I am a prof at a RG uni, STEM subject. I worked through to the 23rd to "catch up" before finally switching everything off. This was a long awaited break following the semester of hell, and no holidays last summer.
I opened the email yesterday and got totally overwhelmed by the amount of work hiding in my inbox. Ten years ago, I would have happily worked on pet projects during the break, but this has massively changed over the last 3 or 4 years. I cannot complain - my group publishes well, I have more than enough funding.
I just can't face going back. It could be burn out, or just falling out of love with the job and the workload, especially now that the nice parts have vanished (conferences, workshops). My uni has also done some dodgy financial moves that restricts us from spending any discretionary money toward CPD or conferences (unless from grants).
DH suggests that I just pack it in a retrain in sthg else. I don't like the idea of retraining. I am sitting on an academic job offer elsewhere (not UK) which i haven't actioned just because it would mean disrupting DH s career and DC10 and DC13 too much.