Dan, are you joking, complaining, bragging, or what? "I am such a failure at balancing my life that work has completely taken over at the risk of alienating my family." Is a family just a group of people who must be placated while you pursue more fullfulling activities? Then why have a family?

How sad.

This is one of the reasons I realized I wasn't cut out to be prof in a top-20 department. I actually have a very long list of things that interest me outside of the field, and while I'm serious about my work and my career, can't imagine it displacing those other interests entirely.

Not that I spend "vacations" sitting on a beach. I recently told a friend that I considered a vacation a failure if I wasn't mentally and phsyically exhausted when I got home. It's a wide wide world, with all sorts of history, culture, nature, etc. to see and experience. Give that up to read the latest issue of ISQ? Not on your life.

I have long thought there is a personality-type which tends to dedicate themselves to one topic or activity. You find these people everywhere, from baseball fans able to quote the most obscure batting average statistic from memory to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both of whom work because they enjoy it rather than out of any financial need.

I am pretty much the same as Drezner, I just love what I am doing. Does it mean I neglect my family or cannot enjoy a vacation? No.

Judging from the plethora of Blackberries (tm) at a long weekend bachelor party I recently attended, this ridiculousness goes way beyond academia. That's why I believe that the studies the 'found' that Americans have more leisure time than Europeans are hogwash. It's the very rare German who uses VPN to log into the office computer during his 4-5-6 weeks on Majorca .

(Of course, the 'go-away' bachelor party is another awful trend, but that's off-post).

In fairness to the Blackberry crowd at the bachelor party, I think that's a slightly different phenomenon. I doubt that those guys had families in the hotel that they were ignoring. The destination-bachelor-party-crowd is pretty young.

I don't think this is such a bad idea -- we actually did that this year, as we are starting dissertations and he's starting teaching in the fall... we didn't think we could afford to spend 2 weeks away, so we drove to Colorado and spent some non-reading days on the way out and back ---- as well as spending a week reading in a really pretty condo. We went out for mountain drives on the last two days -- but only after we'd accomplished a lot.