I quit my job 8 weeks ago.

What I've learned so far.

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“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.” - Jim Carrey

8 weeks ago, I quit my job.

With the 90 min one-way commute 3-5 days a week and since commute being a time & energy-killer was one of my lessons from 2023, I chose to quit my job and start a sabbatical.

The following are the stages of mind I’ve gone thru over the past 8 weeks.

Freedom

Initially, I wake up in the morning after I quit and my mind, bracing for the pull of responsibility, tenses but….. there’s nothing.

No Slack messages.

No early morning standup.

No bumper-to-bumper traffic.

No manager to check in with.

No deliverables.

Huh. That’s odd. There’s no work…But I’ve always had work. This is weird.

My mind relaxes slowly at first, then all at once. Some underlying tension that was taking up room is set free.

What was once a 8 hour workday with 1.5 hr commute on both sides is now an 11hr gaping hole in my day.

Thanks to my relatively frugal lifestyle & savings , finances are taken of for the forseeable future, so I know I’m not going to be put out on the street and can get a coffee from the place across the street without stressing.

I begin exploring my interests; starting some personal training to focus on my health, experimenting with diet & energy levels, meditating in the mornings, writing more frequently, dance, etc.

And slowly, the thoughts of work red-shift into oblivion. I no longer wonder about that project or task or deliverable. Or what my colleagues are working on or the weekly upcoming team sync or that deadline or that bug or whatever it was. Work fades to be this distant thing I once did.

But one question comes into sharper focus: “What do I do with all this time and energy?”

The Void

Without any financial obligations, any structure, I’m simply free-floating; an untethered astronaut.

Friends continue going about their lives, commuting, working, social hangs and dinners. I join in for some of the fun but the 9-to-5 doesn’t really apply to me; I’m out of the current of daily life.

As I stare at the cars lined up bumper-to-bumper down Fell Street, the same line I sat in listening to podcasts to numb myself to the commute, I ask myself, “Why am I here in SF?”

I could be Bali, hiking Macchu Picchu, sitting on the beaches of Thailand right now if I wanted to. It’s only a flight away and I have the cash.

I have endless optionality; the world is my oyster! But it doesn’t feel real.

When you can do everything, you can do nothing.

The gaping 11hr block in my schedule becomes a black hole and I’m pulled into it, going beyond the event horizon.

Bikeshedding

Imagine you task committee to design a nuclear reactor compound. After a few weeks, when you check in on them, what are they arguing about?

The color and size of the bike shed.

And so, the little things become the big things; small adminstrative tasks explode in importance but also in perceived difficulty.

Doctor’s appt? Hmmm, let me search and find a doctor. Cue to 3 hours later, I am intimately aware of the availability of health insurance plans on Covered California and have yet to find a primary care provider.

Increasing protein intake in my meals? Let me run the calculations on this. 2 hours later, I can tell you what exercises to do to prevent “nerd neck” but have no idea what I’m making for dinner tonight.

Shit.

Getting things done moves at the pace of molasses.

Admin tasks alone are not the purpose of living; We go to the gym and shop groceries to be healthy but a full life is not comprised of these things alone.

To live a fuller life, we have to have something that pulls us out of bed in the morning.

Something that all these admin tasks orbit around.

A dream.

To Dream Again

As children, dreaming is constant. Imaginary friends, places and storylines exist entangled within the world and we have difficulty separating our dreams from reality.

But the world does not reward dreams; it rewards results. And specifically from kindergarden to college, it’s grades.

We optimize ourselves for grades because the feedback loops guide us to. Once you enter the corporate world, it’s deliverables and career progressions.

But when you narrow down your focus so intensely on these feedback loops, we begin to believe that this little, microscopic world of grades, careers is the entirety of the world.

We forget to dream. We forget to look up and see the many tangled paths of opportunities that are all around us.

People running for office on local housing reform, fascinating emerging counter culture media publications, and limited print zines.

All existing off the beaten path.

It’s hard to believe that what you’re seeing is real, but slowly, you realize that you actually can reach out, participate & even contribute to these if you want to.

And in doing so, you see that there are people in the world who actively pursue their dreams, no matter how silly, with intentionality and seriousness.

And when you see others pursue dreams, a part of you tugs to dream again.

Mind Expansion

Here you have two choices.

You can ignore this tug to dream. You can accept the world as it is and live there, ignoring the vast world before you. But, I’ve found that people who do so, tend to live less interesting lives.

I’m not eager to join such a cohort.

The other is to accept the vastness of the world and ramp up your own internal fire. To recognize that there exists great work in the world and that your purpose is to find work, paid or otherwise, worth contributing to & that right now is a great opportunity to find such work.

Therefore, it’s not about working a 9-to-5 & in the office vs. sipping Tahitis on a beach. It’s about meaningful work vs. unmeaningful work.

Meaningful work is something that lights you up, that enlivens you. The thing that you can’t stop talking about or stay up late nights working on.Those pursuits may not be feasible to generate revenue in the imminent future or ever!

Generating economic value is not the point.

You can be going to work and doing something meaningful in your day job that you love. Your job can be the most important thing in your life and something you pour your energy into 24/7. There’s plenty of founders who feel that way and that’s perfectly fine.

And you can be going to work and work may be just a paycheck that enables you to work on meaningful pursuits outside of work. It could be a blog, a magazine you contribute to, a political campaign you volunteer for, that one anime series you post about online; whatever.

As long as it puts the fire in your bones.

And there’s a few things that point to meaningful work:

1. People experience your work. We’re social creatures and it’s a bit foolish to believe we can all chart our own course in life while ignoring others. One of the greatest joys in life is seeing the thing you love resonate in others.

2. Centered around your interests. We live short lives. 80 years is about what you can expect, 60 years in good health. I’m close to halfway of my healthy years in a few years and so it really bears asking “Am I going to live for what others are expecting of me or for what I’m up to?” Life’s too short to not do the things you love.

3. Contributes to the world. Not everything we have to do has to be on the civilization-wide scale. No one will likely remember us in a few thousand years, our families included. And that’s OK. Something as simple as helping others figure out how to quit their job or encouraging people to travel more when they are young (both things I’ve done :)) are a public service in and of themselves.

The Starved Explorer

No one could have predicted in 2019 that Covid-19 would strike and the world would grind to a halt. Or that Russia would invade Ukraine in 2022. Or the Israel-Gaza conflict.

The most significant events of the past twenty years have caught the whole world blindsided.

If there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that uncertainity is here to remain.

Rather than attempting to figure out every approaching danger and prepare for every eventual outcome, the better approach is to handle tail-end risks and cultivate yourself to be someone who can weather any storm.

But for people who are used to fitting into a neat role, clear instructions and a directed goal, the idea of exploring, uncertainity, adventure and agency is scary. There are times, when I too am unsure of my future and I really don’t know where I’m heading with this sabbatical.

But over the past 8 weeks, I’ve cultivated a greater strength in my own capabilities to weather any storms come my way. I trust that as long as I pursue my interests, cultivate my abilities and focus on putting myself out there, something will emerge as a consequence.

So, if you have anything you’re working on that you think is cool, share it!

My DMs are open :).

Until next time,

-Kiran

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Kiran’s Gems 💎

• “On my way to work, I’d regularly see families wealthy enough to afford cars living in partially collapsed brick buildings, the cross-section of life inside a vivid reminder of the failures of the city’s urban design.” - A data driven look into Mumbai’s failure to properly house 25 million people.

•  "The toll of maintaining the facade was utterly exhausting. The games, the persona, and the mental gymnastics he had to perform on the sales floor made him resent the job. So he retreated to being silly, and goofing off, and disconnecting as a way to cope. As it turned out, he resented the lengths at which he had to go to be so damn charismatic." Zac Solomon’s experience with his first mentor. 

• Read Valve Software (creators of Steam)’s Employee Handbook to see how they function with a flat hierarchy (i.e. no managers!); not too sure how well this works in practice.