Is this some weird american way of describing a vacation?

So like a vacation? I'm wondering why retirement is a good term for this. A sabbatical is already a break that's smaller than a retirement, and this is shorter than that. A 3 month gap between jobs is kinda just taking a break.

A label might help explain it on resumes if anyone is checking for gaps though of course.

Great idea! I have micro retirements every year for 30 days. My company calls it vacation, but micro retirement is a better term I like.

Even more than that, I have nano retirements every now and then. We call them holidays. What a lame term, I know.

We should really make a name for press and blogosphere legitimizing (by the virtue of mere coverage) all those silly trends that really just are a response to late-stage capitalism. "Analog bag" being the most recent example.

Anyone NOT doing this between jobs?

It's no revolutionary idea, but the comments here are dishonest when they compare a 3-month leave to standard european vacation.

I would say most middle class europeans take like 10-14 day long vacations. I sometimes travel for a month and that is already abnormal.

So just a vacation then?

Don't fall for this rebranding.

Here in the U.S., the idea of taking even a few weeks off between jobs as a way to refresh oneself is a real luxury because of the way health insurance is tied to employment.

I have wanted to do this each time I've left a job, but a lapse in health insurance would have been too risky for my family, and COBRA is too expensive to be anything other than an option of last resort. So, the most time I've had between jobs over the past 25 years has been a couple of days.

If health care were not so tightly tied to one's employer, I could see people saving up and taking a few months off every 3-5 years as they change jobs. For me, a summer off with my kids would be a tremendous joy. But I don't think I'd be able to afford it until I retire, and by then my kids will be all grown up.

Stefan Sagmeister talks about taking 5 years of your retirement and interspersing them into your working years in this great talk, pertinent moments at 01:30-02:00:

https://youtu.be/MNuOmTQdFjA?t=79&is=0GYzcLwy9fhQWqHR

I did this in the summer of 2019. My girlfriend and I lived in her Subaru for the summer, and drove across the country visiting a bunch of national parks.

Writeup here: https://cushychicken.github.io/leave-of-absence/

We had a ton of fun doing it. I loved it. A lot of why I loved it was because it reaffirmed how much I love my work.

I want to do something similar in my late 30s / early 40s, now that my girlfriend is now my wife, and we're starting a family together.

Can anyone share their experience with such 1+ month "vacations", while having a family with wife and 2+ kids?

It's cool to read about author's experiences with travelling and making new friends abroad, but that's only possible if you live alone with no dependent people. I know if I took such vacation today, all the 8h of time gained daily would be just sucked out by my kids and everyone around.

Retirements imply a regular payment called a pension, either from the government or from a private fund that you contribute to during employment years. It doesn't seem to be the case with the author.

I'm currently weighing up a sabbatical (3 months), for a bunch of reasons.

A vacation (or holiday, or PTO, or whatever you call it locally), is great, but normally too short to properly reset. I often come back thinking "I could do with another couple of those right now". The main purpose for those for me is to travel and get away from home for a week or two and experience new things.

What I'm more excited about is taking a few months to basically do very little. Read, walk, no alarms in the morning, no Sunday night anxiety, no wishing it was Friday. Just wake up, do what feels right, don't work, don't do anything.

I'm in my late 40s, I have chronic health issues, and have symptoms of burn out, so even this might feel "too short", but I think it's such a valuable experiment to try, it's got to be done.

I am involuntarily in a mini retirement. The very previous job turned out to be a disaster. I have been enjoying this opportunity by traveling a lot with my partner, exercising a lot more, meeting old friends, visiting family, playing unfinished games, and reading novels a lot. It’s been great. But there is always a certain pressure back in my mind for my career forward. I wonder if it’s become more or less common to hop between jobs every two to three years. I cannot see myself staying in a company for a decade long. Maybe it’s just because I was always working for startups, rather intense environments.