This resonates with my own experience: "Although most people look forward to vacations and days off, most successful people I know dread them."—working more hours was a socially acceptable route to not dealing with my own sh*t.
Just like an alcoholic uses booze to avoid the problems they face in the rest of life I use work to avoid problems in real life. I don't do it because I am so hard working, or because I really love what I do, its because when I sit down and can stare at code for a couple hours I don't have to worry about the other things going on in life, my brain gets filled with this little world which I know I can control by issuing magic spells that behave appropriately.
It means I'm not thinking about my sister's descent into alcoholism, I don't have to worry about my bipolar sister in law, I don't have to face the guilt I feel about not spending enough time with my kid.
I'm trying to combat that, I'm trying to not use work as an excuse to avoid situations that cause social anxiety, I'm trying not to shirk my household responsibilities by volunteering for extra work that is urgent. But the problem is that I've built up an expectation of several years of what people can expect from me, now I am trying to balance and I can't because I've got to the point where I have so much responsibility it requires that output, it's hard, and I am trying to keep things in balance, but by God it gets so hard sometimes....
So my holidays are now, just another form of work. I literally cant remember the last time I've had a "holiday" where I just unwound and was decadently lazy for the whole time. I work, I go home and work. I book time off under the guise of holidays but really I work on other work.
I kid and say "this is the way" but really I suspect it might not be healthy.
I have no plans to ever retire.
I selected a college specifically to prepare for the kind of things I wanted to do as a career, and selected classes in the service of that. I once told my dad that I was never bored for a moment in college.
Vacations dull pretty quickly.
Lying around doing nothing is my notion of hell.
Maybe I'll take a look at D now :)
Do you have any resources you'd suggest to someone (who, btw, doesn't have a systems programming background -- but is curious to learn!)
The only thing I can really suggest is get one of those tomes on Linux systems programming.