Plausible Speculation
Remember what it was like to have a snow day as a kid? You thought you were going to have to go to school, but when you woke up, your parents had the TV on, listing the school districts that school was cancelled in for that day. Maybe you had a test that day, and you now got an extra day to study. Maybe you just wanted to play in the snow outside! Either way, snow days were generally a pretty universally positive experience. (I recognize some of you are from places that never got snow, and that’s terrible. Everyone deserves snow days!)
But as an adult, snow days are a lot worse. Maybe you’ll have to come into work anyways, or work from home, or maybe you’ll just be stressed that you have an important client coming in and “it was snowing” isn’t a great excuse. You never really get the same excited feeling that you would have as a kid. You can’t really play in the snow, so now you’re kind of just stuck at home. So even if you do get a “snow day,” it’s not the same.
Normal holidays and PTO replace some of this, and hopefully you do get some days off wherever you work. The difference between those and snow days is that they are planned days off. You might be excited for them, or maybe have some sort of trip planned, so planned days off could be a lot of fun! But your happiness or excitement is probably going to look more like a straight line upwards than a discontinuous jump. Those sorts of jumps are really exciting - it’s why people go to the casino in hopes of striking it rich, and don’t get the same sort of excitement from making a contribution to their 401k. Or why The Bachelor isn’t The Fairly Non-Committal Guy Who Will Wait An Appropriate Amount Of Time Before Proposing (granted, there may be other issues with that title). Or even why soccer announcers get a lot more excited about a goal than basketball announcers do about a team reaching 100 points. It’s a lot more fun when things (money, love, points) go up suddenly, rather than gradually. A snow day provides that sudden boost to happiness.
