{"id":13675,"date":"2018-07-03T16:04:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T16:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=13675"},"modified":"2025-03-08T16:26:20","modified_gmt":"2025-03-08T16:26:20","slug":"day-4-of-free-agent-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2018\/07\/03\/day-4-of-free-agent-life\/","title":{"rendered":"day 4 of free agent life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

2018 Jul3 \u2013 Day 4 of free agent life: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I went to bed at about 230am last night. I was somewhat disappointed in myself \u2013 I hadn\u2019t gotten any word vomits written (though I did do a bunch of tweeting). I haven\u2019t hit the gym yet. Today is the 4th day of my free agent life, and the 2nd day that I\u2019m not at work. It\u2019s 850am \u2013 I woke up naturally, without any alarm. I feel a pretty strong impulse to check Twitter (because I know there are surely notifications waiting for me), but I\u2019m trying to make sure that I write and finish this vomit first before I start checking on those things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s a worry I had \u2013 I had written a bunch of essay ideas on my whiteboard a few days (weeks?) ago. I took pictures of them so that I would be able to follow up on them as necessary. I hoped that each one would be able to be written as a word vomit. When I looked at them a couple of days ago, however, I found myself feeling a little trapped. I felt like many of those essays would have required reading and research, and I didn\u2019t quite feel up to it at the time. And I worried, just for a moment, that maybe I\u2019m not a writer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What a silly, cursed thought. There is truth in that experience, but it isn\u2019t in the conclusion. What it reveals to me is that there\u2019s some writing that flows very naturally without any sort of research or reading, and there\u2019s some writing that needs to be grounded in research \u2013 because I\u2019m writing about things that I don\u2019t completely understand, things that require facts and context that I don\u2019t have readily available in my head. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have developed a pretty good mechanism for writing about that sort of thing: the twitter thread. There\u2019s something about the 280characters + 4 pictures per tweet format that forces me to write in a way that\u2019s practical, sensible, digestible. (Aaaand this was where I hopped over to Twitter and spent about an hour there, probably. Now it\u2019s 1020am.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So. Where was I. Yes. I want to write lots of word vomits. But I don\u2019t want to repeat the same thing over and over again. That said, there\u2019s a limited range of things that I can talk about at length without having to pause over and over again. So what do I do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First of all, I think doing status updates \u2013 I\u2019m talking about emotional states, psychological states \u2013 is something that would be useful and somewhat novel since I haven\u2019t done these in a while. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually, what I\u2019m seeing myself say here is that I should just write about all of my feelings as much as I can. Because that\u2019s one thing that I haven\u2019t spent a lot of time with, and it\u2019s something that I can talk about at length. Maybe I should go through each emotion one by one \u2013 I talked about sadness recently. What about all the others? Yes. I want to do that! I want to get to know myself better. I want to feel all the feelings, and catalogue them, and make sense of them. I also want to clear out all my notes and todo list items. I will work on that after publishing this vomit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s take a moment to recap what I\u2019m trying to do here. I can write off the past couple of days as a transition period, as a relaxation and recovery phase. (I\u2019m also helping to cat-sit for a friend, which is proving to be quite… tedious) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to practice meditation, improve my posture, breathe easier and live more freely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to hit the squat rack, start getting stronger again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to tidy up my house and get rid of all the junk I have lying around. This is so I can feel more comfortable, cosy, replenished by my immediate environment, and feel like it represents who I a<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to improve my living conditions to better serve my daily routines and practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to go through all of my notebooks and simplify them, reduce the overall footprint and replace them with something more coherent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

____<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

NEET life \/ taking a break<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it\u2019s been about a month and a few days since my last day of work. The absolute best thing has been not having to worry about a daily commute. Not having to leave the house and get on the train. Not having to worry about work emails and work messages. Those were all things that were just a chronic part of my life<\/p>\n\n\n\n

___<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A fun thing about being a free agent is I get to discover which of my personal issues are contextual and which are intrinsic. This was kinda supposed to be a funny tweet but actually there\u2019s a lot to chew on here…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Free agent life<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I left my job at ReferralCandy, where I had been working since February 2013. It was probably the single most enriching and transformative experience of my life. I tweeted about that here: https:\/\/twitter.com\/visakanv\/status\/1012504508012744705<\/p>\n\n\n\n

since then, I’ve been a free agent. I’ve been gloriously lazy and unproductive, staying up late playing video games, eating junk food, hanging out at home with my wife and cats, and generally allowing myself space to just “be”, like I was during long lull periods as a teenager between schools, before and after military conscription.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I think this sort of bumming state can only last for about a month before it starts being costly in its own way. I’ve seen and heard firsthand from friends about how their extended breaks led them to feeling listless, disconnected and depressed \u2013 and I want to make sure I avoid that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got myself a new laptop a few days ago, and I’ve been “going through my notes”. This was something I did periodically when I was a salaryman too, but at the time it always felt like something I could never properly sink my teeth into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I feel this way about some of the conversations I’ve been having with my wife too \u2013 like there are some things that you can’t really do in bits and pieces; you need large chunks of time to get them done. This can seem like a bit of an excuse to avoid doing work \u2013 and maybe it is \u2013 but I’ve definitely also noticed the difference since I’ve gotten more space. I can set aside an entire day to do something. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2018 Jul3 \u2013 Day 4 of free agent life:  I went to bed at about 230am last night. I was somewhat disappointed in myself \u2013 I hadn\u2019t gotten any word vomits written (though I did do a bunch of tweeting). I haven\u2019t hit the gym yet. Today is the 4th day… <\/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":[814,737],"class_list":["post-13675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-feral-free-agents","tag-ios-notes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3yz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13675","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=13675"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13680,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13675\/revisions\/13680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}