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Comment by noodle | Hacker News Reader

better titles: "i had a bad vacation", "my mini-retirement misconception"

i appreciate this person's thoughts, they're very insightful. but to try and use his individual situation and experiences to represent the set of all mini-retirements is fallacious.

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This guy had vacations, he had a trip, but he did not travel. He just brought his "occidental" mental conception of living elsewhere, he didn't even seem to have really met and lived with other people.

i can agree with this, too.

I notice a few people using "guy" to refer to the writer here ... unless I'm missing something, I believe she is a woman (Tina).

Tina http://thinksimplenow.com/about is both passionate and keen.

What's with this trend of calling a vacation a "mini-retirement" anyway? Three months may be longer than average for a vacation, but lots of people have taken that sort of time out between jobs without needing to call it a "mini-retirement".

i think its a misconception (see what i did there?) about the concept. "mini-retirement" is supposed to refer to a longer period of time where you're taking a break from your primary career, but you have plans to go back. i'd define it as at least 6 months.

it doesn't have to involve travel, and you don't have to stop working or engaging yourself in projects. just like being actually retired.

/my $0.02, at least

I think it's part of our culture adapting from the idea of one career and a retirement at the end of it, to several, with breaks in between. The semantics are interesting: it probably would have been called a sabbatical 20 years ago.

it still can be referred to as that, except, in my experience, there's an understanding that with a sabbatical, you're arranging things so that you come back to the same job. i don't think thats necessarily the case with a mini-retirement.

semantics, i know.

That's a good explanation. I quite like the concept of calling a break between careers a mini-retirement. In this case, though, it doesn't seem to have been anything like that, but just a simple three month extended vacation.

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