If your work projects are as interesting as your free time projects, I congratulate you to having a great job.

From the Netherlands and not having had to work since I sold my first company at 25 (over 25 years ago), I cannot do more than a week vacation before getting annoyed and bored. I like building stuff: programming, welding, soldering, guitar playing, cooking. But I have no patience for doing one thing: normally I code myself and vibe with multiple claude codes on the boil, my electric guitar is on my lap, there is either YouTube presentations from meetups/events or science podcasts on in the background and then there is cooking and soldering when I happen to get up from the desk. Or I go for a run or meet up with friends. When my friends tell me about their vacation, I fall asleep listening to it, let alone having to live through it. It is a Me thing and nothing wrong with them or me and luckily my wife is even worse, so we work almost nonstop generally. Never makes us exhausted though; quite the opposite.

> I almost never take the full 5 weeks and end up accumulating it over the years.

Companies should have a policy to limit accumulation of unused vacation, such as 3 weeks maximum. The problem with unlimited accumulation is that it essentially allows the employee to assign themselves paid overtime[0] without any business reason or management oversight. For example, if the company policy is to have you work 49 weeks and take paid time off 3 weeks a year, but instead you work 51 weeks and carry forward 2 weeks vacation, you have just assigned yourself 2 weeks of overtime.

I used to work for a large corporation that finally implemented such a policy to address exactly what this person has done: 12 weeks of paid overtime that no one asked for and that the company probably hasn't budgeted for.

[0]I don't mean overtime in the sense of time-and-a-half pay or anything like that, rather overtime in the sense of working more paid hours than you were hired for.

In Romania I also have some 5 weeks of vacation, but never take more than two at a time. Two in the summer, two in the winter (Christmas - New Year period) and the rest, sprinkled throughout the year, either for errands or bridge days. Like when there's a holiday on Thursday, I'd take Friday off as well.

Honestly two weeks at a time seems enough and conversely, being absent at work for three-four weeks or more, seems excessive to me. I also have stuff to maintain and new developments to meet a schedule promised to customers, two weeks plus or minus isn't affecting those but I couldn't leave for a month and meet the schedule without killing myself with overtime, effectively negating the whole idea of unwinding during vacation.

But ... speaking of Sweden, one colleague is taking 3 months off. Indeed, Sweden is something else :)

I'm from Norway, and we have 25 days a year, which also comes out to 5 weeks. I had 7 extra day transferred from last year, so 32 days this year. This year was the first I took out 4 weeks of summer vacation, but usually 3 is enough for me. Travel is fun, but after 2-3 weeks of traveling I start to get a big exhausted, and want to focus on hobbies, house work, or similar stuff.

My routine has been: 1 week vacation during spring/Easter, 3 weeks in summer, 1 week fall or Christmas vacation.

On the other hand, I've also worked in other countries where there's much less focus on vacation. I like our balanced view very much.

Save it up for when you have kids ;)

It’s a bit trickier than that imho because Hard work doesn’t guarantee results either. And since, as you said, life isn’t fair, we are faced to… randomness. True story, working hard/intelligently does buy us some tickets to a decent life, but it’s not 100% jackpot. I know plenty of people that worked hard, they studied things that are not in demand, and so they are work in whatever they can with shitty salaries. I worked as hard as them, but studied (by luck I guess) something with demand (software engineering), and so I can afford some more niceties in life. And I know people who didn’t work as hard as others, and live a better life than many. So, it’s more complicated than “work hard”.

There’s plenty of productivity to afford all of us housing, utilities, food, and healthcare.

The only real reason we don’t do that is because we take hard work as a virtue, it’s not; ignore the effects of luck, the capacity for hard work is derived by luck; and like to imagine ourselves being rich one day and think that hard work is enough.

Homelessness is not a bug, it’s a feature, and so is every other aspect of society that directly or otherwise forces us plebs to be obedient cogs in the wheel unless!

Great things demand hard work, there is nothing great about basic needs.

Also the sacrifices of those before us.

Weekends, 8 hour work day, paid time off, etc.

I don't think you have to waste your money or time on a cruise.

Just being on a boat does it, in fact a blow-up boat for three people (for a good friend and cooler bag with snacks and drinks) will completely detach you from the realities of land life.

There may be other ways to experience this. Cruise ships are some of the most polluting way to experience a vacation there is. It’s also not for everyone, like an all inclusive vacation.

Thank you for this, what a great perspective! I've never been on a cruise because I always figured "but what is there to do?". But you're right, that's the point. I might actually book one now.

> I would pay Carmack to write about Doom all day long

That just shows that each of us have different tastes.

You can keep yourself pretty busy if engaging in wondering how every post makes it to the front page of HN.

We used to infer one’s mind from their writing. Nowadays?

I’m surprised people are too lazy to even remove them dashes. Well, in fact it might actually be a good thing for one can spot when something was AI generated much easier.

I feel like original writing is pretty much dead these days. We’re all best selling authors now.

I have started using —ahem— em dashes more regularly so people think I am as smart —well clever at least— as AI.

As a counterpoint, I quite enjoyed the writing style. Not everything has to be summarized. To me, it was more about the human experience.

The author is literally an artist though. What you call fluff may be a worthwhile artistic and emotional expression.

If someone stopped at this summary they would have missed out on a nice poem by Emily Dickinson for example. Oh wait, let me summarize it:

> The poem describes how a prairie can be made using clover, a bee, and imagination.

there, that's better. no more fluff.

You're born, you live, you die. There, I have freed you from the rest of this mortal coil.

Ouch, I feel terrible for having missed that. Well for the rest of us...

Same here. I may be thinking about this wrong, but in my view, that "magic number" is a constantly increasing target, increasingly unapproachable. I once thought I could retire on $1M saved--at a 4% withdrawal rate, that's 40K per year... add social security and I could probably do it in a very low cost of living state. 5 more years later, when everything costs a little bit more, and my lifestyle inflated a little, I started thinking that the number I could safely retire with was $2M. A few more years of inflation and cost increases later, plus a kid that needs college, I started thinking I had to shoot for $5M in order to be safe. Some more years pass, more societal safety nets are burning down, and now I'm starting to feel the pangs of old age and potential health problems, I feel like that number is even larger and further out of reach....