America does not guarantee time off. How much time you get off is ENTIRELY up to your employer.

Which sucks, because while my employer is VERY generous, my wife's is not. So, realistically, we can't go anywhere or do anything because she's not allowed.

Example:

July 4th Holiday:

My office is shutting down 7/1 to 7/5. Counting weekends, I have 9 days off in a row.

My wife? July 4th. A Thursday. They aren't even decent enough to make it a Thursday/Friday so she can have 4 days off in a row.

So while I have the opportunity and the means to go do something nice, get out of town, travel, do SOMETHING, my wife, at best, has Saturday/Sunday. That's it.

Do you know how hard it is to do something nice when you only have 2 days off and part of that has to be spent travelling there and back?

She would LOVE to see Washington D.C., we could go, see maybe one place (Library of Congress) then have to pack up and head back home.

What's the point? New Orleans? Hawaii? Yeah, no.

The last time we did anything, it was for her birthday and she had to ask for an extra day off 3 months ahead of time so we could do a Friday-Saturday-Sunday thing.

My entire life has offered two options - time or money

Never both

In this phase, I've been making good money, but it's at the cost of working twelve to fifteen hours a day six to seven days a week for half the year, going down to a meager forty five to fifty hours for the other six months with no overtime.

Then I've got to be careful in making comments that I've got a few pennies saved because it makes other Lemmy users think I'm all bougie or whatever word it is that the kids use these days.

The reason I've saved money is that I have no time to spend it. My entire existence is either working or preparing to go to work via laundry/groceries/cooking. (Leaving the office for lunch is a mortal sin, so I bring my own daily and eat at my desk, never a lunch break)

I'll look at the transactions in my bank account and I'm surprised that I live on about a hundred and thirty dollars a week because of this. (This doesn't include housing expense)

It's unprecedented in my company, but I'm about to negotiate more time off in lieu of raise this next upcoming cycle.

I'm so

Fucking

Existentially

Tired

And no I can't just "get another job". There are no greener pastures, especially since I've crossed into the dreaded "in my fifties" zone

Gee, I wonder of there’s a correlation between those two things…

I just took a vacation. It was so stressful. I prefer to relax by going into work and giving it my all for Amazon®. I get so relaxed I don't even need an Amazon-approved Restroom Time Theft™. I've even stopped going home most evenings and just working until I fall asleep at my Amazon Life/Work Cubicle™

So much of world money flow for US... For what? No free time, bad health system... Burgers? World is broken.

Wow, so much freedom.

US average PTO (paid time off, not vacation; that is for ANY time off while maintaining income. Sick? PTO.) is what, 2-3 weeks a year at best?

Plus it's incentivised to not use it, as some states require unused PTO be paid to the employee if they leave for another job (which is the only real way to get a raise or bonus); which is why some companies also switch to "unlimited time off", as you can't pay out infinity and you can just not approve the time off.

None of that even touches the OTHER problem:

we're

fucking

BROKE

My parents weren't super wealthy or anything. We were middle class. My dad was a professor, my mom was a psychotherapist (actually, she was in grad school for that for some of my childhood). We took vacations. We went to Italy, we went to the UK, we went around the country, trips to Arizona, Colorado, Washington D.C.

We try to take my daughter on vacations, but we can barely afford to travel within the U.S. and even there, it's probably only going to be a couple of days just because of hotel costs. We live in Indiana, but my daughter was born in L.A. 14 years ago. We moved away when she was 2 and she's wanted to go back and see where she was born for years, but we can't afford it.

I feel very lucky. I work in education so i get nice breaks. Pay is less than in the regular world, but I'm old and at this point I'd rather have the time than the $. My husband gets 5 weeks but usually only takes 3 so we can cash out one or two weeks in December.