When I returned to campus after the vacation, a quiet thought stayed with me much longer than I expected.
This might be the last vacation that feels like this.
Not the last break ever, perhaps, but the last long stretch of time where rest is assumed, uninterrupted, and not negotiated. In the future, there may be holidays, weekends, or leaves carefully planned around responsibilities. But a vacation that simply exists without justification already feels fragile.
This realization did not arrive with panic. It arrived gently, almost matter-of-factly. Growing up often means learning that time slowly stops belonging to you. It gets divided, measured, approved, and accounted for. Rest becomes something you earn rather than something you inhabit.
And once you notice this shift, it is difficult to ignore.
Thinking about this also made me aware of how relative the idea of a vacation really is. For many of us, a break marks a pause from work or study. It assumes that there is something to step away from and something to return to. But there are people for whom this pause never existed to begin with. People who began working early, not as a choice or phase, but as necessity. For them, childhood itself was structured around labour.
This is where the thought becomes heavier. In conversations about hard work and perseverance, we often celebrate struggle in abstract terms. We admire stories of people who “worked their way up,”. Of those who sacrificed comfort for stability. But what is less visible, is how often that work dissolves quietly into the system. Long hours, physical effort, and emotional exhaustion rarely translate into lasting security for those situated in the lower strata of society. Their labour sustains the system, yet leaves little trace of itself in their own lives.
What is striking is how normal this arrangement has become. Entire lives are spent working without the promise of rest that is meaningful or restorative. Even when work leads to a slightly more comfortable living, it is often precarious; easily undone by illness, inflation, or circumstance. The system absorbs effort efficiently, but returns very little certainty.
From this perspective, the idea of a vacation begins to look less like a personal experience and more like a social privilege. It depends not just on individual effort, but on structural positioning; on class, access, and inherited stability. Some people worry about this being their last long vacation. Others never had one to remember in the first place.
This is not meant to induce guilt, nor to romanticise hardship. It is simply an acknowledgement. A recognition that time, like rest, is unevenly distributed. While some of us learn to say goodbye to vacations gradually, others were never introduced to them at all.
Even though this realization does not demand action or resolution, it asks to be noticed. Perhaps that, too, is a form of reflection; to sit with the discomfort of knowing that not everyone’s work leads to rest, and not all effort is allowed to become something lasting.
Edited by lakshmi Yazhini | Design by Surabhi Chhikara
Article 19 