RickSpace

It’s that time of the year again. People look forward to Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Years as times they can take days off from work, on either side of the holidays, and therefore have a larger chunk of time off from work. While I love the seasons and the festive nature of the holidays, I have grown to realize that I really hate vacation/holiday time.

That is to say, I actually hate taking multiple days off from work in a row. When you take time off from work, you have two options basically and both lead me to my conclusion of hating the time off.

1. You could go visit friends, relatives or maybe some place special to you, and therefore spend long days traveling, sight-seeing and experiencing which can, at times, leave you more drained than having worked those days.
2. Or….. You could do absolutely nothing; a glorious absence of ambition coupled with copious amounts of free time could lead to the absolute apex of laziness. You sit around the house (apartment, double-wide, whatever), you eat (drink, imbibe alcohol, whatever) and watch TV (play video games, sleep, whatever) and you do nothing of any use.

Either way you choose to spend your time, you end up potentially worse off than you were before you took the break. You are either tired and feel like you had no break because of all the travel and visiting, etc, OR you feel unmotivated, unaccomplished and unenthused about returning to the job you just had a break from. I don’t know what the answer is, and if I ever figure it out, I’ll let you know by way of a book, the writing of which will make me filthy rich and put me on a permanent vacation.

Surely you can’t just not ever take vacation time, because I don’t care what your job is like, I’m certain you would eventually burn out, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t it suck to never have a week-long period or some such where you can go visit family members you’ve not seen in a while? Or what about those three weeks you wanted to take to go to Europe? Could you really do without vacation time? More importantly, is there some way to use your vacation time where you don’t end up feeling like this afterwards?

Regardless, Thanksgiving vacation is over and I’m back at work; I haven’t been this unmotivated at work in a long time and I blame the tryptophan.