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Micro-retirement

A Boring Dystopia @lemmy.world

Micro-retirement

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Maybe someday I'll work somewhere with good PTO. currently 6 holidays, 2 pto weeks and 1 sick week.

This has got to be fake, or engagement bait, right?
- Honestly, as someone who doesn't like in America I feel like this wouldn't surprise me if it was real from there.
  Where I live you have minimum 4 weeks annual leave a year...
- Everytime I read something that makes me frustrated or that sounds ridiculous I assume it's rage bait because it almost aways is.

Just 2 weeks? That is called a vacation!

Hi, Norwegian here, we have 5 weeks vacation per year, mandated by law. Oh, and the government takes 10% of your paycheck every month and pays it all out in July, so you have the money to go on vacation. Strong labor unions is the recipe.
- American here. I work for a company that gives 5 weeks per year. It's great. I can take a 1-2 week vacation in the summer and various days and weeks off throughout the year. It doesn't hurt that my boss is great and almost never says no to time off. "Hey, this project is draining. I could really use a week off for mental recovery. It looks like nobody is off next week." "Go for it."
  It's possible, fellow Americans. Unions are the way.
  
  5 weeks seems like a good minimum to shoot for, yeah. Even with technically "unlimited" vacation, I tended to take 1 week a quarter, 2 in the summer, and then whatever Christmas to New Year's is. I wish I could take more in the Summer of course, but it is what it is.
- aussie here. 4 weeks. required by law.
- I'm probably going to move out of Austria in a few months and the one thing that'll take a while to get used to is that in most other European countries you 'only' get 13 wages a year instead of the 14 I'm used to.
- My vacation money usually goes to taxes each year as a Dutch citizen.
  It's a sick joke imo. "Here's the money we took from your wage for vacation, but also here are the tax bills that are equal to that amount".
  Thanks i hate it.
  I'm saving up my own wage for retirement and investing it myself because i have zero trust in these systems. I watched my dad get screwed out of a large part of his retirement money.
- Nationalised oil probably helps too
  
  We don't have oil and we have the same in Denmark. I have 7 weeks paid vacation, and of course free healthcare and education, etc.
  
  We have pumpkin seed oil in Austria, and apparently its enough to give us 5 weeks PTO per year, 2 weeks of paid nursing leave and up to 72 sick weeks for a single illness.
  
  No, it is pretty standard European fare.
  
  4 weeks by law in the Netherlands, usually the union adds another week to that.
  
  5 weeks by law in Finland as well
  
  Same in France. We don't have oil but we have strikes.
  
  What’s stopping the US from nationalizing its oil and other natural resources?

I'm actually retired but I think of it as a macro-vacation.

Crazy people. We get 4 weeks at the start and then 1 extra per year for five years. So total 5 weeks paid holiday. Only work 33 hours a week too. Some companies treat people well, just have to get lucky and find a small one.
Also, yeah I’m not micro retiring.

Typical AI sludge, complete alien nonsense spouted confidently.
- Yep that was my first thought too. Gotta be AI written because it makes zero sense.
  
  The part that gets me is that syntactically and lexically it makes perfect sense, so you actually have to think about it before realizing it's totally worthless. The old signals of quality and care in communication are meaningless.
  People with poor critical thinking skills are going to be fucking lost at sea this coming decade. They have no tools to tell what's worth believing anymore.
  
  How did we get to the point where this is published as something serious?
  Can I go live naked in the forest and forage for mushrooms instead? I want to macro-retire.

I think it's probably a typo caused by AI and a lack of editing. As i understood it, a micro retirement is taking between several months and a year long sabbatical after 1-2 years of working, which is a bit more interesting than 1-2 weeks. So basically, it's working 1 year and taking a break from work for 1 year (whatever that entails, personal project, travel, possibly doing nothing at all).
- That's what i expected when it said "micro retirement"...something worthwhile like 6 months+

did similar for years with sick time which was use or lose 10 days a year. boss complained my calling in sick Fridays and Mondays had become a pattern. well yeah. worked at a community college in illinois. not a slave.

This has to be a shitpost. I can’t believe this would be a real article.
- ...so you haven't read the business press at any point this century?

We used to do that in my generation, but it was just called getting laid off. 😂

Oh you mean a fucking short ass vacation?

What the fuck is this gaslighting propaganda bullshit? People in the US have been taking vacations for decades; it’s not exclusive to GenZ, nor is it a “new trend”. I call bullshit.
- Quiet quitting is just doing your job/acting your wage.
  People on the internet love to make dramatic sounding names for normal stuff.
  
  To be fair, "quiet quitting" is a labour action that goes back decades if not centuries. A more common name is "work(ing) to rule".
  I remember that term from when my teachers were preparing to strike a long while ago. The fact is, most workers, teachers especially, go beyond the bare minimums that their jobs require. It made a big difference when teachers who used to supervise after-school activities just went home instead. In jobs that are associated with "vocational awe", it's very common for people to do much more than the minimum requirements for their jobs, so when they engage in a "work to rule" campaign, there's a really big difference.
  
  CONTENT! ENGAGEMENT!!
  
  it's just a new term for something that exists.
  no idea why it was every a big deal.
  now everything is a culture war for engagement.
  was there any drama when we started calling "beouf" "beef"?
- Speak for yourself. I'm all in on this trend and have even begun taking nano-retirements for about 16h each day.
  
  taking a piss now counts as pico retirement.
- You're wrong. NObOdY wAnT WokR anYmORe
- Yeah I mean, you wouldn't have any tourism aside from rich folks otherwise
  
  that's the contradiction inherent I'm the system, congrats, you win 5 Marx points
- You were young and stupid once. You know perfectly well that back then whenever you did something for the first time it was also the first time anyone in the entire history of the universe had done that thing.

Thats "the Onion", right?
I mean, this cannot be written by a human who means this seriously. right??
- Shit like this is published only to set the bar even lower than it is today. It has no other purpose as they know most intelligent people will not read anything but the headline. They just inject this dogshit into the collective consciousness so that they can normalize a type of work that is a little better than indentured servitude.

1-2 weeks every 12-18 months is seen as a lot? No one tell them about europe 😶
- I guess everyone is doing macro-retirement every year in EU.
- Isn't that like a short holiday?
  
  In my home country a legal minimum is 4 weeks a year, so 1-2 weeks is half or a quarter of a holiday if you take it at once :3
  Or if you split it into 2 parts you get 2 weeks off every 6 months instead of 12-18
  
  Ultra short holiday. I get seven weeks paid, usually take four off in a row nowadays and spread the rest around Christmas or whenever I feel I need to rest up from work.
- No one tell them about the majority of countries.
  
  Real :3
- You guys get vacations? Next you'll tell me you get holidays off too or something...🫠
  
  Well it's either holidays off or double pay :3
- 12-18 months??? I read it as weeks and was still considering it normal vacation.
- Can confirm: I get 6 weeks paid vacation per year, and time spent on vacation is paid slightly more than actual work time.

1-2 weeks every 12 to 18 months? what is this, time off in Auschwitz?
- I do that, but i've been wfh since 2015 so every day i have mini holidays in between workflow
  
  You mean lunch break?
- Wake up, Hustle, and Grind. Ain't no time for time off. You think Elon Musk became a billionaire while chasing tail or doing drugs or spending all his time playing video games?
  
  Yeah because hard work will make you a billionaire. 😂
  
  Well no. Technically the baby mammas, ketamine and path of exile came way after he inherited all the diamond mine money... :D

Charles currently takes work breaks every six months for two weeks at a time, and said he heard about micro-retirements from a friend. “I reward myself by traveling to different countries. Whether it’s Europe during the summer or other destinations, and so that’s a way that I incentivize myself to reach certain KPIs,” says Charles.
FML Charles has discovered holidays

Give burnout a chance

Yes, it's a real article, and it's worse than you are imagining.
- Yeah this is just telling me we young people need to organize and demand more pto
  
  Europe has this. You should too.
- If you want to suffer some more the author has a website. There's no actual content to be found there either.

If I don't take at least one 2 week period off per year, that's literally illegal. I'm also entitled to 28 days off per year that if I give enough notice and book in at least one week periods, an employer can't deny me without good reason.
- Where, might I ask? For a friend. Asking for a friend.
  
  afaik this is the case on most of europe.
  
  Estonia. Our 28 days includes weekends though - some countries give you fewer days but weekends aren't counted so it ends up being about the same.

Not satire: https://www.fastcompany.com/91357784/what-is-a-micro-retirement-inside-the-latest-gen-z-trend
But they specify that unlike PTO, this is an unpaid time off, which can be a break inbetween jobs or a unpaid vacation.
Still fucking ridiculous to call it "micro-retirement"
Soon we will hear how gen z is having nano-retirements every 5 days of work that can include 2 days of no work and often destructive behaviour such as parties and binge watching tv.
- What about those eight hours at night? I mean people hardly even think about work while they are dreaming.
  
  I think its called a nightmare usually
  
  You mean my pico-retirement? Sometimes i lay thinking awake before i start it and yes, sometimes I have thought about work during it and yes sometimes I think about what the day holds just after coming out of it - but that's why you need to have a nano-retiremtent after every four to five pico-reti's you know.
  I also try to stack them if I found myself to occupied with work. I'll allow myself a pico during a nano for example, instead of raving all night I choose to do some self-care. It's really about finding the right balance. Please leave a like and subscribe for more meaningful insights.
  
  It's bad enough they get your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free.
  
  I once had a dream that Steve Irwin had come in and wanted a tattoo of a budgie. Does that count?
- Marketplace also covered the trend recently. They described it more as taking a few months to even a year or two off from work unpaid
- I think they may have confused some terms here. Among my peers in engineering it's quite common to take a few months between jobs to travel or relax. They usually call it funemployment. I totally get why one would want to take a longer break assuming you have sufficient savings before you quit. What this article seems to be describing is just unpaid vacation because we don't have real vacation policies in the US.

I work in educational support on a 10-month contract. I am paid for the built in holidays and I save a little and take the summer off. I think it is a good work/life balance.
- This is like 4x10 hour days or 3x12 hour days to the extreme!!
  I also work in education (university level) but the IT side of the house. I’d love to do this but honestly the slow summer is when we get most of our more extensive maintenance done since it’s slow.
  
  I can imagine! I cannot guess what it’s like to try to get big projects done when class is in. Just the oppressive amount of bodies. I remember the net going on once in my elementary school. That was chaos. Hearing “When will it be fixed” a thousand times. As someone who depends on IT (my laptop has become a frisbee more than once) thanks for your hard work. :p

Is the original satire? I know Americans are obsessed with presentism on the job, but even they understand the concept of a vacation?
- It's hard to tell. I've worked at places that would definitely fire me for using a week of vacation, and legally in my state vacation isn't a tangible guaranteed thing; it's completely legal to just fire the employee instead if they try to use it without compensation. Practically some jobs don't have time off. You just get fired.
  
  Thats … really worker unfriendly
  
  At my last workplace one of my colleagues took a couple of days off per week for 3 weeks to participate in some robotics competitions. He was teased and generally made aware how much of an inconvenience his planned absence was.
  This same workplace made up a reason to fire me just because they didn't like me. I can make a million and one guesses as to why I was actually fired, but the most telling part is they didn't even stick to the reasons they provided for firing me when I applied for unemployment and the unemployment office called to verify details with them. They dropped all of the pretense they built up and basically just said I wasn't a good fit for the team. I may or may not qualify for unemployment, I should find out soon.
  Fortunately I've been doing some contact work for my previous employer on the side so I've been able to make that my main gig to try to keep the bills paid. I'm not sure what I'd be doing right now if I didn't have that, given this job market is so terrible right now. I've been applying for 5-10 jobs a week for the last 6 weeks and I've had a single interview
- My work offered a compressed work week for a few years where employees could work the same number of hours over 9 days every fortnight, meaning they could take every second Friday off still working the same number of hours. Employees based in NA didn't get that benefit, instead of trying to get that implemented over there NA employees were practically celebrating when the company recently scrapped it everywhere else instead.
  My experience of American work culture is very much toxic crab-in-a-bucket mentality, pull everyone else down instead of trying to make work life the littlest bit more bearable, ironically directly contradicting the company's slogan. The amount of brown-nosing sycophants on all-teams calls is pretty insane too.
  So yes, I very much believe this is something American media would say.
- What the fuck, it isn't satire? And other sites are writing articles on it?

I was working in a European branch of a SF based private company. It's a company that tries really hard to have good optics everywhere, from being listed as PBC down to "support and inclusion" talks.
US employees officially had "unlimited" vacation days, European had 25. Plus the company has a practice of giving an extra Friday off once a month, plus few days for Christmas break plus one year there was a week of summer break.
That year with a summer break employees in Europe got over 40 days of vacation. 35..37 without it. Plus bank holidays and sick leaves.
I was freaking out after learning that US employees with the unlimited time off were getting under 20. Whenever an employee was using more than 15 vacation days a year, they were presented with an inquiring interview from their manager trying to figure out why they need so much rest.
US has no work culture, it's exploitation.
- Unlimited PTO is an accounting dodge because PTO shows up as a liability on the books if it is defined, because if they liquidate the business they need to pay it out in lieu. And number doesn’t go up.
  Which is why they also don’t allow carry-over in most cases.
  
  Not unless you do it the right way, i.e. the way it is done in Europe. It is basically mandatory to take vacation days every year up to a specific number. Unlimited PTO makes it so you get extra. I also have a policy of a burnout vacation - if I notice you are burned out you get sent to a mandatory paid vacation. You get to refuse once, as a hangover excuse or "I'm fine, really". But it I notice it again after refusal, you get a choice. Either you go to vacation, or you get fired. It doesn't go into a tally of "I need to talk to this guy, he took 80 days off this year", I treat it as if they'd worked. Oh, and 100% paid sick leave instead of a percentage, all they need is to talk to their doctor and they put in that they are sick in the system.
  The agreement about time off is you get the 25 mandated by the law, anytime, without any request beforehand, as long as it won't make the sun explode. Instead of people requesting time off, I request time "on", if I need to work with them, have them in a meeting or train someone.
  My "off the contract" ask to them is "I'll try to treat you as fair as I can, and ask you to do the same in return". I did get screwed over by an employee once, but so far I can still maintain this policy
- A company telling you you've got unlimited off days is actually really bad because it means they will just engage in this judging practise.
  If they tell you you've got 25 days then that's great you know how many days you've got, if it's unlimited they start being argumentative around day 10. So in reality people with unlimited time off actually end up with fewer days.
  Working for a European company is great, currently I'm being told that I need to take 2 weeks off, in addition to the holiday I've already booked off.
  
  Also you don't get paid out for "unlimited PTO" when you leave. I have something like 45 days of PTO saved up, and if/when I leave my company, I will be paid for those 45 unused days along with any other severance package that is included. Unlimited PTO is a trap.

Skipping lunch is now "intermittent fasting".
- i call my bathroom trips nano sabbaticals
- I mean, technically it is

Please tell me this is fake.
searches the site
Nope.
- Wow, that article is really trying to make vacations "special" and trying to indicate most people want this "new" thing as a benefit, unpaid.
- This is too stupid to share, even in a humorous or ironic sense. That's rare. Holy hell.

When I've heard about "micro retirements" before, it's been in the context of taking months long sabbaticals, not a regular amount of paid time off to take in a single block

It could just be me but I think this is what you would call a "vacation."

microaggression

Any "journal" that misuses commas like that should be ignored as an example of anything real people are saying. It's a tabloid.

I just listened to a news/information show regarding studies done on millennial and GenZ that found 4/10 of this cohort also worked a side gig in order to hedge against layoffs. Often, many of these side gigs are not glam type.. like influencers etc. Many of these jobs are like working in service -- nannys, retail, food service -- stuff that can't be replaced by AI or a remote offshored employee. So this report was on NPR today...

Vacation or busting your arse at a high paying job like truck driving for miners then quitting and living off the wages?
'Cos i know Millenials who spent their 20's doing that.

I wonder what this kind of people think about >20days of vacation in Europe.
- Give me 30 days for a 40hr workweek or get out
- Three weeks is what you need to really deconnect from a demanding work IMO.
  
  It depends on how much you practice disconnecting. I found that working 4 day weeks allows me disconnect almost immediately every weekend.
  Disconnection is not really a vacation issue per-se, it's a work-life balance issue that can't be solved if you spend the overwhelming amount of you waking time working.

if this becomes a thing we need to make "fire-sale" a euphemism for a literal fire.

Micro retirement? It's called holidays in Europe and we get around 1 month of it in total. Americans are so used to their corporate slavery they call it "micro retirement" now. Fucking hell.
- To be clear - Americans do not call it that.
  Shit mouthpieces of shit companies seem to be trying to make it a thing.

During the pandemic, a large swath of hospital systems, both psych and medical, contracted with nurses to travel to work for them on 13 wk contracts. There were some significantly high contracts in the midst of the pandemic, mainly through a company called Krucial. However, the Krucial contracts were not normal work weeks but five 12hr shifts every week, with significant overtime. Overtime in travel contracts was typically above the standard 1.5x hourly rate most hourly workers are accustomed to. The weekly rates on these contracts made news. I say this so we can move past it to the standard contracts where we can talk about lack of burnout.
The normal travel contract was typically 36hrs a week, a standard work week for the hourly nurse, with elevated OT. Rates were stronger than precovid, which was a strong lure, but the industry at large had not increased staff nurse pay with cost of living, most of the industry not seeing much in hourly rate increases past the years 2000-2008 which was some significantly bad wage stagnation. California was and is, as always, the exception in this practice. Post COVID, many states now pay nurses in keeping with the normal contract rates they originally left their staff jobs for. OT on staff is 1.5x but extra shifts beyond an FTE will often contain an extra $20-30/hr after OT is factored in, or a flat $200-500 per extra 12h shift. As such, many nurses who left for travel are back on staff and not traveling.
Even so, there were nurses who would not leave travel even though hospitals were offering better deals on the financial side, to be staff. More money, less movement sounds good, right?
Not for some. Burnout due to scheduling and lack of time off remains a problem for nursing staff. Meanwhile, travel contracts work like this: 13wks on, with roughly two weeks off in between. If a nurse opts to sign on for another 13wks at the same location, 1-2 weeks off is typically offered in between the old contract and the new. In addition, they can take Christmas off.
Less pay than staff, now, but a swath of nurses stick with travel regardless because they aren’t burning out. Travel nurses don’t typically burn out. Think about why. What would your own hourly work feel like on a 13wks on, 2wks off rotation?
Many people are going to and have to follow money, but this real life experiment has demonstrated how much less money people will take when they can to just not have to work every single week of their lives. There’s a lesson here that corporate America will likely never heed.
- FYI travel nursing and locum tenens were around before the pandemic and still happening after. Seasonality occurs in different regions due to snow birds (aging boomers with a vacation home) for the most part.
  Also travel is still going to pay more than a staff nurse when comparing a single area.
  
  Post pandemic the contracts profess to pay the same as staff but those contracts are taking the room/board stipend, blending it with the hourly rate, and presenting it all as hourly income, when the stipend isn’t something that should count against income when in fact, stipend is only allowable by the IRS in situations where living expenses are duplicated.
  In essence what these new contracts are doing is not acknowledging expense duplication, as if these nurses don’t already have a rent or mortgage, alongside all the household bills like renters insurance or electricity, that continue to be paid in tandem with a long term furnished rental in another state. And are they even accumulating retirement beyond an IRA?
  The 2 weeks off is also unpaid. The strangest expense detail is this. Income tax is paid to each state which is somehow legal under the contracted circumstances. The home state and the state worked.
  While the details are fascinating, that is not my point in bringing it up. I’m more interested in the work pattern. 13 wks on. 2 wks off. The nurses who talk about travel love it, even when the pay is lower than what staffers make either with the blended rate or after subtracting room/board stipends. As such, I think we need to look to the work pattern.

New bullshit jargon just dropped.

As a member of Gen Y, it's been interesting seeing younger generations take on habits I've been doing for years. A few years ago I took a couple weeks to take a road trip across the country, after quitting one job and acquiring a start date for a new one (to start after I returned.) I've been doing this because vacations in the US of 2 or more weeks are impossible to get in many jobs.
For the situation above, I had planned a vacation for the first job - I requested it nearly two months early. Then a few days before I was set to go (after I'd already booked a place to stay), my boss attempted to deny my time off. Thankfully, HR put their foot down and I was able to go, but it was the last straw for me. So when I got a new job, I planned out time to enjoy for myself before returning to the rat race.
Workers are human. We need a break sometimes. If companies aren't going to respect that basic human need, we're going to find ways to reclaim our time.

how dare you! cracks whip your glorious CEO deserves that bonus and you should be grateful for being a minute part of this occasion.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91357784/what-is-a-micro-retirement-inside-the-latest-gen-z-trend
- Wow their website is a nightmare on mobile
  
  Was very readable on IronFox. I also use uBlock Origin in medium mode.
  This is a very aggressive setup that will break some sites, but after a while of using it and changing uBlock's blocking on broken sites it's an amazing way to not suffer the BS websites on the internet.
  ETA: This applies to LibreWolf on PC as well.

🤨

I get six weeks paid time off every year, on top of pay for 10 national or state holidays, this amounts to eight weeks pto EVERY SINGLE YEAR!
Oh, also, unlimited sick days (though after 6 weeks the pay goes down to 60% and is then paid not by my employer but by my cheap, statutory, mandatory health insurance) and other social securities that have allowed me to spend TWO (non-consecutive) YEARS without a job and take care of my mental health.

I want to slap whoever wrote this.
- slap whoever demonised taking time of forcing a entire generation to invent new words for something necessary.
  I hate algospeak, but the real culprit isn't whoever came up with the term "grape" or "unilive" or"pewpew". it's the corporation censoring language.

I don't think it's just Gen-Z.
Here's former Manchester United and England footballer Gary Neville, telling us about his "mini-retirements"
Gary Neville - Mini-Retirements (youtube link)
Gary is 50 years old.

I think that is called unemployment, just saying…

LoL. The US always takes someone’s idea and makes it bigger 😂 As far as I remember it was a concept to disconnect from work every few months for two weeks, at least.
Different proportions 😉
A radical idea similar to 4 day workweek or, even better, 4 hours workweek.
But, then, a mid management would be redundant so there would be no ladder to climb.
I think corporations would be in trouble if there was no promise of “work hard today and tomorrow you’ll be in position to tell others to work hard”.

Pfffft... Gary Neville did it already.

These genZ people are a bunch of suckers, why would you just go for 2 weeks? Take some time off a month not at the office is good for you!
- Hello, non-USer

Wait what?! I'm leaving on my paid month long vacation, required by law, on wednesday and can not believe you guys call it micro retirement

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