Summer Vacation

Growing up, summer vacation just meant the end of school to me. It was intrinsically a good thing, because I got to sleep in and every day was like a Saturday. Ninety Saturdays in a row. Now that I don't really have a summer vacation anymore, I have come to realize what it really was.

When you are a kid, summer is the natural demarcation point of age. Birthdays are always an occasion, but we really measured time by the passing of summers. Each summer brought the end of one epoch, and every August brought the beginning of an entirely new one. Kids can reinvent themselves over the summer. Some come back completely different. I remember a guy that used to get straight A's who came back after our sophomore year with a mohawk and a new penchant for getting high before school. I knew another guy that had piercings, tattoos, and a penchant for pot that came back after one summer with a crew cut and a new goal to be a Navy Seal. I have no idea what happened to them to affect such a change, but I'm willing to bet it wouldn't have been possible without summer vacation.

I think kids live in two entirely artificial worlds. One of them is school, with all its strange social pressures and crises. The other is summer vacation. School is a rather lame artificial world, summer is artificial only in that 'real life' sadly doesn't resemble it at all. In school, you have this contrived responsibility to do your homework and pass your classes. During the summer, however, you suddenly have a responsibility vacuum. School has its own hierarchy and social norms, while during summer vacation you only see the close friends you make an effort to see. School makes you work towards external goals (those of the teachers), while summer forces you to set your own.

Now, I wouldn't say that most summer goals are too lofty. When I was 17, I saved all summer to buy a computer. Going back further, I'd bet my goals as a ten year old were probably more along the lines of finishing my road in the sandbox or adding to my tree fort in the woods behind my neighborhood. The point is, in the absence of external goals, kids create their own. They don't stop to think about whether the goal is profitable, or even possible, or any of the silly things grown ups consider before setting out on a project. They just decide to do it.

Somehow this changes when you grow up. You wake up one day and think to yourself: "I don't want to go to work." At first, this feels kind of like school again. Who wants to go to school most days? But when you get to that point in school, you make the last push to make it to the next vacation. The thing is, work is not like school. There is no summer vacation from work. No time to check out for 90 days in a row. Even if you could just take a break from a job, it wouldn't be like summer vacation as a kid. You'd still have to keep up the house, run errands, and worst of all, pay for stuff. If you haven't experienced it yet, taking an unpaid vacation doesn't have quite the same carefree quality as a worry-free summer does.

The worst part about this is that, without a summer vacation, there is no time to reinvent yourself. To reinvent yourself, you need a break from routine. This forces you to examine yourself (usually subconsciously) and figure out what to do. When you have a daily routine, time passes almost unconsciously, and if you change at all, it's to be more like those around you. Without a routine, you suddenly have to find something to fill the time, and that something usually leads to a personal change.

Personal reinvention aside, routine also affects your goals. When you spend five days out of seven working towards someone else's goals, it's hard to justify making more of your own. Suddenly you spend time analyzing whether an idea is 'worth the effort' before you start it, and sadly, this is where most ideas die. A kid doesn't analyze anything, they just do it. A grown up wonders if it will fit in.

The point to all of this rambling is two-fold. First, if you are a student now, don't replace one routine with another. I know for most students it seems prudent to get a summer job to save up money for the coming school year, but don't do it. This is your time to be creative, to figure out what your passion really is. You can't do that if you never form your own goals and instead work towards someone else's.

My freshman year in college I got what at the time was a great job. It was the spring of 2002, and the dot com bust was in full swing. Computer Science grads were coming out with diplomas and no jobs, so I counted myself lucky to get paid to program. Granted, the language sucked (ColdFusion), and the site I worked on was neither hip nor bleeding-edge by any means. But it was a job that paid $14/hr to write code when everyone thought my field was dead. I counted myself lucky.

Looking back now, I realize how unlucky I was. Sure, returning to that job each summer allowed me to graduate without any debt, and gave me a couple years experience on my resume right out of the gate. At the time, it seemed like all upside. The downside is simply that I robbed myself of all that creative time. Three months, once a year, to both reinvent myself and work on crazy projects without a care in the world.

So, if you are a student, don't get that summer job just to fill the summer. Get that dream internship in your field if your field needs internships, but if your field is like mine (computer science), then you don't. What you need is an idea, a case of coke, and a computer. What you need is to do something you are passionate about. If the summer job at Target makes you jump out of bed every morning in eager anticipation, then, by all means, work it. But if (more likely) you are doing it for the cash, then just don't.[1]

For the non-students out there: quit your job. It's that simple, really. If you don't wake up every morning and nearly forget to shower because you are so excited to get to work, then quit going. (Or try and get a three month sabbatical if you think they'd go for it.) If you made it this far in my essay, odds are that you aren't that happy with your job. You need a summer vacation. Worst case is at the end you find a new appreciation for your job and come back rejuvenated. Best case is you reinvent yourself and at the end find a new passion. Maybe you'll start working on an idea you have always wanted to 'get around to' but haven't. Maybe you'll find out that you'd rather be in field X instead of your current one. Maybe you'll just remodel your basement. The point is, you'll accomplish something and feel refreshed. This is the the great thing about summer vacation: by the end you are new again.

Granted, you'll have to plan a bit more carefully than a college kid does. You don't have the mom and dad safety net nor the access to cheap capital (student loans). You do, however, probably have other financial tools at your disposal. Home equity, if you own a home, is a cheap source of funds if you know you can repay it later. Simply saving up three months expenses is another way. Might as well put that fat paycheck to use on something besides new cars and suits. There are small business loans if you want to go that route, and credit cards always allow you to put off expenses for a few months. Bram Cohen wrote Bittorrent while living on no interest credit cards that he maxed out in succession. If you can reasonably pay them down before the no interest period ends, this is like a zero interest loan.[2] There is no free lunch, but there is no reason you can't eat two weeks worth of dessert upfront.

Summer vacation is important, and as soon as you don't have it, you stop changing. It needs to be long enough that you can't glide through it by goofing off (you need to get bored). It needs to be totally free of routine (again, you need to get bored). Most of all, you need enough money to get through it without focusing on the money part. A little planning ahead can get you all of this, and it is well worth it.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that summer vacation is a luxury for kids only, and if you are still in school and have it, don't waste it trying to work like a grown up. Go apply to Y Combinator or Google's Summer of Code instead. Spending years in an unchanging environment without a chance to remake yourself isn't healthy or natural, as much as cultural stigma tells us to the contrary. Do it for too long and you might never find time to grow as a person, work on that crazy idea, and chase that dream, whatever it may be. So here is to hoping you have a great summer vacation.

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Footnotes:

1. If you are wondering how to pay for all this free time and don't think your parents will spring for the idea of you not working, there are these great things called student loans that are just made to take advantage of. Everyone looks at student loans as the refuge of last resort, but I'd argue they are infinitely better than summer jobs. You get a chunk of money upfront without giving away any time in the present. It's like mortgaging your time in the future (when you trade your time for money and then use the money to pay it back). You get three months now to reinvent yourself and find a passion in exchange for some time spent paying it back later. It's a total win because the amount you borrow to live as a college kid is going to seem like peanuts by the time you get around to paying it back.

2. I got one the other day from Chase that was no interest for 18 months. The $2000 credit line will reasonably buy me two months of living, and who can't pay back $2000 in 18 months (live on it for two months, then dedicate a whopping 72 cents of every hour for the next 16 months to pay it back in time).