Leisure Deprivation

In the same way that people can be deprived of sleep, nutrition, and companionship, they can also be deprived of leisure. American companies give two to three weeks of vacation per year because they want employees to be refreshed enough to do well at work but not so refreshed that they start having new ideas and prioritizing their family and personal business projects over their jobs.

When I’m sleep deprived, I start having fantasies about sleeping ten to twelve hours a day. I look forward to the weekends where I can sleep in and I wish they would last longer so I could have more time to myself. When I ate a questionable diet, I always felt hungry and had difficulty saying no to bad food choices. The truth is, when I get enough sleep and the right food, I never think about those until bedtime or mealtime. I noticed this is also true for leisure.

When I go for years at a time without more than a week or two of vacation each year, I start fantasizing about how great it would be not to have to work. I imagine sleeping in, watching movies, reading, and just doing my favorite leisure activities all day. I recently quit a job so I could take a few months off work, start my blog, and enjoy the holidays without having to work. After about four to six weeks of all my favorite leisure activities, I actually started feeling antsy and wanted to get back to a regular schedule of some kind of productive work. My time off was certainly enjoyable but it wasn’t as great as I’d imagined. Just as with eating, sleeping, and even sex, though those things are satisfying, they’re never as amazing as you imagine during periods when you’re deprived of them. I’d be willing to bet that you’d actually prefer a life where you do productive work on your own terms to a lifetime of vacation. I’m sure that if you’re fantasizing about leisure it’s because you’re “leisure-deprived”.

I have a friend who can walk to the beach from his house. I once asked him how often he goes to the beach and he said he only goes about a dozen times a year. I was surprised; I thought he’d go there a few times a week. He said because it’s so close by, he can go whenever he feels like. When I’ve worked jobs which gave me more vacation and more flexible hours, my increased leisure time acted like a relief valve when I needed it. If I’m getting the leisure I need to recharge as often as necessary, I actually enjoy working and work longer and more diligently when I’m at work.

Many countries in Europe legally mandate that employees get 30 or more paid vacation days per year. Employees in those countries have been measured to be just as productive or more as those in the US, per hour worked. Conversely, employees in Japan have been suffering from symptoms of severe overwork, called “karoshi”, which has caused death in many cases. Stultifying amounts of overtime in Japan haven’t proven the wrongheaded idea that more work usually equals more productivity.

A friend of mine, who was a successful statistician at the time, quit his job and took an entire year off to re-train himself at home to develop Android mobile applications. Aside from some overlapping computer programming skills, it was a complete career change. He couldn’t have successfully done this while working full time. He needed a complete break from his previous career. He’s been successfully programming Android apps for a couple of years now at multiple companies.

Occasionally, I need a long enough break from working to replenish my energy to the point where I begin to feel antsy again and actually want to go back to work. With this recent break, I needed down time to examine my successes and failures and reassess who I am and what I’m doing. I needed a lot of research time to learn about blogging and home-based businesses and to assemble all the necessary components. I needed to be unencumbered by work for long enough to allow myself to approach my ideas from all sides, multiple times, to get them right.

When I was busy working every day to pay the mortgage and support my family, I didn’t have the time to recharge and examine my life from a fresh perspective. I would take my two weeks or so of vacation, but these were usually spent with family during holidays or on summer vacation hurrying back and forth with very little true down time. I longed so much for a vacation where I could just stay home. Since I’m already twenty years into my career, a week or two off wouldn’t have been enough to recharge, reevaluate my life direction, and develop and start executing a new plan.

I enjoy working. I love helping other people and making their work lives easier and their businesses better. The drama of solving difficult programming problems doesn’t exist on vacation. I’m not stretched or challenged during my leisure time in the same way. My work is usually the most difficult and growth-stimulating activity I do. If I were to quit completely, I would have to replace it with something similarly challenging – like writing high-quality blog posts 🙂 – in order to continue my personal growth. For you to advance your personal development, a long vacation where you recharge and reinvent yourself might be just what the doctor ordered.