My experience with holidays/vacations is that they’re not worth it. However, I exclude a lot of things from the category of vacation that others might include. I exclude:
going to visit family
going away to a conference
going on meditation retreat
generally visiting someplace to do something
All of these are activities that can be fun and may count as “vacations” in the sense of “I took vacation days from my job to go do them”, but they aren’t really about relaxing or getting away.This may be due to my personality preferences, but I find the only thing I really think of as a vacation is having a long (at least 3 days, and the vacation only really starts on the 3rd day) period of unstructured time with no responsibilities. The more external pressure that gets applied to me, be it from the need to visit family, the need to keep to a schedule, the need to not lose out on money already spent on tickets to do something, the less it feels like a vacation.My ideal vacation is probably something like going to an all-inclusive resort for 1-2 weeks.If you have a sufficiently similar personality (I can guess at what factors affect it, but my overall personality dimensions are high openness, medium-high conscientiousness, medium-high agreeableness, very low neuroticism, and medium extraversion), you may find like me that there is a very small set of things that will count to you as a vacation worth taking; everything else will just be things you may value doing for other reasons but not for what I see as the purpose of a vacation—experiencing true, deep freedom.
My experience with holidays/vacations is that they’re not worth it. However, I exclude a lot of things from the category of vacation that others might include. I exclude:
going to visit family
going away to a conference
going on meditation retreat
generally visiting someplace to do something
All of these are activities that can be fun and may count as “vacations” in the sense of “I took vacation days from my job to go do them”, but they aren’t really about relaxing or getting away.This may be due to my personality preferences, but I find the only thing I really think of as a vacation is having a long (at least 3 days, and the vacation only really starts on the 3rd day) period of unstructured time with no responsibilities. The more external pressure that gets applied to me, be it from the need to visit family, the need to keep to a schedule, the need to not lose out on money already spent on tickets to do something, the less it feels like a vacation.My ideal vacation is probably something like going to an all-inclusive resort for 1-2 weeks.If you have a sufficiently similar personality (I can guess at what factors affect it, but my overall personality dimensions are high openness, medium-high conscientiousness, medium-high agreeableness, very low neuroticism, and medium extraversion), you may find like me that there is a very small set of things that will count to you as a vacation worth taking; everything else will just be things you may value doing for other reasons but not for what I see as the purpose of a vacation—experiencing true, deep freedom.