Dan AE (After Employment) Journal - Day 88: The Comfortable Chair

I've fallen off the blogging wagon for some time. Lots has happened. Let’s get caught up.
In just 4 more days, I will have been unemployed for a 3 full months. 3 days ago was my daughters 6 month birthday. I now have not had a full time job for half of her life (however the first half of her life was spent working from home, so from her perspective not much of a differenceI suppose. An Interesting reality during these strange times).

So what in the last month has changed? On one hand a lot and the other very little. I still spend a portion of each week scanning job boards and LinkedIn, browsing email notifications of new positions that match my profile and halfheartedly sending in applications mostly for the reason that it’s what I feel I’m supposed to be doing. On more than one occasion, a few companies I have had initial and second round interviews with have ghosted me. Complete radio silence. Was the position staffed? Removed? Did I blow the interview? and I used to have a pretty good batting average at those things. Perhaps I'm loosing my touch. Some days I continue down that dark path of finding my old colleagues on linked in to see if they’ve found new jobs yet. A lot of them have. It’s definitely enough to doubt yourself. My standard mental progression then reminds me that I don’t want to jump back in to another version of what I was just doing, that I was just filling time, passing the days in a socially stable framework to obtain comfort and approval. An answer to the question “So, what do you do?” Problem is, without a job, how does one answer this question?

On the positive side, even though I don’t know exactly what I will be doing, I’m zeroing in on what it should be doing should feel like, trying to use this time as a luxury to devote a part of my day to working on something I want, and man does it feel great! iOS one week, 3D printing the next, python, cryptography, learning a graphics engine (why not) all things that I wished I had the time to do when I was working full time. Sure they’re small nuggets of projects that aren’t paying me anything, but for the first time in years I can say at the end of the week I know something that I didn’t know before. The seeds of development are starting to rekindle and excitement awakening. However an answer to “What do you do” is still at this time elusive.

Years ago I was watching a Netflix cooking documentary featuring a reclusive chef living far off grid, away from all civilization. At times he would mentor young up and coming chefs and he had a policy that once they were no longer learning anything new, he would boot them out and tell them to go do something else, that their time is being wasted if they stayed. Conventional wisdom would suggest that once you’ve worked so hard at something, you should stick around and capitalize on your newly honed craft. Take advantage of what you’ve learned.

This is what the master chef referred to as the ‘Comfortable Chair’. You master a skill and you spend the rest of your life churning out the same thing, loosing all creativity and capacity for new learning in the process. After all, it’s hard to always be learning, always being the new guy. This is not a comfortable way to live, however it’s the only way to ensure you are always growing, always progressing, being alive. For years, I sat snugly in that comfortable chair, slowly developing bedsores, and unable to get out.

So what have I gotten out of these last three months. I’m not really significantly closer to finding a new job, but it’s taken this long to begin isolating the feeling I’ve been looking. Francis Ford Coppola once said “You don’t have to specialize, do everything that you love and then, at some time, the future will come together for you in some form”. So now with these small kernels of knowing what I want more of and what I don’t, the next steps can come into play. To be continued.