Six Months into a Career Break, Boredom Hasn’t Arrived Yet
Half a year ago, I quit my job and started a career break. Between travel, self-improvement, volunteering, and relaxation, I’m having a great time. I’m still undecided about what kind of work I’ll do next, and about how long this break will be.
During the first half of this year, I’ve had a mixture of warm-weather trips, nostalgia trips, and trips to new places. During the winter, I went to Kauai for the first time in over a decade, to San Diego for the first time since 1986, to Palm Springs for the first time, to Pittsburgh for the first time since COVID, to Vancouver Island, and to Osaka, my first Japan trip since 2018. By the end of June, I will have been to Virginia, to meet a couple of friends who I’ve known since our IRC days in the late 1990s but who I’ve never met in person, and to Washington’s Methow Valley. More trips are coming up in the second half of this year, too. During these trips, I’ve been doing a mixture of exploration, meeting up with people I haven’t seen in anywhere from a few months to 20-plus years, and introspection.
Despite all this movement, I remain planted in Seattle, my home of just over 19 years — a longer span than anywhere else, including my first 18-plus years when I grew up in New York. I keep planning trips as one- to two-week vacations, with the strong intention to come back to Seattle when I’m done. I have a home in a walkable, bikeable, livable neighborhood. I have friends and family who live nearby. I’ve been able to dedicate more time to local volunteer causes, without business meetings or conflicts of interest to get in the way of housing, transit, and walking advocacy. The closest thing I’ve had to a full workday involved a 6:30 AM shift with a local volunteer group, handing out coffee, doughnuts, and swag to bike commuters, cycling 9 miles to an afternoon baseball game, then cycling to the group’s afternoon happy hour. I’ve also been able to travel with a few volunteers to Pike Place Market to advocate for the market to be more pedestrian-friendly, which has since been tested with great positive impact for visitors on foot.
As the tech industry continues to lay off workers, leans into artificial intelligence as a substitute or augmentation for human work, and deals with political challenges, I haven’t spent much of my first 6 months doing technical work. I typically travel with my phone and an iPad. The closest I’ve come to software development work is some light revision to a few silly Discord bots that I’ve deployed on a small social server. I’ve been reading books like Abundance and The Tyranny of Merit to try to make sense of the present and future of U.S. politics. I also picked up How to Retire, even though I still reject the “R-word” myself, to better understand how professionals see the financial and emotional challenges of life without work. Aside from Pokémon Go and slow-paced online chess games, I haven’t been playing many video games during this break. I still get recruiter mail from time to time, and I’m open to picking up a new job, if something really compelling comes up.
I’m still staying physically active with a mixture of walking, biking, and one-hour workout classes at a local gym. I’m keeping my brain active with language learning, word games, and regular meetups with friends and fellow volunteers. I’m also continuing to talk with a therapist on a regular basis, which helps me deal with the vastly increased time that I’ve spent thinking about my feelings and emotions during this break. I’m very fortunate to be able to spend this time healing and recovering from both the accumulated stress of a two-decade software career and the events of this decade to date. Other people who have taken breaks have been very positive and open about their experiences; I’d be happy to talk with anyone considering a break of their own.