even if you can, financially, it's often hard to do so mentally/emotionally. if you're taking time away from work, that means no income - whether you desperately need it or not may be immaterial to the mental state you've built for yourself.
As I posted below - the situation in which you have 40 weeks of spending set aside is radically different to that of having 4.
From my perspective, and I recognise things are probably very different in the USA with your health insurance catastrophe, taking a few months off work to unwind, or check out the job market, or whatever else every now and then is a completely normal thing to do.
My first software job came about because I left a job and bounced around for a bit. I had enough mental space and time to physically visit interviews without the sort of typical "pretend to your boss you're ill" stuff. Without that time I'd be somewhere completely different now.
The real cost of failure isn't just loss of savings. It's potential homelessness, bankruptcy or death through less of health cover, or bankrupcty through student loan payments.
In a functional culture the cost of entry for small businesses is much lower, as is the Total Cost of Failure.
For a country that claims to be business friendly, the US makes it unbelievably dangerous to start a small business without the backing of a significant financial safety net.
Being in a country where vacation time is paid by the company (currently 7 weeks / year, even if I usually don't use up all of it), the idea that taking a day off work means less money at the end of the month is mind boggling.
For example leaving one job and having a gap before another one, or getting sacked and having a few weeks without work, or moving town before you have something lined up, etc.
Basically, being able to function without income for a nonzero period.
I wouldn't want to use my holiday weeks looking for work more than a few times in my life even if I have quite a generous allowance (well, generous by 'normal people' standards, I find the idea of working >80% of the year quite odd)
[EDIT] weaker end in terms of ability to negotiate—so, the vast majority of workers.
It's also interesting to look at percentage of workers that work part time by country. US is relatively low at 22% while countries with a more generous welfare state are higher (France 39%, Norway 48%)
But there are a million other things going on as well so I'm not sure if it's related to that or something else
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.PART.ZS?most_rec...
Mandating a week off for everyone doesn't seem to give the space needed for poorer people to become as wealthy as they might deserve. What can be done?
If you want to attribute America's economic advantage to hours worked or labor regulations (and yes, they do matter to an extent), you have to be ready to explain why Russia, Mexico, Greece, and Chile aren't also economic powerhouses.
My personal conjecture is that you're in for a long period of degradation followed by something violent. Fascism most likely.
If you have 4 weeks' worth of spending saved then it's difficult.
If you have 40, then it's fairly easy.
If you have 400, it's trivial.
as it stands, I've got perhaps... ~5 years of living expenses saved up. Certainly enough to not worry about a few days of non-income, but it's.. certainly not FU money. 25 years of expenses lined up seems like it might give you more breathing room, but, I suspect your comfort level and goal posts move.
when I was in big debt, I thought "man, just having $1k in the bank will make all the difference, and I'll be fine". and when I got there, I was 'fine' for about 10 minutes. Then the goal was $2k. Then 5. Then 10. Then 30. And so on. For me, there's a realization that it's moderately hard to earn and keep that money, and that it can be reduced rather quickly, so.... keeping earning income is still top of mind, at least for another few years.
You really think you couldn't walk out of a job and find another one in a few months? Will you even notice that drop in savings aside from as a theoretical number on a spreadsheet?
It sounds to me like you have a complex about this rather than it being in any sense rational. (I don't mean that as an insult at all.)
5 years is less than the amount of time it took for me to go from a skint teenager in a dead end town, to a graduate with a full time job.
And yes, it's sort of a complex. I have to remind myself that yes, I can pay the extra 50c and get cheese on the burger if I feel like it. I'd lived 30+ years without being able to do that (meaning that adding cheese a few times would be noticeable at the end of a week), it's a hard mental state to break from. Not 'working' means ... a day where savings isn't going up, etc.
Replenishing the spent money is simultaneously both easier (larger savings tends to grow in larger chunks) and harder (takes longer to earn new money vs the compounding of earlier money, and takes more of the remaining time I have left, which is always depleting).
I'm not claiming it's entirely rational, by any means, and that's why I was saying earlier that it's hard to break out of.
EDIT: I've always taken FU money to mean... you never have to engage in any sort of 'work' ever again, not just for a short time. In some ways, I've been able to use this cushion to say "no" to some situations/jobs/projects that I would have agreed to before, but it's not the same as saying FU to people. :)
I was like that for a while and went all in on FIRE type stuff.
The thing is that eventually, after I did take off that N months, I realised that it's unrealistic to assume I'd have no/almost no income for multiple decades.
I would go insane without having productive work, even if that were working for a non profit for a significant pay cut.
> Not 'working' means ... a day where savings isn't going up, etc.
This is true regardless of how much money you have. You're always going to be able to add some more income by performing labour, even if your investments outperform your labour after a point.
It's worth loosening the straps at some point, even if you just give someone else the money to spend (e.g. charity).