Mini retirements: like a sabbatical, but much smaller
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I have wanted to do this each time I've left a job, but a lapse in health insurance would have been too risky for my family, and COBRA is too expensive to be anything other than an option of last resort. So, the most time I've had between jobs over the past 25 years has been a couple of days.
If health care were not so tightly tied to one's employer, I could see people saving up and taking a few months off every 3-5 years as they change jobs. For me, a summer off with my kids would be a tremendous joy. But I don't think I'd be able to afford it until I retire, and by then my kids will be all grown up.
Public schools are generally paid for via property taxes at a pretty local level.
Just make sure when doing so you don’t work at the sort of place that’ll let you go as soon as you put in your notice.
It's been in recent years, though, that I have come to see that it's still _very_ much in their interest to have employees who already have a job to feel _scared_ to leave it. I don't think this is an organized operation, there's no annual meeting of US company HR departments who scheme about it, I doubt it's something actively thought about by many people very often, but all the same the loss of corporate-provided insurance would do _so much_ to loosen the fears that keep people working for jobs that it would no doubt have a _large_ effect on the economy and every company. The biggest effect would be that it'd be extremely simple to leave a low-paying job to seek a higher wage if you have just enough saved up to cover rent and living expenses for the interim.
As such, it finally makes sense to me why so many of the wealthy choose not to lobby for socialized medicine or even to actively fund lobbying against it even if they're not involved in the insanely-powerful for-profit health industry themselves or to lobby in other countries to weaken/dismantle/destroy their existing systems (yes, I know that with an aging population costs of care are getting higher everywhere, but a lot of the funding issues with UK NHS and Canada Medicare are also political in origin): it weakens labor and wages more than they ever have to spend on insurance.
One way you can "break your fast" is an ANCIENT TECHNIQUE uncovered from the OLD WORLD; you take your cheese and your ham, and you put it in between two slices of bread. That way, you can eat your "break fast" meal WITH YOUR HANDS! No dirty dishes!
LIFe: HACKED!
Loyalty is almost never rewarded in the long-term for North American tech sector burn-and-churn, so jumping firms every year or two is common place. Mostly because gullible boards believe all workers are fungible, and in many cases they are right as most graduates do share a common history. =3
Hired one or two gold-brickers over the years, it is kind of like a pack of Pokemon cards. Always a surprise, and not always a fun surprise. =3
Even more than that, I have nano retirements every now and then. We call them holidays. What a lame term, I know.
A label might help explain it on resumes if anyone is checking for gaps though of course.
Writeup here: https://cushychicken.github.io/leave-of-absence/
We had a ton of fun doing it. I loved it. A lot of why I loved it was because it reaffirmed how much I love my work.
I want to do something similar in my late 30s / early 40s, now that my girlfriend is now my wife, and we're starting a family together.
A vacation (or holiday, or PTO, or whatever you call it locally), is great, but normally too short to properly reset. I often come back thinking "I could do with another couple of those right now". The main purpose for those for me is to travel and get away from home for a week or two and experience new things.
What I'm more excited about is taking a few months to basically do very little. Read, walk, no alarms in the morning, no Sunday night anxiety, no wishing it was Friday. Just wake up, do what feels right, don't work, don't do anything.
I'm in my late 40s, I have chronic health issues, and have symptoms of burn out, so even this might feel "too short", but I think it's such a valuable experiment to try, it's got to be done.
I would say most middle class europeans take like 10-14 day long vacations. I sometimes travel for a month and that is already abnormal.
> To me, vacations are too short to turn off completely. Here, where I live, we have 5 weeks a year, if you are lucky, you can take three in a row in summer. But having two months or more, it’s completely different. Your mind will take time to turn off, to shut down from everyday life, and that’s when the benefit of new ideas comes, usually out of the blue, not forced just because your mind and body are resting from work and everything else.
It's cool to read about author's experiences with travelling and making new friends abroad, but that's only possible if you live alone with no dependent people. I know if I took such vacation today, all the 8h of time gained daily would be just sucked out by my kids and everyone around.
Perhaps not right away and often taking the opportunity to do something completely different going forward, and on your own terms more so than ever.
All of which can be out-of-the-question without a realistic mind-set of retiring from "something", in the extreme case ending up doing almost none of the routine tasks that were so critical to career development and maintenance up until then.
Don't fall for this rebranding.
What the OP likely meant, is leaving a gap between leaving a job and starting next one. It's usually easier to push employment date by a month than getting a month-long vacation after starting the job.