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Comment by jrmg | Hacker News Reader

An Amerisleep.com survey of more than 1,200 Americans revealed that 37 percent used vacation days in the past year just to rest.

I’d like to see the wording of this survey.

If it’s something like ‘did you use vacation time to rest?’, it seems to me that it’s likely to always have got a large percentage of ‘yes’ answers. Isn’t that partly what vacation has always been for?

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> Have you done the following in the past 12 months just to catch up on sleep?

> Used PTO days

> Taken a vacation

https://amerisleep.com/blog/top-cities-for-sleep-vacation/?s...

I pay no attention to anything that comes from a survey. It's meaningless.

It's just so lazy. Look at average hours which went to a high of 35 hours in 2021 (probably peak WFH), and now down to 34. This is all likely noise, but there's nothing to suggest Americans are overworked and burnt out. There are a ton of other measures, like annual hours worked, etc and none of them show an increase in the amount Americans work. Maybe people don't like their jobs, but it says more about expectations and attitude than anything else.

You hear this stuff all the time from commentators and politicians. I've heard hours worked is lower because "everyone has multiple jobs", and you look it up and it's 5% and pretty steady from the past 25 years

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620

The erosion of the spending value of the dollar (aka the amount of inflation from post-covid government spending), and therefore most people's salaries probably have more effect on people's feelings about their salary and how far it's not going, which in turn negatively impacts feelings about work and overall stress.

Why work if you can't even afford a house or healthy groceries for yourself or your family?

>The erosion of the spending value of the dollar (aka the amount of inflation from post-covid government spending), and therefore most people's salaries probably have more effect on people's feelings about their salary and how far it's not going, which in turn negatively impacts feelings about work and overall stress.

Even though inflation shot up post covid, by all official statistics wage growth has outpaced it. Therefore to imply that this behavior is as a result of people earning less in real terms is incorrect.

See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q, note the units for the chart, which indicate the figures have already been adjusted for inflation

People are getting fired and are having to rely on gig work to live. It's a reporting gimmick by both administrations to convince us the economy is doing better when it hasn't.

Uh, isn’t your first link from a survey?

I think maybe they mean something like "questionnaire poll survey" vs "data reporting survey" (i.e. the former comes from asking random people a hopefully well phrased question and seeing who responds, the latter comes from many businesses just feeding payroll data up to the government to be analysed directly), but even then... a good questionnaire poll is nothing to ignore.

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