People who say a week vacation is too long are fucking nuts and programmed like sheep by American capitalism

And you forgot the re-entry mess you have to clean up when you return to work. I seldom took a vacation of less than four weeks, but my employer -- at that time, at least -- allowed us to bank vacation time and the nature of the job was such that some years there was no way I could take any vacation. What you outlined is absolutely true; in my case, I always returned to pretty much civil war between my staff and my boss, chaos, and in one case an absolute public disaster. Shorter vacation on my part would not have totally avoided any of that; he only needed a few hours. When people asked what my job was, I usually said "glue. I hold things together".

I survived in between with weekends away, unreachable. Long, three-day ones if I could manage the time off. Not thoroughly decompressing, relaxing, but let off enough steam to keep the boiler from exploding. We would throw a hibachi in the trunk with a picnic basket and cooler full of food, and go hide somewhere off the beaten track for a couple of nights.

They don’t want you seeing life in other countries.