A mind adapted over hundreds of thousands of years for the pursuit of singular goals, tackled one at a time, often with clear feedback about each activity’s success or failure, might struggle when faced instead with an in-box overflowing with messages connected to dozens of unrelated projects. We spent most of our history in the immediate-return economy of the hunter-gatherer. We shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves exhausted by the ambiguously rewarded hyper-parallelism that defines so much of contemporary knowledge work.
Cal Newport
Back in September, I was up one night at 4am listening to my heart racing, thinking about a million different work stressors. How many times had I lay there lately, performing that same ritual?
I had never had problems sleeping, my entire life. I always felt lucky for that. Now infinite open loops from work kept me up at night, and no sleep made me a walking zombie all day, and less able to keep up at work, which made me worry about the mounting piles of undone projects, which made me sleep less, and so on, and so forth. I had certainly never had any problems with my heart, or with a tightening of my chest that must have been emblematic of some kind of panic. I was starting to worry. I talked to a couple friends about it, who were sympathetic. I talked to Matt about it, who said “oh” and changed the subject.
This night in September, I guess I finally reached a breaking point. But not because everything was going wrong—I think it’s because everything in my life is so right that a single thing going wrong sticks out in sharp relief. With everything I ever wanted firmly in my grasp, how could I let a poison injected into the beautiful center of it all take hold?
I thought about God and suddenly felt like a fool. “Am I like…waiting for other people to get worried about me? To somehow give me permission to admit that things are dire enough? I don’t need an intervention. I can worry about me. And do my best to be here for my kids, for a while yet.” I didn’t want to have a heart attack in my early 40s. I decided to quit my job. I closed my eyes and lay back on my pillow. I fell asleep right away.
The next morning, I emailed my financial advisor, told her I was finally ready to take that sabbatical I had always talked about wanting to take, and asked what I need to do next. I’m not wealthy, but I had been either working or attending school (and for some years, both) since age 15, and a break was necessary.
I did all the prep work—making sure I had all my accomplishments more or less documented, and starting to think about how to break the news to my team and hand off pieces of work. I told a couple of neighbors at a potluck we had during a glorious sunset, and it started to feel real. I put in my notice a few days later, and by mid-October I was celebrating my last day at work.
I intend to write more about what my sabbatical has been like so far, which makes this post the first in a series on sabbatical. Stay tuned, I guess?
parasol party 