Self-employed, self-exhausted
theisolationjournals.substack.com
theisolationjournals.substack.com
Vacations don’t need to be stereotypical though. To me vacation nowadays means simply taking a break from my main money earning activity (typically a job, but I had a business before too).
When I travel these days I don’t even plan anything. Just land in the city and let it be. Just wonder around and explore. That’s it.
I am not quite set myself, but trying to :).
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.
1. Working outside of your normal shift hours or days on a non-routine basis to meet some deadline or specific business goal.
2. Working overtime is not generally voluntary on the part of the employee.
3. However, most companies acknowledge that overtime is an unwanted burden on the part of the employee and thus usually compensate overtime at a higher hourly rate. This is partially a reward for putting up with that burden, and also discourages managers from assigning overtime on a regular basis.
One of the reasons companies are hiring a higher percentage of their workforce on salary is that they can ask them to work longer hours and occasional weekends without the downside of paying them more.
I can see how it can be paid overtime if company has to pay out the unused vacation when you quit, but I don't know if that's what you meant.
I hate this. My company lets you accumulate unused vacation, but it has a cap of 300 hours, or 7.5 five-day weeks. After you reach the cap, you stop accruing. I'm constantly at the cap, so I just take a Friday off every time another 8 hours accrues, and spend that time putzing around the house doing routine chores and maintenance. I'd much rather just accrue and accrue, and then get all that accrual paid out when I leave or retire.
I understand that companies would rather I not do that, so they implement this "cap" that allows them to stop providing the benefit they promised during hiring.
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 :)
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.
To expect results without hard work is presumptuous and pretentious, of which this author has in spades.
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.
Weekends, 8 hour work day, paid time off, etc.
How you do one thing is how you do everything and once the baseline shifts to your new normal (most likely after a few weeks or months) you will feel the same as you did on your old baseline before the big change.
This is the human condition, you have to figure out how to improve your baseline to improve life.
((or at least, that has been my experience living life))
Positive vibes where you have no choice but to shed the stress. It’s worth it. Even a cruise to no where for 5 days.
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.
Whether it’s a retreat in the rain forest in Costa Rica or a cruise around the Caribbean for a week. A cabin in Alaska or a yurt in the Norway countryside. Get out there somewhere where you can’t escape your fate. The point is to succumb to the moment, and things become clear. Personally, I like a party. Not a crazy carnival but a sophisticated one - so I went on Norwegian. It was worth it.
There are places nearby wherever you live that you can visit and that don’t require sailing across the ocean in ye olde ship, flying, or taking a cruise to experience. And they’re just as beautiful, relaxing, and would provide the clarity/relaxation discussed in this article.
I have some wonderful memories of my trip.
I mean, yes? You do indeed need an emergency fund, and the theory, which various retirement vehicles are designed to support, is you set up your affairs to permanently slow down at around 65.
Before that is outside of the reach of most people, but if you want to do it sooner, the way is straightforward: increase your savings rate.
It's math and economics... once you don't need the income anymore, you get to slow down, until then, you manage your stress and anxiety as best as you can.
I am also self employed, fortunate enough to be in the technology profession where we're relatively well paid - I hit the "I could stop at 65" number a few years ago and the way I see it every year I put in at this point, is just bring that number down lower. At some point my age and that number will meet in the middle.
Hopefully.
The author mentions: "The leukemia diagnosis and relapses certainly intensified the urgency I feel around work…"
#1, most people who take care of their bodies will live long and healthy lives. So the first tool is just to take care of yourself through diet and exercise and watch your risk of deadly diseases plummet.
#2, insurance exists and the medical field is extraordinarily effective. Rich people beat all kinds of conditions. Worried your insurance isn't good enough? Buy more. Keep making more money, and keep buying more insurance. Insurance is tool #2.
This may sound harsh but I really don't know a lot of people, in America or elsewhere, who take care of their body, have a Cadillac fantastic insurance plan, and are worried about illness destroying their life. People who are already unhealthy, on the other hand, or don't have great insurance, are worried about this constantly. Now it's unfortunate that society can't guarantee that optimistic state of mind and health for everyone but until it can, it's diet, exercise, and more income that you funnel into more insurance, for you and your family that are the solutions.
After a diagnosis these tools, especially #2, start becoming less effective because now you've got a pre-existing condition and in particular you're kind of stuck with whatever insurance you had when it happened. So the urgent message here is to get on this stuff now, and sleep better tomorrow (and live longer) because you did it.
To your point though enough insurance and regular visits (and screening — does insurance always pay for that?), you might dodge a bullet that your ancestors caught.
(That, and reading The 4 Hour Workweek. Once Tim Ferriss became famous, legions of people picked it apart and called him a bullshit artist. I took inspiration from that book, and went and lived it. 20 years after he published it I bumped into him completely by chance in a cafe in Phuket Thailand, which was an incredible moment, here were two guys, for decades just doing the thing that everyone had said was impossible or impractical, and we were two of the first to have the exact same idea and end up in the exact same place once Covid restrictions started to relax around the globe.)
I'll grant that kids significantly alter the numbers.
This whole post is so self-serving and iconoclastic it kind of feels like satire, and if it was, it would be gold, but it's not.... I mean, I don't think it is...
The post ends with a "read me or not, but if you want more of my genius, pay me", which I guess it's alright, since I would pay Carmack to write about Doom all day long, but some guy with dogs "curled" around it, writing about how hard it is to conceptualize his next "Sistine chapel"? GTFO
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.
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.
Curiously, I find in editing my dad's auto-biography that a certain generation went crazy over-inserting commas — wherever they think you might want to pause to take a breath or something. To my eye (ear?) the result is a staccato sentence.
But the truth is I know nothing about grammar rules — I slept through sentence diagramming in elementary school.
I find emdashes hard to parse and I don't like them without extra spacing.
The punctuation in English feels kinda sucky (and implicit variables suck) compared to some programming languages.
Thank goodness for LLMs
>The author's core message is about breaking free from a lifelong pattern of tying self-worth to constant productivity and output, realizing that true creativity and well-being require intentional rest and "revery" (contemplation/dreaming), rather than relentless striving.
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.
People do argue for and against, but usually less effectively than what you did here. Kudos to clarity!