have.
Well, several Republican-led states are fixing that by encouraging a “free market” that employs children in low wage jobs that were once reserved for illegal immigrants.
The only reason children get a summer break is because back when there was no air conditioning the rich people would just take their kids out of school for the summer and go to the shore where it was cooler. Only poor people were left at the schools so they decided to just shut down for the summer.
I've taken one day off in the last year and my boss gave me endless shit for it.
It's to the point I don't use any time off unless I'm dying because the drama isn't worth it.
Part of why American kids still get summer vacation is because many of our schools don't have air conditioning. I worked in a few. Nightmare.
They *usually* have heat, but not always.
A lot of us use those "vacations" to schedule appointments, do home repairs, and other things we couldn't find time for during the rest of the year. I've never had a real vacation.
Only time I had real vacations was when I was in the Marine Corps. Now I make enough money but there is just never enough time to actually take a real vacation when my schedule can line up with the wife and kids. Best I ever get is a week to stay home and relax a little more than normal.
Ooof i see lots of these comments on kids and family. Another guy was missing the days of dating his gf/wife after work in 20's. I.... want to do that in my 30's too i think? I dont like chores as it is
That's why I'm never having kids
That’s one of many reasons im never having kids.
As someone approaching middle age, not having kids seems to be a life hack tbh. Taking a half day on a random Friday to get the margarita party started never gets old.
I'm 35 and from my experience it isn't bad, but it will be missed. We get some of that time on weekends when our kids have things like girl scouts, parties, ets line up and then it's just the two of us. Unfortunately it doesn't happen often though, so we rarely get to take advantage of it. Usually the only date we go on is our anniversary where we have our friends watch the kids for a few hours. Most often we just take the kids out with us as we have very well behaved kids. We do miss the intimate dates though, we have talked about it from time to time.
Find moments when your both home. Throw some music on. Dance together. It'll help.
After the kids go to bed, take some wine or a few beers, go in the back yard or on the stoop or porch or whatever you have and play a game of Battleship. or Scrabble or Uno. I dig those kinds of date nights too, when we can't go out.
You say you make enough money, why not prioritize time for you and your wife. My partner and I are of similar age with two kiddos under 10 and sometimes you just have to put it on the schedule. If you do your budget together put date night in there and put it on the calendar. Eventually your kids will be out on their own (I hope anyways) and you have to keep your relationship strong for the decades of just the two of you.
I was still "dating" my late husband well into our 30s...maybe the trick is not having kids?
I work so much I can't even meet anyone for a date.
Yeah man. Call me selfish, but one of the biggest reasons I never ever want kids of my own is because of the massive time and money commitment of them. It seems like 30 is the age by which most breeders really want to have their kids... but I'm only a a handfull of years off of that and have zero desire to put my life on hold for them. Like, do people just have nothing they want to do or places to see after their 30s? I literally can't concieve of a way that I could afford to both have kids and have nice things and life experiences. Like I can either tour an entire continent, or have a baby. Same amount of money (assuming the baby is 100% healthy, if it's not then the baby is more) I know which I'm choosing
You could try moving to Europe. Here (Finland) there are strict laws around vacations. Basically of you have been working in a company for a year you get 2,5 days of vacation per month so basically you get 28 days of vacation each year. I actually get 3 days per month. This time is also purely meant for holiday activities as for example got extra day off for activities such as moving to a new apprtment. Another example would be funerals of a close ones. Sure you propably make more money than I do eventhough I make more than an average finn. I could never work in the USA. Not after being accustomed to being treated like a human by both government and my employer.
We might make more than you on paper, but you probably don't have to turn around and pay $1000 per month for health insurance that doesn't really cover that much anyway.
This ...!!!
Before retirement my UK employer gave me 32 days paid holiday, 8 public holidays, 3 days for volunteer work. A maximum of of 186 days sick leave in any 4 year rolling period. All on full pay. Not to mention 6 months maternity leave and 3 months paternity, if necessary. A 5 day 36 hour week. Retirement on two thirds pay for life after 30 years. Did I mention there was a union?
Meanwhile, I had 5 vacations last year which ranged from 3 days to 2 weeks each and which I spend in 5 different countries. But it’s easy when you have 5-6 weeks of vacation time each year and can combine them with another 2 weeks of paid holidays.
You guys need to revolt, and fuck shit up. This is not normal. I live in France, work at a decent but nothing out of the ordinary big-company, I can (must) take 32 vacation days (6w+) per year, we have also unlimited PAID sick leave (with confirmation from a doctor ofc) and that not even taking into account kids sick days, PAID parental leave (literal months, for both parents, with guarantee that you get your position/salary back when you come back) and such. You live in a dystopia and need to do something about it. Édit: typo + parental leave part Édit2: also, the work week here is usually 35h sometimes 39h, not sure how that compare with yours but I have some ideas...
Parental leave for umm…months?! In Romania it’s 2 whole years
I live in the US and my mother gave birth on Sunday and was expected to be back in the office on Tuesday.
The new WFH: Work From Hospital
"No one wants to work/give birth anymore!"
Why aren't millennials having kids!
no wonder they are rolling back child labor regulations. Your newborn can work from day two.
I knew someone in Nevada that did this exact thing, I saw them back at work and I was like didn't you JUST have a baby? And she told me she didn't have any sick time and Nevada doesn't have any state paid leave for having a baby...
Yep. I know someone who got yelled at for unapproved time off. What was she doing? Oh yeah, giving birth to her 2.5 months premature baby. Ended up getting fired for refusing to come back to work that day. And in a state where she had no protections for this so it was legal.
I think here it's paid leave for a few months and after that you can extend to a few years but with no pay (just state benefits) and still go back to your job afterwards. 2 years would be nice indeed, always good to have a precedent somewhere to show that it works.
Well here it’s 2 years paid leave, but you get like 70%-80% of your salary I’m not sure about the number but still you’re quite ok for that period of time
In the US, the company would probably put you has “do not rehire for job abandonment”.
In America, my job bragged that I could take 12 weeks unpaid.
What an awesome opportunity for both the mother and child to die of hunger
One last bonding experience
Courtesy of the HR team
I work full time, salaried with the expectation that I stay late and simultaneously don’t *ever* clock overtime. My company gives me zero vacation time for the first year, and I accrue one hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked. I’ve been there for almost a year with zero breaks. I’ve had to use unpaid leave for doctors appointments, breast tumor surgery (I did field work the next day), an upcoming impacted wisdom tooth surgery and recovery, and a week-long vacation I’m planning to take a month before the anniversary of my starting date for a family event that will never happen again. The three whole days of unpaid leave I’ve accrued my entire time working for them won’t even cover the shortest recommended recovery for the oral surgery. At least they let me take the unpaid time, I guess.
And people wonder why capitalism get so much hate. Capitalism has some upsides for sure, but when it get to the point where it's just full on worker exploitation bordering on slavery... Truly evil.
Until we reverse years and years of hyper individualistic propaganda and teach the police and military not to use high tech weapons against their own people I honestly never see it happening. Not in my lifetime any way
I'm not a big antiwork guy, but a massive general strike couldn't be fixed with cops. Millions not showing up, just staying home.
Yeah thing is your system is design to be very hostile against strikes which does not help... Like most thing the problem lies on the government side that does not properly take care of workers. As a comparison here the law mandate that every company with more than a few employees MUST have an union. And union duties happen during working hours and are therefore paid for by the company. I've literally never paid union fees or wtv, but I still have unions managing things for me(us) by discussing with high-level exec and/or organizing strikes when necessary.
The first bombs dropped on US soil were at Blair Mountain when the Army bombed striking coal workers
A national strike will never happen. Americans are crabs in a barrel
We're crabs in several barrels on a very large boat.
People are scared of losing their insurance. THIS is the only reason your insurance is tied to your employer. So they can control your life by dangling your health in front of you. Until that changes and people can leave their job without fear of losing their healthcare a general strike won’t happen.
Absolutely, it's no accident that insurance is tied to the employer. My wife was looking around for a new job because she was massively underpaid but she was pregnant and some complications made us think we may have a surgery costing many tens of thousands of dollars once the baby was born. Lots of new jobs make you wait 90 days until you can start their insurance. Completely fucked.
Whether the police, military, and government like it or not, we maintain every single service they need to live. We create, process, package, and distribute the food, build the housing, clean the water, make the clothes, guns, bullets, roads, and cars they use, and they know it. And yeah, we'll need to undo individualism. But for the first time in a long time people are realizing that things can't keep working like this, and the tipping point is coming very soon.
Keep protesting for your rights, even though the rest of Europe is making 'fun' of France for rioting and protesting to keep your pension age the same.... The rest of Europe needs you, we're weak. Bring us the next revolution, it is time.
Not in UK the way the French protest is admired by a lot of people and there’s loads of strikes currently. Although older people think protesting is inconvenient to them so should be banned entirely
It will likely never happen in the USA. The government and ruling class has a done an excellent job over the last 200 years of ensuring that enough of the population is too poorly educated to be able to see through the propaganda they have been fed about "the American dream". As for the rest, decades of police militarization (especially thanks to the disastrous "War on Drugs") has made certain that the police are armed to the teeth and willing to kill civilians for any reason.
Too many people in the US think you aren't dedicated enough/aren't working hard enough if you aren't doing 60+ hour weeks at a salaried job
People can lose their livelihoods here if their kid is sick a couple extra days. White collar workers are the *lucky* ones with 10 days of sick time and maybe 10 vacation days. Factory workers get completely fucked, 5 minutes late is the same as a full day off in my area, makes no sense. People get stuck at a train and decide they may as well drive back home
My company in the US has 22 days regular PTO, 4 days PTO for volunteer work, an entire week off for the whole company around the holidays, I think 6 other holidays paid? That shakes out to about 6 weeks paid, it's not all bad. It's fucking sad that's a rarity though.
Yeah this should be mandated by law and not up to weather your employer "cares" or not about your wellbeing.
>I live in France >You guys need to revolt Uhhh... Checks out?
To be honest, on the whole it is normal, even though it’s not right. The countries where good conditions are a norm are actually the outlier. On the larger scale, the majority of humans are abused by those who have more money and power than they have and most don’t have much choice other than to accept it or starve and that’s basically a pretty fucked up situation. Our money in North America and Europe largely goes to companies that perpetuate the cycle in countries that rely on exports or foreign business where worker protections are not a priority.
Years and years of propaganda and conditioning has caused this problem. The average American is so against things that would actually help them if they really understood more than what they were being told by their political party. Like being against taxation of the wealthy and labour unions. Those two things would literally solve a massive chunk of the problems. The Cold War made the term socialism so anger inducing for Americans, it’s really sad. You can have a hybrid of capitalism and socialism… but they don’t understand only the rich really get socialism
With the 35h work week, is that that you work a true 9:00 AM - 5:00PM (9:00-17:00?) With an hour lunch in the middle? The norm in the US seems to have become 9 hour days with an hour unpaid lunch (8:00am-5:00pm)
Judging by my business trips to France the French would be annoyed by a mere hour of lunch break. That's barely enough for starters.
They tend to shoot at us when we revolt. Other than that, we’re too divided and too large of* a country. It would be incredibly difficult organizing a strike/protest across the US over this.
> They tend to shoot at us when we revolt They tend to do that in every country. No country has worker rights that were won bloodless. I'm not saying that anyone should be willing to get shot, I just wanted to clarify that this part is not uniquely american.
I told my husband when we were "off" at the beginning of covid that it was our retirement. I doubt either of us will be able to or live long enough to retire.
This is sad to think about.
Yeah. It's depressing. I'm glad I got to experience it for a hot minute.
Tbh if I took a month long vacation I would never want to go back to work. Idk how people take vacations and come back relaxed and energized. It just makes me hate work even more.
Im also like this. One day I would like to take a sebatical or something to just have like a year when im still young for myself. So I can be creative and write a book/make digital drawings for it. I cant create when im under pressure or if there is to much hanging on a treath. I do not need vacation, I need a balanced life where im just allowd to live and exist.
They got rid of sebaticals where I work because too many people didn't come back 😔 Edit: I spelled Sabbatical wrong but I'm leaving it because it made some people salty.
I've had jobs that'd be happy to hire me back after I left, so if you have that you save 25% of your pay cheque and then after 3 years you can take your sabbatical for a year. Obvs you need to make enough to save that much in the first place but if you can scrounge it, it's possible.
There is a hidden, “for the same position at the same pay level” in the “we’d rehire you…” And we know you can’t afford that or you wouldn’t have moved on. So this really is a moot point. I also want to point out that old employers couldn’t afford me now. I know why all their “we do it this way because,” is bullshit.
I have some rich in-laws. When they graduated university they took a 3 year sabbatical before starting their finance jobs prepared just for them. Some years later they took another 3 year sabbatical and their jobs just smiled and kept the positions open. Man, what a life.
I have 4 friends from business school who started a firm where every founder got 3 months a year off in a rota. So always 3 guys running the business and always one off somewhere on a decent vacation, on full pay.
But I thought rich people worked 865x harder than everybody else? Cuz that’s why they’re rich, right? … Tell me the in-laws are at least aware of their privilege, and don’t think they’re superheroes for having life on easy mode?
I seldom interact with them as they are my wife's extended family. One lives fairly frugally and donates a lot of money to charity. He's a really good dude and very down to earth when I do talk with him. The other two married other rich people and live pretty lavish lives, I don't know much past that.
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Their dad owns the firm or something?
All three work at three different places. But their dad is very wealthy and has connections in a lot of places with a lot of influential people. Basically, they always will have a secure job *somewhere*.
About five years ago I had a breakdown. The pressure of work, anxiety, depression, no time for creativity, uncertain future (I have no clue how I am going to survive retirement), not affording to see a doctor, housing going up (I am 35 and had to move back into my parents a few years ago because rent kept going up) etc etc. It caused me to be a no-show at work until I was fired. The breakdown itself was obviously bad, but the few months I was off in between jobs? It the best time of my life. I helped clean up a lake and some neighborhood streets unprompted (a local news person learned about it and came to interview me, but I don't think it ever aired). I started worldbuilding a fantasy series. I am passionate about film and got back into watching a ton of movies, and started outlining a TV show. I did some light traveling by train to another state, and stayed overnight at a hotel. I was rested enough to get up earlier than usual and go for a walk-run mix exercise. It was amazing. Went back to work, and I feel a breakdown for the same reasons coming on again. Edit: spelling. I'm sure there's more
Im 30 end of may. Im defenetly going to take some time soon to think about the next 10 years. I want to feel good when im still youn and capable. Really settling in my life. Im still studying abd probably finishing my ba when im 32. I have no problem not being 21 and start working for the rest of life. I was 19 when I started working, 23 when I moved countries and had a chanse to get a degree. Pandemic fucked shit up for me bigtime so at 28 I was like okeee lets go for a BA. So now im here, hehe. Im trying to find a balance with work/life. I want a very simple future. I think keep thinking what is best in your situation is the best you can do.
20-29 seemed to last forever to me. 30-40 goes by in a flash because I spent so much time focusing on getting to the weekend or the next vacation I didn’t appreciate the little things that make up the majority of the year in between those things. When my wife and I were dating in our 20’s every day after work was “our time” and I missed just going for a walk together after dinner especially during the spring or fall months. Then I ended up in a job I hated, became depressed and lost years of my life into World of Warcraft to compensate. Now we are both 51 and we are back to how we were back when we were dating and I don’t take every day for granted.
I agree. I am turning 36 and time has been speeding up for me. I have a 4x10 schedule and it feels like I am driving to work Monday and driving home on Thursday. All of the days between are a blur. On the bright side, the terrible people that made me hate work are gone and I enjoy being there more now.
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Great comment, obviously coming from real life experience. Thank you for writing it and know that it gave at least one person (and I suspect more than one) some pause. I have filed it away in my "remember this" cabinet. 34 now and the past 4-5 years seem to have gone by so quickly it almost seems like they were simply skipped. The pandemic of course also has something to do with that but I suspect even without that, those years would have blinked past. I'm focusing on work, professional growth and success so much that I need to consciously think about what you wrote above or I don't give it the attention it deserves. I will keep it in mind as much as I can though. I also likely need to focus more on "our time" too
I am turning 38 this week, I quit my job of 12/13yrs because I hated it, 6 days a week, travel, never home to spend time with my partner. I took a year off to clear my head and am fortunate enough to be able to afford working part time. Best decision aside from getting married I've ever made. I now have hobbies!
For anyone feeling this way **TRY NEW THINGS**. The reason life speeds up or slows down is a lack of new experiences. When you're young every day seems to be it's own unique event because you do new things all the time, you're constantly exposed to changing environments and new ideas and new events. As we age we tend to find things we like that are comfortable; but if you do it over and over there's nothing to break up those periods of time when we look back on them which gives the illusion of speeding through life. Try new stuff. Life will slow down again.
Are those years to wow lost or fondly spent? If you enjoyed them it's not a waste. (Coming from a gamer)
I can tell you at 38, with being a husband and a father, it all moves very fast. Work is always going to be there - enjoy your youth while you can and make lasting memories to hold onto when life gives you shit.
As a 36 year old husband/father I’m not at all ready to say good bye to my youth. I’m not into cars so am still trying to figure out what to do for a mid life crisis.
You have cars, smoking meat, or craft brewing. Choose wisely.
People in my age cohort tend to be buying farms and homesteading. It’s what we’re doing!
Man a 2 acre hobby farm like 2 hours out of town costs about 1.5 million for me. 10 years ago this was much more dooable but now I’d be going ~8h away and I don’t want to leave it all :p I was thinking more like taking up more recreational drugs and hiking. I think I’ll have a youthful resurgence in a 5 years when I can leave my kid home alone for a weekend :p
Midlife crisis at 36? That's scary, I'm 4 years away
as a wife and mother who is 53, I'll throw in that there that it can and does get even more exhausting, especially if any of your kids have heightened needs and if you wind up also responsible for a parent as well. And we just get more and more tired. If I could travel back in time I would just sleep. well, also eat right and get into really good physical shape! but mostly ... SLEEEEEEEEPPPPPPP
I was in a similar situation. College directly after high school, work directly after college. Been helping support my mom and my sister the whole time, so on top of not making enough to live a decent life, I had even less. Living with a physical disability and depression that I've had since high school, I've just done my best coping, since there's really no other choice except to be homeless. But within the past 5 years we got benefits, so I was hopeful. I have no energy left after work, and spend the rest of the day sleeping, and the weekends recovering. As a result I basically haven't had a life since I started working. I don't want to live like that my entire life. I don't even make enough to save for retirement, so I don't even have that to look forward to. So I'm using our benefits and applying for long term disability. My mom owns a house in the middle of nowhere that I'll move to so I won't have to pay rent. I might be able to actually live some semblance of a life that way.
I’m 59 and also live with both a mood disorder (depression/anxiety) and a physical chronic illness. It’s likely that I’ll be able to retire at 62, but only because my dear late father was a saver, and I’ll be inheriting a portion of his wealth. I say this to you because LIFE GOES SO FAST, and it sounds like moving back home actually gives you an opportunity to live a richer, fuller life. So once you get to the “middle of nowhere” where your mother lives, find your people. Whatever it is you love to do, find people to share it with. If you don’t know what you love to do, take some free/cheap community college classes to find out. I moved from NYC to a rural area when I was 35. It gave a good portion of my mid-life real meaning and joy, and I have a beautiful group of friends from those years. I live back in NYC now, but I live a much more balanced life than I did when I was a younger woman. Middle-of-nowhere living can be great for a person with limited energy. Life moves slower, expectations are less career-driven, and you can do a lot for little or no money. I hope you can find your people, and find time to give yourself the life you deserve.
Good luck. I was 30 two days ago. Now I'm 42. I don't know what happened, but I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up.
Imagine if our billionaire overlords decrees all profits from robots and AI be equally distributed to all, freeing us to pursue artistic and scholastic endeavors. Wouldn't that be something?
I took a year off from college myself and it was life changing. I went back and finished but my family was pissed. I still worked full time. I was suicidal at the time, taking a break from college saved my life.
I quit my job last year and recorded like 90% of a pretty good album (anybody that wants to do some overdubs hmu), but when I ran out of money, the inspiration stopped. I got another job, the inspiration is still stopped. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t…
Something I've realized is there's never enough time off. It all passes by much faster than you would expect. I think even a year off would - and then what? You go back to work and you had that one year of creativity but then your done until you die or retire? I think a much more sustainable way to go about things is to do a little every day, even on days you work. Figuring out how to create the free time and balance and mental separation to allow for it can be tough, though. But if you do a little every day, it adds up very fast. Then when you do get some time off, you're equipped to actually use it productively: you just do what you normally would, but more of it. Otherwise I think when people get some free time they have analysis paralysis on how to spend it.
I was unemployed for 3 months at the start of the pandemic, and it was the happiest I've ever been in my adult life. It was also the worst thing that ever happened to my mental health because I started having panic attacks when I was forced to get a job again. I suddenly found myself staring down the barrel of having no free time during the week again, limited vacation days, and a forced schedule of waking up early to commute. Probably for several decades before I can't afford to retire anyway. I got to experience what life is like when you don't have to give up most of your waking hours to working, and it absolutely broke me.
I keep saying if there is ever a time for a general strike in the US it's now. Most people realized how much of our lives are taken over by our jobs, and that we deserve a better work/life balance. Now the government and corporations are pushing for a needless return to the office, despite knowing it's horribly screwing over the workers for no reason. People are pissed, and clearly see how we are fucked over for the ruling class time and time again. Now is the time. But there is no one to organize it. How does France organize this shit?
Well, for one, their cops (and bootlicking conservatives) aren’t armed to the damn teeth… it really helps when people aren’t literally afraid for their lives when taking direct action. Lot easier to get shit started in that environment
Theres a reason no modern protest movement has had a name attached to it like we did with MLK. Anyone charismatic enough to start organizing gets disappeared quick Edit: I meant a person, not that a movement doesn't have a moniker. Leaders get squashed at protest rallies, with police explicitly trained to quickly suppress anyone who appears to be in charge, regardless of any actual illegal action being done by said person or not.
MLK was assassinated. Conveniently, right when he started speaking on ending poverty. He was literally a charismatic leader that got disappeared.
France is more central and smaller than the US, it's a lot easier to organize rebellion when the capital is relatively close for all citizens.
I was layed off 2 months ago. My days have been spent writing music, gardening and petting my cats. It feels like I'm retired and I'm loving it and I am dreading september when my unemployment benefits run out and I'll have to be a marching robot once again.
Be sure to document that you're looking for a job while collecting UE or you may be asked to return the money.
I did a year, it was nice but my anxiety skyrocketed about 6 months in. I planned to do something useful during the time, but I pretty much just watched YouTube all day.
It can take a long ass time to get over burnout, or at least the parts you *can* get over, a year not being enough for serious cases isn't uncommon.
>a year not being enough for serious cases isn't uncommon. "Best we can do is 1 week off at a time if you're lucky, and only twice a year, for 45+ years. Oh and you'll feel guilty the entire time because you've been indoctrinated to believe you're inconveniencing everyone around you while looking after yourself."
General strike towards [universal declaration of human rights, article 25.](https://www.humanrights.com/course/lesson/articles-19-25/read-article-25.html)
I took a most wonderful week off last month but came back to two weeks of work to catch up on. It was so stressful coming back to all that that I felt like I never had the time off. The week was unpaid so it was good to get extra hours in when I returned but the stress was not worth it. Definitely need a few weeks paid and just come back to regular amount of work.
It doesn't help that so much effort is made to make work a living hell. Back in the glory days, Google used to have a livable playground as a work environment. Also, they used to have a 20% 'creative time' at work. Tell me honestly: how many work places even have gyms anymore? Did they go out of trend back in the 2000s? I researched it: turns out much of this cutback (35% or so?) was a casualty of Covid. More people are working out solo and outdoors than we used to have.
> Tell me honestly: how many work places even have gyms anymore? Granted seen from Sweden. Seems like over 50% of offices, rest have deals with gym chains for either free or cheap membership. Many allow exercise during work hours and most will fully subsidize a gym membership so its free to go to any gym.
Because in that month you forget how pitiful of existence people live just to work/sleep/eat so the 1% could have life long vacations and more leftover. So enjoy the little time you get to the fullest even if you have to work like a rookie after it.
Main reason why I’m just gonna use PTO for 4 day workweeks
Yeah or work ruins my vacation. Spend my precious 2-3 weeks anxiously thinking about how I have to go back to work and then depressed that life can feel so much better without it.
I only get a week, no one will be doing my work while I am gone. Based on my coworker, she took her week and was texted 42 times while gone about stuff she left detailed notes on. I’m stressed before I have even taken time off. I sort of want to ask if they text me if that means since I’m working I get that day of PTO refunded since I’m not actually “off”.
That's a good idea! No one should be bothering you during your time off. I don't get paid vacation anymore and my phone will absolutely be on silent when I'm off. I am not working for free on my vacation time.
I took 3 months off this year, not for the best reasons, and it put me in a decent financial hole, but in retrospect it was a really good thing to happen to me. I got to explore some hobbies I had forgotten about and get myself straightened out. It’s been an adjustment getting back to work, but I have a new perspective now, but I imagine by the time I work myself out of the financial hole from doing this, I will be just as burnt out as I was before
I take a year off work every decade or so just because I tend to burn out. It’s realllly hard to get back into the work mindset .
Just a little taste of freedom
> It just makes me hate work even more. Yeah because the place that you work makes you hate it. We've all been there.
Well most people who take months long vacations are set for life and have no worries, so their jobs are usually a cushy high level fuck off and have people do all the work for you positions
Or they live in Europe.
Or literally work any job in Europe.
Same deal in speech therapy for children. We know that pacing the session appropriately and including play makes the session more effective. However, our employers insist on scheduling us back-to-back sessions with no breaks, which decreases our productivity. They don't care about how effective our day is, just how many reimbursable sessions we bill.
Dont want to brag but in developed countries we have minimum vacation days. Guaranteed by law: Sweden 36 Days Denmark 30 Days The Netherlands, Czech Rep,Finland, France, Norway 28 Days Poland 26 Days [....] I could go on with this list but i think my point is clear. I am from Germany and have 35 Days PTO per year.
10 days in Canada, only if you're full time, which many places purposely schedule their employees so they don't qualify for full time status.
I didn't want to say anything because at least we have some, but yeah, Canadians get fucked too.
Canada really is USA junior in this regard. :(
with much worse pay and higher cost of living
It’s actually only 20 in the Netherlands :(
Only 20 days lol I got 36 hours for the year. HOURS.
You're joking, right? Right????
He is not, the majority of workers in the usa have 0 vacation days or at most 1 week a year.
At my old job (in ohio) if i asked for time off they would threaten to fire me lmao. God bless america.
Well I got *40* hours PTO for the year. I am apparently very fancy
Afghanistan employees get 20 days vacation plus 15 paid holidays.
Do you work 12 hour days? Such a weird number. As opposed to 32 or 40.
25 in Sweden sadly
Brazil 30 days + national/ local holidays. Also you still have days if you sick (you just need a doctor's note)
School vacations are different in other countries because in the US they were scheduled to allow children to work on the family farm in the summer.
In Germany children have 14 weeks of vacation per year. Adults have 30 days normally so 6 weeks. The US are just fucked
56% have 30 days, around 10% have 24 to 20 days. The rest in between 26-28 days typically. I can't imagine having just 10 days or something like that
My wife applied for a marketing position at an established firm - they offered 5 PTO days for employees under 2 years!
This is what I get. I worked at my last job almost a decade and only had 7 days pto. The job i work at now has 5 days until you’ve been working there 5 years, then you get 10 days. I’m exhausted. I don’t know how people say they “get bored” because I always have places I want to go. Things I want to do. Most are nearby, some are further out… but at the same time, almost everything costs money so you have to work to do the things, but anymore the only things you can afford to do are survive for the next day of work…
Just like the other reply, I've been at myjob 3.5 years now and I finally got upgraded to 3 vacs and 3 sick days a year... And you get treated bad if you use them for anything less than a death in the fsimily (no bereavement)
Like a lot of western European countries, which are comparable to the US in terms of economic standards etc. In Sweden you have at least 5 weeks of paid vacation regardless of type of work and then some public holidays, but many have 6 weeks. Elementary schools have approximately 8 weeks of summer break, 3 weeks around Christmas, 1 week in the autumn (way back the so called 'potato leave' to help harvesting), 1 week winter/sports leave and 1 week for Easter I think the 'Muricans need to think things through and start voting accordingly.... Otherwise they will still be complaining about their vacation situation in 50 years...
It's largely a generational thing in the US. In 50 years the old workaholics will all be dead and the majority of eligible voters will be the millennial, zoomers, etc. Don't worry, though, there will be something dumb that today's younger generations will think tomorrow's youth are stupid about.
In Chile and most of South America too. Only our summers ar December to March, harvest time.
Interestingly enough that’s not the reason: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/debunking-myth-summer-vacation
It's unfortunate all the misinformation is getting upvoted on this, because it's fits what people "feel" is right, instead of your post. It's not like there's magically more work on the form from June-August. Busy times are planting and harvesting. Those happen spring and fall, not summer. Animals need care year round, but would have been birthing in the spring usually, and slaughtered in the fall before winter. Common sense gives a more obvious reason: it's really fucking hot in schools in the summer and even today many schools don't have AC.
Interesting: >Long summer breaks have been shown to cause children, especially lower-income children, to lose ground academically. It’s a phenomenon known as “summer slide,” where students return to school in the fall having lost a full month of learning, on average.
That's an oft-quoted myth. And one that doesn't even make much sense. Extra help on the farm would be most needed for spring planting and fall harvesting. The actual reason was affluent city folk escaping the hot summer weather to the cooler countryside. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/debunking-myth-summer-vacation
The middle classes would do it too, but dad would stay in the city to work!
This isn't true, actually, it's a really weird myth. My family farms, so I was a farm kid, and I always found it... Baffling. Why would they give farm kids the summer off when they made us go to school straight through the busiest times of year on a farm: planting and harvest, which are usually done before May and after September. This is also when most calving happens with cattle, spring births or fall births; I'm not, admittedly, familiar with other animals. About the only thing that farms do more of during the summer would be baling hay. This myth works really well because for some reason even farmers don't question it often. It was parroted by my peers who were farm kids too. And when I asked them or their parents "but then why have us in school during the busiest, most time sensitive times of year for the farm?" I'd be met with "huh. Good question. That is weird." It's because it was never about farmers. Prior to compulsory education laws, which weren't really a thing until the late 1800s and early 1900s), many schools were summer term and winter term, some were basically year round with short breaks (Detroit had 260 day years! Wow!! That's way more than the standard 180 today!) and then upper class families sent their kids to boarding schools or to schools with different calendars. Because there wasn't an actual standard school calendar yet. But there wasn't cheap, widespread AC yet when compulsory education came about, nor when the standard school calendar was developed. Many educators thought that learning in hot weather was both difficult and unadvisable. Schools had difficulties cooling their buildings, especially in the southern parts of the US. Homes were pretty hard to keep cool when it got into the 90s and above for weeks at a time. Well, guess who didn't stay in those areas for those months. Rich families. They'd go up north for their summer home where it was cooler. When trains were cheap, middle class families started summer vacations as well because it was better to go somewhere cool then to sweat constantly in your own home. So summer wasn't a good time for the most privileged children to have to attend school. It was, really, quite inconvenient. Sure, poor kids didn't have anywhere better to be, but those rich kids did, and you couldn't very well expect them to go to school while at the family's summer home. And the middle class kids were possibly traveling, so how would you even know where to send them? Well, no one wanted to be in the hot school building anyway... And America's most privileged weren't about to stop going on vacations over the summer. So might as well not inconvenience them. Summer's off, the farm kids will just have to be told they'll be charged with truancy if they ditch school to help their families with harvest, planting, etc. Plus it conveniently forces families who could rely on their teenage children to help with the busiest time of year to now need to either hire workers *or* sell all their land to those who can afford it. That said, many agriculturally inclined states had rules allowing kids past a certain age to take days to help their families farm. Hell, you can drop out once you're older than the compulsory education requirements, so really farm families just needed to wait until their kids could drop out. After all, from the perspective of those in charge, the people who have to drop out to support their families weren't going to use their education well anyway. Might as well make it convenient for the most privileged and not worry about the less privileged. Why do we say it's because of farmers though? No idea.
This. Summer holidays are just relic of child exploitation/labour. Definitely nothing to do with giving them rest.
Hi, someone from a farm family here. It's not exploitative to have your own children work with you, it's a survival method done by people who can't afford to hire help. Further, for many farm families, it was training for what you were going to do as an adult: take over the farm when your parents were too old to keep it up. Importantly, though, it's not actually why we have summers off, as I explain here: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/13fhbl7/need_a_month_long_vacation_asap/jjvj9ye/
I see your point having been an agricultural child-laborer in Nebraska when I was twelve, however I think the net result of children’s *entire role in society* being a source of labor was probably not great! Like you said, it was a survival strategy and training for future labor - Big difference in my mind between helping dad around a modern farm and toiling in the fields from birth ‘til death because you didn’t have any other choices. There’s a quote by Jay Gould that I like: > I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. I don’t like how he frames agricultural labor as a waste of a brilliant mind, since I grew up around many farmers who easily blew the PhDs I met in university out of the water in terms of raw intelligence and many of them actively chose their profession (versus inheriting it), but the social mobility people have now is undeniably better than how things were in the past. When children are given no other options than working the farm for their entire lives, I feel comfortable calling it exploitation. When a kid in modern times lives on a farm and does chores or even works for pay, that’s a totally different story imho. EDIT: To be clear, I understand the Jay Gould quote is alluding to forced labor, but given the context of the conversation relating to economic exploitation, I felt it relevant because child labor and forced labor share many ethical problems. I didn’t intend to draw comparisons to the transatlantic slave trade or American chattel slavery, and I apologize for not being more specific and delicate in the comparisons I drew.
Yeah and let’s not disregard how messed up the American education system is for kids anyway. I mean I get what OP is saying, but we need new structure for both kids and adults.
Im so sorry Americanos. I get 6 weeks this year of paid vacation, plus a couple days of PTO. Its unfair.
It’s not unfair, it’s the result of strong unions pretty much everywhere in the developed world except the US.
You don't even need strong unions or a developed status. Once it's the norm in the country it falls into place. I live in a 3rd world country and we have way more paid vacation than Americans.
No it’s the result of governments who give slightly more of a shit about their people legislating for it
Those governments only give more of a shit because their populations haven’t completely given up on fighting for their rights.
The companies who employ US citizens are the same companies that lobby Congress against fair treatment of workers. Money talks and they have more than us.
I just asked my boss how much holiday time I get a year. His answer was "Obviously the 4 weeks statutory, but really whenever you need off so long as you don't take the piss with it".
School vacations are not for the children - like ever.
Literally nothing about school is designed with the good of young people in mind.
As a former teacher, I take issue with your statement, because it’s completely right. Big part of why I don’t teach any more.
I thought about becoming a teacher, and then became a librarian instead specifically because I could not, in good conscience, lend my energy to the institution of school.
Last year I had 3 paid weeks off.....then our company got bought out by a bigger company and now I only have 2 weeks of vacation. Which I've already used a week, so I have 5 paid days off the rest of the year. Yay for me.
As a European I consider it sacrilege to not take all 35 holidays by the end of the year.
Reading the comments about how America is backwards in almost every way and then just seeing Americans shrug and putting up with it and then expressing how free they are, more so than the rest of the world. It's crazy to witness.
Around Christmas my boss gave me an extra day off because things slow down because of the holidays. Fast forward to February, which is when we have to submit our time off requests. I ask for 10 days off to go back home to visit my family, only to be informed that I only have 9 days available of PTO because I already used one in December. I still took the 10 days, however, I was not paid for that one day. Companies that force you to take time off but then take those days out of your accrued PTO should be burned to the ground.
2-3 weeks off!? Yo who is getting 3 weeks off!? In Freedumb land…land of Liberty we might get a week unpaid.
Don’t worry some states are already treating 12 year old kids as adults and putting them to work.
If school is supposed to train us to be good workers then I want the exact same amount of time off. I want 3 months off work. Half days. And ideally be able to call off on snow days.
Don't give them this idea, they'll do the opposite and just stop letting kids have a rest to train them.
Don't worry, the GQP are trying to remove all this nonsense and reintroduce good old-fashioned child-labor. Soon all this liberal nonsense will be nothing but a distant myth! /s
My company offers 4 weeks paternity leave and I used 3 weeks of PTO after it. On Monday I will be going back to work but still don't feel rested enough. I'm grateful for the time off but holy crap work sucks.
I always wanted a job where I could alternate between doing something physical and being outside half the year and at a desk doing my programming/computer work the other half. Or... even better each of those a third of the year, and FREE TIME/Vacation/Not working at all the other third.
My IT job is like that at times. It's a mix of remote work and field work depending on what is going on. It's mostly a bit of both each day but I have had 2 week remote stretches from time to time. Plus, about once a year I may even get to fly to another major city for some training. There isn't always time for sightseeing unless it goes more than a week, but it's nice to be able to eat out at nice restaurants and have the company pay for it.
I also think it’s insane that we have children spend all day at school and then come home and do more schoolwork, and that missing scheduled school is totally not tolerated.
Children don’t get summers because it’s recognized they need a break. They have summers off because so many families kept their children home to work farms during those months, it wasn’t worth it to keep the schools open. Then it just became habit. Don’t let anyone fool you. America doesn’t give a fuck about kids.
America is an absolute hellscape. We've handed the entire country over to psychopathic billionaires, aka deranged hoarders. America used to know that you had to tax such filth at 70 to 90% otherwise all their excess money would end up funding lying think tanks, propaganda, and also used to bribe judges and politicians. The ultra wealthy are sick sick people. We can't afford them and have never been able to. We used to collectively know this. Slowly though the billionaire filth managed to brain wash most of the nation. Think about it. Most Americans are in desperate need of universal healthcare and higher wages but they keep voting against it. You couldn't make this plot point up in a screenplay. It wouldn't make sense unless you spent countless hours explaining how brain washed all of society had become by a pretty incredible endeavor waged by psychopathic wealth hoarders.
Teachers are overworked and underpaid but one benefit of the profession is summers off. If I switched careers I’d struggle hard with so little vacation time. We should all have the schedule school kids have.
Well, several Republican-led states are fixing that by encouraging a “free market” that employs children in low wage jobs that were once reserved for illegal immigrants.
Don't worry, there are people trying to take this away from kids. They need to be as miserable as everybody else.
That’s because breaks are for cowards, real men work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week until they have a heart attack and die, that’s the dream
The only reason children get a summer break is because back when there was no air conditioning the rich people would just take their kids out of school for the summer and go to the shore where it was cooler. Only poor people were left at the schools so they decided to just shut down for the summer.
I get 34 days of vacation per year and maybe another 10 days of holidays here in Sweden. Can't complain :)
If you're lucky, your kids will be working in the coal mines, if the Republicans have anything to say about it.
You get 2-3 weeks off a year?
Plot twist: The school breaks aren't for the children, they're actually for the teachers :p
I've taken one day off in the last year and my boss gave me endless shit for it. It's to the point I don't use any time off unless I'm dying because the drama isn't worth it.
Part of why American kids still get summer vacation is because many of our schools don't have air conditioning. I worked in a few. Nightmare. They *usually* have heat, but not always.