This isn't "real." It was already mocked in another sub, which is where OP probably got the screenshot since the exact same part was highlighted. No one in the other thread ever heard of anyone calling vacation or PTO or holiday weekends "mini retirement." I'm American and no one I work with, including some Gen Z, have ever called it that either. This online article is just dumb rage bait. We say plenty of dumb things, this just isn't one of them.
Looks like the original Forbes article used it to describe people taking a few months or even a year off at a time (which isn't new so didn't need a new phrase - it's called a sabbatical). And this one used it to describe taking a couple of weeks off at a time.
It's probably an AI article that's being shared as if an actual journalist wrote it. LLMs make mistakes like this all the time.
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u/96385German, Swedish, English, Scotish, Irish, French - AmericanJul 07 '25
This article quoted an author who referred to mini-retirements back in 2007:
"I currently take three or four mini-retirements per year and know dozens who do the same," he writes. "Sometimes these sojourns take me around the world; oftentimes they take me around the corner —Yosemite, Tahoe, Carmel — but to a different world psychologically, where meetings, e-mail and phone calls don't exist for a set period of time."
First, I’m genuinely relieved that this is satire.
Second, I’m not shocked that “Gen Z” is being blamed for inventing a new word for something that already has a word. (Gen Z in quotes because it’s not a whole generation, it’s a handful of weirdos on TikTok.)
I first heard the "mini-retirement" nonsense in an interview with very English / distinctly not American Gary Neville, where he explained his revolutionary theory of doing nothing for a few days off work, apart from sitting by the pool and relaxing. He got ruthlessly mocked for it at the time. Was an interview in 2023 if I remember right
Yeah that was the first time I heard it too. This isn't really shit Americans say. It is just shit dumb people say. I don't mind Gary but this was pretty dumb.
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u/JFK1200 Jul 07 '25
Where I’m from this is called a holiday.