✍️ Thoughts on leaving a 9-5 job as someone who always found a lot of meaning in work. It's been a few months since I left my full-time job. I've worked for about a decade, had the savings and privilege, so told myself that was reason enough. Last time I took a few months off, I knew I’d eventually join a full-time job again. This time it feels different. The first thing to get used to was not seeing the salary message come in. There's something very comforting about watching a number show up which indirectly tells you that you're doing fine. On the flip side, not having a calendar is liberating. I spent the first few weeks waking up and figuring out on the go how I wanted to spend my time. I also started trying things I never got to do with a job, just to see. I finished some personal projects that had been sitting around. Helped founder friends with design, for fun more than money. Got curious about design outside screens, in physical spaces. Started working out every single day. Ran a little mango toast delivery in the city. Hosted many friends who stayed with us for months at home. Tried to give more of my time and energy to giving back, in whatever ways I could. What surprised me is how much of a job I never noticed I was doing just to get through a job. Commute, meetings, the gap between one thing and the next that you fill without thinking. You don't feel that structure while you're in it. And once it's gone, you start asking questions about things you never used to think twice about. Somewhere in all of this, I found myself trying to figure out how different people find purpose in life. If life doesn't come with a built-in meaning, how do you actually live? People have been answering that for a while now, and it mostly breaks into three camps. – Nihilism says there's no inherent meaning to life so just keep doing what comes your way. – Existentialism says there's no inherent meaning to life so build your own and take it seriously. – Absurdism says there's no inherent meaning to life and that's fine, so just do what you feel like doing today. I've spent most of my life as an existentialist without knowing the word for it. Pick a goal, care about it more than is reasonable, try to "win". That's probably what made me ambitious in the first place. Lately I can feel myself sliding toward absurdism, and it's a strange thing to watch happen to yourself. I'm going for a swim at 2pm, working when I actually feel like working, having long conversations with friends over breakfast, building things purely because I want to see them exist in the world and learning to make design content and putting it out there. Coming back to why I think this time is different, why I'm not in a hurry to go back to a 9-5. Right in the middle of all this, life tested it. One of the hottest startups in the world reached out about my work. I ended up travelling, meeting the team. It sounded like the perfect thing to do on paper – a few years ago, I would have wanted that job so badly I'd have talked myself into anything to get it. And yet, it didn't ignite me the way I expected. On paper, it checked every box but I was more excited by the possibility of continuing to make things on my own terms. I wondered if I was just avoiding structure again, or if something in me had actually changed. I'm at this newfound balance between existentialism giving me happiness and absurdism giving me peace. I still don't know how much of one I'll have to give up to keep the other. For now, I'm off to my 5pm pickleball game :)

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