#9 Why I'm Taking a Sabbatical at 25
THE SEED OF AN IDEA
The first mention of a sabbatical in my journal came up about 4 months after I started my first full-time job out of college as a motion graphics designer.
It's written down as a far-fetched idea - a pie in the sky, "Wouldn't it be great if I could take a year out to learn? Maybe when I'm 40." kinda idea.
From the very beginning, I had been studying and taking classes while I was working. I followed my whims and passions as they came and went.
That's a great thing about having a full-time job - outside of the 8 hours of work in a day, I could pursue learning anything I wanted without worrying whether it would pay the bills or not. Having a job simultaneously restricted and liberated me.
This carried on for at least a year and a half.
However.
As life started to open up again post-lockdown, I realized my life was severely imbalanced. I was obsessed with two things - working as much as possible and saving as much money as possible. (London is an expensive place to live.)
Ultimately, this led to constantly being in front of my computer. I would wake up early to put a few hours in to study before work, work the full day for my job, and then if I had the energy, put in another hour after work. I was obsessed with having no 'zero progress' days (days where I didn't do anything towards any 'goal' at all), so I'd put in at least a couple of hours a day on the weekends too.
Things also organically changed when I closed the gap in my long-distance relationship, and my partner came to live with me. My relationship naturally became a bigger priority; I started to have normal weekends again, away from work. Turns out I enjoyed having weekends, waking up and going to bed at somewhat normal hours.
This meant that something had to be cut back - and it couldn't be my job, so it had to be my personal work.
That needed to be a temporary solution.
CREATIVE DISSATISFACTION
To have something to work towards, I set a deadline to save up a certain amount of money and then quit my job. This kept getting pushed back as reasons to delay quitting cropped up over and over again.
At several points, I was questioning whether I even needed a sabbatical or not - I could've just kept doing classes outside of work! Certainly, when work was manageable and easy, this felt like the way to go.
However, I started to get increasingly dissatisfied with the work I was doing professionally. I had achieved what I set out to do after I graduated college (find a job as a motion graphics designer), but it turned out I didn't actually like the work I was creating once I found myself in a job.
This became crystal clear to me one day when I was at work. I was waiting for an ad to finish playing while trying to get through to a YouTube video.
I said, out loud: "Man, I hate ads!".1
My boss was next to me, laughed, looked a bit sheepish and said: "Hey, we’re the ones that make ads."
It was a realization that if I wasn't the one making the content, I probably wouldn't watch the things I spent most of my day working on. It started to feel like a big waste of time, and it was pretty clear things needed to change.
THE STATE OF NOW
Anyway - it's taken about three years of saving up and planning, but I handed in my notice in July, and formally left Ignite as a full-time employee at the end of September.
I've wrapped up all my freelance work for now, so I've just finished my first month of this sabbatical. I'm working towards becoming an animator, and I'm a full-time student at Animschool.
I'm also working towards making my own projects at the same time, so other than animating, I've spent time this month painting and drawing, and learning computer science and game development.
I’m trying to build a healthy routine that works with the way my life is right now. These things take time, and I don't want to rush this, so I've given myself a couple of months to get settled in.
I’ve still got questions that I’m feeling out:
How long should this sabbatical last?
Should I focus on studying or creating?
What should I study?
Is it a good idea to study multiple different things at once?
Should I take up any paid work during the sabbatical?
There are still the occasional flashes of feeling like I've made an enormous mistake, cutting out a good job and good people out of my day-to-day life. I wrapped up my freelance work at the end of last week and immediately felt a slight sense of doom.
But then I have days where I spend the entire working day on things that I'm actually passionate about. Days where I give myself permission to spend large chunks of time learning and exploring topics that I care about, to a high level. And then I still have time outside of all of this to spend real, quality time with my partner, and take care of my health. All in one day.
And that convinces me that, at least right now, I've made the right choice.
INGEST:
Plain English with Derek Thompson - An excellent podcast episode that taught me a lot about how we’ve arrived at the current conflict between Israel and Palestine, from two Israel-Palestine historians.
Jonathan Freedland on the Israel-Palestine conflict - An outstanding opinion piece.
Why Self-Sabotage is So Dang Easy by Adam Mastroianni - ending on a lighter piece, I’ve been really enjoying Adam’s substack. This post in particular introduced me to Goodhart’s Law; as someone who obsessively tracked metrics and dedicated a day to ‘optimizing’ my life, this post made me re-examine several things in my life. I’m gonna write about this soon.