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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

I can say from experience that every place I've worked at, the older workers (50 and up) have had the least sick days and leave.

If you have kids, that's a given - kids get sick, and so do you, and most get kids in their 20s and 30s...but it is curious that many senior workers have practically spotless records, compared to their younger peers.

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I’m an “older worker” and have taken exactly one half a day of sick time in the last 11 years. I’ll caveat by saying that during that time I have had the flexibility to work remote (fully remote the last 3 years) so when I had the occasional cold when I was in office, I would simply work from home to avoid spreading illness in the office.

Anecdata: I took an average of 1 sick day per year until I was 34, when my first child was born.

From then moment on (8y have passed), I hover around 7-12 days per year. Quite a change.

Kids are also much more likely to have life-threatening food allergies. I think you are implying it's a cultural shift (maybe not) but I wonder if the environment we've grown up in has had subtle developmental effects and made us unhealthy, somehow. I don't know about you, but I regularly just feel like shit for basically no reason, and will want to take a day off because of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

> I regularly just feel like shit for basically no reason, and will want to take a day off because of that.

I feel like I've seen a rise in this. I'm not sure if older generations sucked it up or if it's a new thing.

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