My memories of vacations are full of family stress. My parents are super controlling type As. I was lucky to get to travel abroad a lot with my family when I was young—not many vacations per se but lots of family and work trips-but it was stressful and sometimes traumatic.
A PhD program means in theory you could be working every waking hour and never get all your work done. A vacation sure sounds nice, but it would just stress me out thinking about how I should be working. The closest I get is occasionally watching a movie. At this point, I am unlikely to be able to go on a vacation for years, if ever. I’m not really counting on ever having any middle class extras like that. If the gods are with me, I will be doing a good amount of traveling abroad for work, and will get to enjoy myself at night and on weekends, but I’ll still be hustling in archives and libraries all day, eating 1–2 meals a day because funding is paltry for the humanities, etc.