{"id":13597,"date":"2018-12-07T10:21:00","date_gmt":"2018-12-07T10:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=13597"},"modified":"2023-05-07T10:25:47","modified_gmt":"2023-05-07T10:25:47","slug":"salaryman-suspicions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2018\/12\/07\/salaryman-suspicions\/","title":{"rendered":"salaryman suspicions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

my 6-month hiatus from salaryman life has confirmed a lot of my suspicions about myself<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. not having a job makes it a LOT easier to exercise, and prep your own food, and spend long hours reading book\u2026aaaand I still don’t really do very much of any of those things. I do them maybe about 5-10% as much as I kinda-vaguely fantasized that I might maybe do<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. not having a job means I don’t have to go to bed\u2026 ever. basically the only thing that makes me go to sleep is the worry that my wife will be annoyed with me if she’s up w\/o me too many days in a row. otherwise I’d be quite comfortable idling online till 8-9am (4am now)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. I suspected that if I had more free time, large expanses of free time, I would finally dig into my photos and files and sort them out. This is correct! I have spent quite a bit of time doing this. And I have discovered that it takes a lot more time than I thought it would. the reason, it seems to me, that i have to spend a lot of time going through my photos, is because a lot of my photos are memory triggers with vague micro-intents. sorting my photos required me to figure out projects and goals. 100s of photos can be a “shadow project” in waiting<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. I suspected that if I didn’t have a job, I would be writing sprawling essays + refactoring my blog. This\u2026 is half-true? I’ve obviously been spending most of my “writing time” on twitter. The full extent of the utility of this remains to be seen. I now blog like I tweet, too. I think that was a hope rather than a suspicion \u2013 and I feel reassured. I’ve had friends who, upon leaving their jobs, found themselves shifty and uncomfortable after sitting around for two months. Me, I’m pretty confident I could do this for years<\/em>, just following my curiosity. I think I was in a bit of a hurry to get around to writing essays out of fear of being an unproductive bum \u2013 but I don’t feel bad about it because I can tell that my mind has been happily chewing and ruminating on all sorts of stuff. The essays are in there, being dreamed<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. I suspected that my mind was being “weighed down” by work. This is true. I was astounded by just how many files & folders I had accumulated in 5+ years of work. Here’s *one* map I made to make sense of some of the territory I was working with. I was carrying this<\/a> in my head. to be clear, that’s not a bad thing. Having a job means having responsibilities \u2013 that’s what you’re being paid to do. It’s just staggering how much of your headspace it takes up, & how much more headspace you have when it’s gone. I’d say it took me 2+ months to “recover”<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    there are many layers to this<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I was working at an ambitious company where everyone was working hard (I loved this)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I was bad at managing my time and boundaries (this is bad)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    my workday involved writing, my personal passion involves writing (there are pros and cons)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    OK so here’s a nuanced-ish thing I want to say: In November 2017, I wrote the entire draft of a novel. I wrote every morning before I went to work, and\/or every night before I went to bed. It was tiring & tedious, but I did it. It was tough. but it was doable. I got it out of me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    That said, it was basically fictionalized-memoir-ish type of book, so I didn’t have to think too much. But I didn’t have the energy to think much about structure<\/em>, about how everything was put together. That’s for Editor Visa to worry about down the road. Now\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Having the freedom and clear-headedness and vast expanse of open time that I have (to edit the novel if I choose, or to do whatever else I feel like doing)\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I absolutely cannot<\/em> imagine suffering the hideous project of editing a novel while working a demanding full time job<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I used to feel so guilty about feeling that. About thinking the thought “oh, I’m so tired, it would be easier if I had free time.” And then thinking “you fucker, you’re just making up excuses. soldiers wrote poems in trenches with their legs blown off. what’s your excuse?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    quick segue \u2013 here’s a picture of me<\/a> before I left my job (for a passport shot, lol), and one of me a couple of weeks after<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I loved my job!! I loved my colleagues!! but I am clearly so much happier and healthier and fresher without it. regardless of diet and sleep. I did NOT start sleeping well or eating healthy, lol. I spent the 1st month giving absolutely no fucks and eating mcdonalds almost every day. I just wanted to not give a fuck about anything at all. my wife, bless her soul, tolerated this. I just played video games it was glorious<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Now. it’s very plausible that a person more skilled than me might’ve been able to handle my commute, my workload and all the other stresses of my life in a much healthier, net-positive way. I had colleagues who were super fit & fresh & happy; they seemed to be doing it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I also learned so much at work about being better at managing myself. I think the analogy I’d use is\u2026 “psychological debt?”. Getting married, buying a house, having a job\u2026 all added more responsibilities, more “debt”. This needs to be “discharged” healthily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    2013\u20132018.5 was the most stressful period of my life. It was also the most productive. I learned and grew more than ever before. But I think I made some critical mistakes that I didn’t know how to correct “on the fly” with the skillset that I had<\/em>. I could probably do it now<\/em>. If Visa-28 with present levels of freshness & clarity could be transported back, I would be more effective, focused, proactive. I would be much more ruthless about my priorities and boundaries, &be clearer about what I can and cannot deliver. Make fewer promises but get them done. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But there is no way<\/em> that Visa-23-thru-27 could have done better than what they did. I’m so proud of + grateful to all those clowns because they did their damned best with what they had. and they were clueless idiots \ud83d\ude02 often blindly trusting I would make their sacrifices count.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Back to the trenches thing \u2013 I think there’s an important distinction to be made between acute stress and chronic stress. And I think chronic stress is a lot harder to deal with. (I think Taleb has a quote that’s like, “much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury”?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    the crazy thing about chronic stress type problems (of all kinds \u2013 physical, psychological, they all seem connected anyway) is that they become your new baseline. you adjust to them. you get used to it. it becomes your new way of being, a little bit at a time. then it gets worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I feel like I\u2019m digressing, lol. I have a LOT to say about all of this\u2026 I think I\u2019ll expand this thread into a blogpost tomorrow. All in all this has been a really positive and formative experience for me and I have absolutely no<\/em> idea if it would be the same for you<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    my 6-month hiatus from salaryman life has confirmed a lot of my suspicions about myself there are many layers to this I was working at an ambitious company where everyone was working hard (I loved this) I was bad at managing my time and boundaries (this is bad) my workday… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[733],"class_list":["post-13597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-twitter-thread"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3xj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13597"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13598,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13597\/revisions\/13598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}