An Indian investment professional’s conversation with a retired Swiss corporate lawyer in Vietnam has sparked a discussion around how differently working hours, holidays and leisure can be viewed across countries.The conversation started when an Indian investment professional, Manuraaj Garg, was travelling in Vietnam with his wife. There, the couple met an older Swiss couple in the lobby of their hotel in Hanoi. Garg initially assumed the couple were in their mid-40s. During their conversation, he learnt they were both in their late 60s and had travelled to Asia around 15 or 16 times.The conversation took another turn when the Swiss man spoke about his career. He had worked as a corporate lawyer in Germany and retired at 55. Garg said the man described 55 as “quite late”.He then explained what he considered a demanding working life. “Very hectic, most days. Seven to nine hours of work. Some days, I was working even past 5 PM. I could only manage golf once a week. Gym three times. Barely seven hours of sleep,” the man told him, according to Garg’s LinkedIn post.For Garg, the description was striking because the same routine could sound quite different to an Indian professional.“I kept a straight face. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that in India, this hectic, exhausting life he was apologising for – we call it work-life balance,” Garg wrote.“We put it on job posters. People switch companies hoping for it.”
The holiday that lasted four nights
The contrast became clearer when the Swiss man asked Garg how long he and his wife were staying in Vietnam. Garg did not tell him the truth. “‘Three weeks,’ I lied. In half shame. It was four nights. I had a job to get back to,” he wrote.The Swiss retiree’s response surprised him. “‘Oh, that’s a pretty short break,’ he said. ‘Make the most of it.’” For Garg, four nights had already been a significant break from work. The Swiss man, however, considered even three weeks to be a short holiday.Garg said the exchange stayed with him after he left Vietnam.“Because four nights was the truth, and the truth was embarrassing – that I’d flown 3,000 km for a break shorter than his morning routine,” he wrote.The difference was not simply about the number of days available for travel. Garg began thinking about what the Swiss man’s working life had looked like and what had changed after retirement.According to Garg, the man said he had doubled the time he spent playing golf and going to the gym after retiring. He also slept more and travelled for around four months every year.
‘The gap between us wasn’t money’
The encounter led Garg to question whether the difference he had noticed could simply be explained by income. “The gap between us wasn’t money. I’ve been trying to name what it actually was,” he wrote. He eventually described it as a “geographical dividend”.“Economists should have a term for this. I call it the geographical dividend: the invisible income some countries pay their people – unhurried time, working systems, and evenings that actually end. You don’t earn it. You’re born into it, or you’re not,” Garg wrote.Garg also compared the retired man’s lifestyle with that of some wealthy people he knew in India.“The uncle wasn’t richer than the millionaires I know in Delhi and Bombay,” he wrote. “He’d just been collecting this dividend his whole life, on top of his salary.”The phrase Garg used was his own description of the experience, rather than an established economic measure. His point was that income alone does not capture the amount of personal time a worker has during a career.
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A different definition of a ‘hectic’ job
The conversation also highlighted the importance of context when discussing working hours.For the Swiss retiree, working seven to nine hours a day, sometimes beyond 5 pm, while still finding time for golf, the gym and around seven hours of sleep, had been a “very hectic” career.For Garg, that description represented something closer to the work-life balance many Indian professionals seek.The difference became particularly apparent in the way the two men viewed holidays. Garg had travelled around 3,000 km for a four-night break and felt uncomfortable admitting how short it was. The retired Swiss man was travelling extensively after retirement and considered three weeks away relatively brief.Garg’s reflection was ultimately about what remains outside working hours.He wrote that the Swiss man had spent his working years earning a salary while also having access to what he called an “invisible income” – time for leisure, exercise, holidays and evenings away from work.“That dividend was never on sale,” Garg wrote.His post has since drawn attention online, with readers debating whether the difference he described reflects workplace culture, economic conditions, job security, or simply individual circumstances.For Garg, however, the moment that stayed with him was much simpler: a four-night holiday had felt too short to admit to a stranger, while the same stranger considered three weeks “a pretty short break”.