Retirement and Vacations

While on vacation in the Pacific Northwest last week, I learned something new about being retired: When you’re retired, you can’t take a vacation. A vacation is, by definition, a break in time and often place from obligations of work or school, a vacating of occupational or educational responsibilities. Most jobs offer a certain number of “vacation days” per year (paid, if you’re lucky). And for students, there is summer vacation, winter (or Christmas) vacation, and Spring Break. But for us retirees there are no obligations on our time to take a vacation from. I suppose you could say we are on perpetual vacation, but that’s just playing cute with words. The concept of retirement is a perpetual departure from work. A vacation, on the other hand, implies – or demands – a return to work or school at some point. Retirement is a step up from vacation on the ladder of work aversion. To consider it a “perpetual vacation” would be to diminish its accomplishment – a full-blown split from responsibility, earned through years of toiling in whatever mine one toils in. For us retirees, a vacation is an occasional bone thrown to laborers as a promise to what the future might be like. For us, that future is here. We don’t take vacations anymore. We take trips. Or we just lie on the couch, drinking beer and watching sports on TV. We’ve earned it.