Not taking all your vacation time is crazy - and destroys the planet
Every time I see someone write about how they have "so much paid time off" to take, and no time to take it, I can't help but shake my head.
Shortly after coming back from vacation last April I already started plotting my next bit of time off.
It'll be in December, when I use up the remainder of this year's vacation time.
Thanks to some careful planning I still have over a week off, and
the Christmas holidays mean I get to enjoy almost a full two weeks off,
which is simply awesome.
Plotting time off, as well as fancy dinners.
This all of course reminds me of a friend who scoffed in response to all this gleeful talk of vacation planning - "your entire life is a vacation."
Hey, if you can pull that off, more power to you, I say.
Even a child can realize that the world we live in asks that people work far too much considering the abundance of resources on the planet and the number of able bodied people able to help harvest the fruits of our collective labour.
In a way, not taking enough vacation time is a good way to help Destroy the Planet.
How?
You earn more money, but you waste more of it on toys to make you more productive, like disposable meals - you don't have time to cook, after all.
Besides that, ask yourself - how else do I waste resources by staying up late?
You get sleepy, make mistakes, and end up wasting paper, electricity and anything else you consume in your job. Burning out means getting sloppy. Which means inefficiency.
I haven't done any thorough research - but a quick google search already points out one study that reminds us of the stress our health care workers suffer from.
Multiply making a mistake a day by 365 by 6 billion people, and you're contending with over a trillion avoidable errors a year. Yes, that assumes every single person makes a mistake, but it also assumes you only make one a day.
For argument's sake, there's still a lot of avoidable errors. And some are minor. Many others end up killing people - think of all the botched hospital surgeries you're heard of, for example.
If you don't take time off, your company will use you to do the job of two or maybe even three people.
Those are the additional people they would've hired had you not decided to work until 10 or 11 pm every night.
Great move, ruiner
If you're not taking your time off and if you're working too late for that matter, you're causing mistakes that waste money - money that would've been better spent employing another university graduate who is instead forced, at best, to work a lame service industry job to try and pay off mountains of student debt.
And all those underpaid kids end up subsisting on toxic junk food instead of something more nutritious, like the organic food we should all be trying to eat more of. But they can't afford it because all the funds are showing up in your pocket. And no matter how much you're paid, it's never enough either - you end up spending it on more toys as well.
Gizmos and machines that end up in the garbage heap in a year or two, while you're still heavily in debt because you're trying to buy yourself the happiness you lack because you're working yourself - and the world - to death.
For real?
Yes, this all started off as a quick reference to the importance of taking your vacation days, and now we're raising the spectre of global apocalypse - let no one ever say I don't have a flair for the dramatic.
And at least now there's no mistaking how seriously I take a balanced work week and judicious use of your alloted time off either.