Majicman Notes

There’s something fractal about rest: we need it daily, weekly and yearly. If you can bear the cumulative expense and the travel time, frequent short breaks beat the occasional elongated vacation.

Reason one: holiday memories tend to depend not on how long the holiday was, but on the intensity of the experiences. What matters is not how long you went away, but just how exciting and different the most exciting and different moments were.

Reason two: a change of activity can be a spur to creativity. This need not be a long holiday; even an engaging hobby will do. Nobel Prize-winning scientists are much more likely to have serious arts and crafts hobbies than other scientists, who are in turn more likely to have serious hobbies than the rest of us.

Reason three for taking a short break: if we need rest to prevent exhaustion, a single, long vacation won’t do the trick. The recuperative effects of a vacation tend to wear off in just a few weeks. You can’t store up the benefits of a long holiday any more than you can sleep for 24 hours then stay awake and sharp for the rest of the week.

Tim Hartford

https://timharford.com/2019/09/should-we-take-a-few-long-holidays-or-lots-of-short-ones/