Goodbye, job; hello, world
tl;dr: This week will be my last week as a full-time corporate software engineer for a while. I’ll be taking a year-long break to explore music, sound design, audio engineering and freelance coding, and to see more of the US.
This last year has been pretty tough. Somewhere along the line my career morphed from being a fairly creative endeavour that was stimulating and rewarding in its own right, to the thing that is eating up all the time that could be spent doing the things that bring deeper meaning, joy, and fulfillment to my life.
Quitting a secure, well-paying, full-time job seems like a totally bonkers thing to do. Luckily, a number of friends have made this jump, and talking this through with others who share this experience really helped to reduce the level of abject terror involved in even thinking about this. After a couple more months of introspection (and trying it out with some extended unpaid leave) it became clear that not only is this something that I could do, but I am in a narrow window of time that is probably the best possible moment to do it.
So this Friday, I’ll be handing in my badge and my laptop and embarking on a year-long journey to explore new things. At this point, I’m not remotely sure where this journey will take me, but the themes I want to cover include travel, making and writing music, getting more involved in non-profit arts organizations, hacking on and finishing this ever-growing list of side projects, and cultivating stronger personal relationships.
One important thing I realized during my shorter sabbatical, was that telling other people what you want to do greatly increases the chances of actually doing it. And so, here we are: I look forward to sharing this journey with you.
