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.
Yes, that is the same thing as
doing your job/acting your wage
Except “doing your job” doesn’t capture that it’s a deliberate change in how you perform at your job, and “acting your wage” is a newfangled way of saying the long established term, with its on Wikipedia page, “Work to Rule”.
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”?
Not only was there drama people couldn’t talk about the beouf they’d gotten into without starting it up again
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.
yawning is a femto retirement
We don’t pay you to have a functional human biology, go back to work
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’re wrong. NObOdY wAnT WokR anYmORe
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 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.
Is the original satire? I know Americans are obsessed with presentism on the job, but even they understand the concept of a vacation?
What the fuck, it isn’t satire? And other sites are writing articles on it?
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.
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.
5 weeks
Is this why you guys won’t join the EU, because you’ll be forced to get humane amounts of leave instead of the pittance you somehow survive on? :P
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.
No, it is pretty standard European fare.
Yeah, well… Not being founded by insane protochristofascists probably helps?
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.
Have you considered giving all that profit to one bald man, though? Think of what you’re missing out on! 🚀
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?
The needs of the 0.1% outweigh the needs of the peasants.
Bribery.
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
Agreed.
The way I think it should be is:
- mandatory 25 days of vacation, plus statutory holidays
- mandatory vacation is subtracted from any performance targets (i.e. it is accounted for in business planning and not offloaded to the employee)
- vacation beyond that is unlimited, but may impact your performance
- major anniversary events within the company grant paid leave of absences
To the last point - I don’t recall which company it was - I have seen one where after a certain period of service your granted a 3 or 6 month leave of absence to go do something else. Travel the world, get really deep into Japanese joinery, or build a new version of DNS. I think that’s something that is healthy for humans.
That sounds so nice, especially as someone whose career encourages cycling of effort levels in its nature
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
Typical AI sludge, complete alien nonsense spouted confidently.
Yep that was my first thought too. Gotta be AI written because it makes zero sense.
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.
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.
You mean truthiness?
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
Skipping lunch is now “intermittent fasting”.
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I mean, technically it is
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.
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.
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.
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.
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+
1-2 weeks every 12 to 18 months? what is this, time off in Auschwitz?
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










