Never Go On Vacation

Would you rather work more than 50 hours a week but have five weeks of vacation a year, or would you rather work 30 hours a week and never go on vacation again?

I would give up vacations, every time.

What if I had taken all the money and enthusiasm I’d put into the past 10 years of vacations and devoted it, instead, to making my own life, the real one, a little bit better? What would that look like?

When I was growing up, my dad — whom I adore — worked all the time. He was one of the first people I knew to have a cellphone, and the only one who used it to check in with the office while riding the chairlift on ski vacations. But I have this one memory of him that I can’t shake. I was about 7. We were playing whiffle ball, thwacking it across the backyard. I remember it because it was an ordinary weeknight, not a holiday or vacation. I don’t know why he was home so early, except that he wanted to be and because it was a perfect summer night in New England — where every now and then there is a day when the air is such a perfect temperature that it feels like no temperature at all, when it’s impossible to imagine that anywhere could be better than right where you are.

This summer, I want more days like that.

Honor Jones is a senior staff editor in Opinion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/opinion/sunday/trouble-vacations.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytopinion