I’ve been (pretty much) jobless and directionless for the past few weeks, and it’s an interestingly new way of living.
Before I really analyse it, let me take you through my day. I go to sleep without any alarm, thinking about something as random as being dropped in the Amazon rainforest and how I would survive. Next, I wake up, absolutely without a purpose. I don’t think I have any purpose in life as of now, at least not yet, except maybe just living a healthy day. I make my coffee and head to the balcony. Apparently the sun is supposed to charge me up, so I just pretend to feel my body charging for a good one hour while the caffeine charges me further. Next, I find my hard copy of “The Three-Body Problem” and deeply immerse myself in it for the next 3-4 hours until it’s time to go to the gym.
Another chug of coffee, and then I go to the gym and just completely kill the workout, already excited for the upcoming table tennis session. Followed by that is 2-3 straight hours of hard table tennis practice and matches. Once that’s done, I drop by a chai shop with friends. Then back home for a hot shower, body shivering from the past 3-4 hours of physical work. Then I catch up on Hacker News, as the US has just woken up, and take notes through a custom-built personal assistant (Trong) at my fingertips. Some ideas, some thoughts, and a check on whether I have a “take” on something. If I do, I write it down. Sometimes I find a new feature gap in Trong and vibe code the feature quickly. Feel good about it, take my novel and head to bed.
That’s pretty much the day - the coffee, gym, table tennis and goodnight novel are the only structure - everything in the middle is flexible.
As pointless as it sounds, it’s been quite fun. Of course this is not how I plan to live for the rest of my life, but these 3-4 months were meant to be pointless, to just follow curiosity and listen to the inner voice, if at all it has something to say.
Over these past few weeks, some emotions and patterns have been showing up quite regularly.
Control
To start with, there’s a sense of being in control of things. I own my mornings, my evenings and my nights, which has a deep sense of empowerment to it, as I am controlling my own time - the single most important unit of life, especially in the peak years of life. This has somewhat been fuelling some confidence, as “I can do what I want”, quite literally. I have always been a control freak - as bad as it sounds - I always like to reach a state of control and clarity, and if things are out of control, I like to do everything in my power to know and understand what is going on, if not decide it. For the most part, the most rewarding part of this so-called “retirement” has been this feeling of control. Coming from a job where I needed a hundred approvals and a hundred alignment meetings before I could even think of “trying” something, it’s quite liberating and completely gives a feeling of “breaking the chains” and “burning ships”.
Uncertainty
Secondly, there’s uncertainty about the future. As I wrote in my last blog post, I have always felt like I had a grounding light. I had very clear problems to solve in my career, and then I would have the freedom to solve them myself within a framework of contraints. Now there’s no problems, no constraints - just realitiy. So now it’s become about the need to be mindful about reality and identify problems, having the intuition, if not the certainty, that they’re problems, and then committing to them. If I look around, I do see a hundred problems, but are they really problems? Are they for everybody? Or are they my problems because of who I am? Am I too dumb, or too smart, or too different, or too average? These are the things I feel. Uncertainty is a good feeling though - I’m not complaining, but it is different from how I’ve lived the past two decades. It’s not “easy”, but it’s not bad.
And it’s not just uncertainty that you have to deal with yourself - the idea of this uncertainty creates some amount of annoyance from the ones who love you. Among people who love you, there are different people with different ways of loving. A few people just believe in you and support you in whatever you do, because they believe you will do something right. Other people love you by worrying about you and protecting you: “he might be ruining his life, he left a stable job, a stable life, he’ll end up on the streets”, “let me say this annoying thing so that he reconsiders and gets back to safety”. It’s just society, after all. When you step out of the trajectory that society has built for you - school -> college -> postgrad -> marriage -> kids - some people take it well, but some feel very wrong about it. And it’s fair, but it’s just a little annoying sometimes as they project it on you. Especially with the ones who love you, you can’t just say “fuck off, whatever”, no matter how thick a skin you have and no matter how self-validated you are. Put that together with the uncertainty, and it can lead to self-doubt.
It hasn’t gotten there yet for me, but I completely acknowledge the possibility. After all, I think this is the cost of being free of chains: you also have to figure out where to go. So it’s fine.
Internal whip
Thirdly, I have been going a little hard on myself. It’s important to give myself time to relax and chill when I’m on a break. It really has been a struggle to let myself just be and not obsess over productivity. At the end of the day, I have this habit of asking myself, “Hey, how was today?” Then I give a verdict: productive, not productive, boring, pointless, all those things. This has been a pain to navigate. The productivity FOMO is real - I’ve been feeling it a lot around days wasted doing nothing. Even though these are the resting days, and I had completely planned them to be so, the internal whip is hard to silence.
So I have been doing some stuff. I’ve been writing a bunch, talking to a few individuals about business opportunities and content strategies, and I started some Instagram theme pages about things I love immersing myself in. Although I have been trying to keep it completely unplanned and driven by the inner voice, there’s also this itch/FOMO that I have to do something with my free time.
Making sense of leisure
Making sense of leisure when it is unlimited is a bit of a challenge. Drowning in hobbies is one thing I tried on my first day, and I utterly failed at it. The brain has some appetite for hobbies, some appetite for work, and some appetite for nothing, basically just emptiness. Overload it with one thing, and it starts feeling like a chase again (similar to a job). There has to be a balance in leisure as well. With a job, there would be so much work, and the leftover time would be leisure, and it was scarce. So it was easy to just make use of it and do something fun. But with nothing else to do and practically all the time being pure leisure, filling it up with things from different categories is interesting.
I’m the kind of person who won’t feel good sitting on the couch watching TV for eight hours straight. Passive activities aren’t very joyful for me for long stretches. I like doing a bunch of physical stuff that I find “animalic”, a bunch of art stuff that I find “beautiful”, like piano and poetry, and a bunch of intellectual stuff that I find “smart”. There’s also a mandatory appetite for sport, where it’s just playing, trying to get better, trying to win. It feeds the competitive spirit. And then there can be some passive stuff. But yeah, managing leisure is an interesting problem that I didn’t expect. I don’t like the phrase “managing leisure” because it has this management smell to it. But making sense of leisure is something I’ve been processing.
Overall, it’s been a grounding few weeks. I went on a trek, and since then I’ve been chilling in Bangalore, feeling fully in control and doing things I want to do. I’ve also been trying to give myself rest, but the whip keeps troubling me.
In the end, it comes down to being responsible to yourself. Because deep down, you know what you want, or rather you have a subtle intuition about what you want. There is usually clear feedback when something enriching happens, like a beautiful movie, a great conversation, a fun party, a new idea, an aha moment. And similarly, there’s a clear signal if something goes wrong - overtraining in the gym, a party gone too wild, a larger-than-usual meal that screws you up, an unpleasant conversation. The responsibility is just in listening to those signals and inching towards the ones that make you feel enriched and more like yourself.
I was meant to be living this no-work life for 3-4 months, but two months feels like enough. The itch has started, and the ideas have begun showing up uninvited, one after the other. The signals are pointing somewhere, so I’l be cutting it short and start working on some fun stuff in a few weeks. I plan to write about all the things I’m exploring very soon. See you then.