7 Things That Happened During My Year Away From Work

Sarah Adelaide Evans
7 min readJan 31, 2021

In May 2019, I took a year-long sabbatical to help my mom care for my grandpa at the end of his life and to generally reassess my options and goals. I extended my year to 18 months in order to volunteer with nonprofits during covid and the 2020 election cycle. My time off ended in December when I started as a product manager for a small cybersecurity startup in Boston.

When I look back, the real fruits of my time away from work weren’t shiny travel stories or impressive projects, but gradual shifts in perspective. The following are some lasting changes that I didn’t expect or intend, but that will reshape my life in significant ways.

1) Parts of my brain turned back on. While I was working at Cisco, I was peripherally aware that I was less able to focus on dense books or think creatively and flexibly. I’d occasionally find old notes and think “Wow, what an interesting thought. I can’t believe that came out of the same brain I’m living in.”

But after three months of good sleep and free time, I started craving literature and history again. I found myself returning to the big doorstops I’d had on my shelf for years, not out of obligation or aspiration, but because I really wanted to know things about the world again. A couple months after that, the urge to write and read poetry returned. My memory got sharper and I had less trouble articulating and following complex trains of thought.

Until it came back, I didn’t realize how much intellectual vitality I’d let slip away. I probably won’t continue reading A History of American Law while I’m ramping up in my new job, but this experience has taught me something that a lot of people have already articulated: A vigorous mind has to be actively maintained and requires regular sleep.

2) I gave up most of my hobbies. I used to think that I enjoyed baking, sewing, and painting. But when I had unlimited free time, I didn’t touch my sewing machine or my paints. Those “hobbies” were actually therapies I’d devised to manage that “too tired to relax; my brain has been extracted with a small spoon” feeling. Moving forward, I think I’ll be better able to recognize screen aversion and mental exhaustion. I’ll be more intentional about channeling my free time towards hobbies I do have lasting interest in — poetry, knitting, and writing little essays like this. And instead of buying a Kitchen Aid when the urge to bake returns, I’ll reassess how I manage my energy and attention.

3) I learned a lot about how the people around me relate to work. When I told people I’d left my job for a year, about 60% of the people I knew were afraid for me, 20% judged me, and 20% were excited on my behalf. Even accounting for opportunity cost, this year was cheaper than the long-term cost of a fancy car. I left my job with a strong resume and 5 years of savings in the bank. But friends, family, and acquaintances were still *really really* scared for me. They were worried the year would be a blemish on my resume, that my skills would atrophy, that I was squandering momentum, etc. Some people would also say things like “But your 20s are for working hard! What are you even *doing*? Laying around?”. I knew going into this that Americans have FEELINGS about work, but I underestimated how terrifying and offensive many people would find my choice to spend the money I’d earned on not working for money.

The irony is, I think time off was really good for my career. I tried out different kinds of work as a volunteer in meaningful low-risk environments. I met accomplished people working on inspiring projects and did a ton of informational interviews to clarify the paths available to me. Even with the curve ball of a pandemic, I was able to find a position that is better than what I likely would have found or imagined for myself if I’d been job hunting while working 55 hour weeks. And I went into my new job at CyGlass actually genuinely *eager* to work.

4) My perception of time shifted. For me, the timelessness of childhood extended well into my 20s. College, and my first two years of work were a dizzying rollercoaster of constant change. I was turning to fresh pages in my mind and heart faster than I was turning the pages of a calendar. But at Cisco, everything stalled. My days became a loop, and the rate at which I was learning about myself and the world dropped off a cliff. I was operating at capacity, but I wasn’t *moving* anywhere. This was a new, static timelessness, and it happened so suddenly I almost didn’t notice the shift from change-induced timelessness to monotony-induced timelessness. Taking a break allowed me to, for the first time, actually observe the cyclic passing of time. I wasn’t holding my breath, and I wasn’t riding a wild rollercoaster of change. I developed a baseline sense of how much experience a day, a week, a month, and a year contain. This taught me a bunch of stuff — 1) not working didn’t change my productivity cycle much. 2) Most days, I do 3–6 things. 3) Most weeks are spent on 3–6 projects. 4) Every time I do something, I’m choosing not to do something else.

5) Having enough space to actually *feel* the passing of time also put me in touch with (please don’t jeer) my own mortality. I don’t mean that in a “stay up late obsessing over death”-way. The fact that time passes and then we die just feels more concretely and obviously true to me now. I grok it. The several months I spent with aging and dying family members is certainly a contributing factor, but I think the shift is mostly a result of continuous contact with a fairly consistent sense of self. I wasn’t lost in work or changing so radically that I felt discontinuous with chronologically adjacent versions of me. I was just your average everyday mammal experiencing movement through time at 100,000 heartbeats/day. Wild.

6) My friendships rebooted. While I was working, if you account for living logistics and commute, I had about 20 hours a week of free time. In the bay area, meeting with friends can require anywhere from 1–3 hours of total transit and coordination time combined across both parties. When you only have 5–10 hours a week to spend in the company of friends, there’s a subtle urgency. There’s pressure to connect, listen, be heard, love, be loved, and have fun all at once over a tightly scheduled dinner that you both drove to. It’s effortful, and a lot gets lost when a relationship is compressed. When I was working, I relied on relationships that were already deep — mostly friendships built during college. But when I wasn’t working I had the freedom to make myself unconditionally available. I regularly drove up and down the bay just to hang out on a friend’s porch. I helped people move. Before covid, I came early to parties, brought food, followed up with new acquaintances, and then went to *their* parties. I gave people a call when I thought about them. I could afford to be emotionally and logistically generous. Honestly, I probably spent a full third of the 60-hours a week not working bought me back just picking up transit and coordination slack. These obviously aren’t sustainable dynamics, but being able to be generous with my time made my friendships feel more familial and less transactional. The drifting and winnowing process that many people experience in their late 20s reversed, and I entered shelter-in-place with a really rock-solid set of comfortable and deep friendships and a big set of new acquaintances I’d never have met while working.

7) I felt less like life is a video game I have to win. When I was young, I correctly apprehended that “winning” the first couple decades of a life within capitalism is the surest way to earn basic independence. I also correctly apprehended that the “default” option is pretty miserable for most people. So between the ages of 7 and 27 I worked like my life literally depended on it. I don’t mean this to sound like an inspirational voice-over or a victory lap. Extractive capitalism sucks. Most people don’t have the opportunity to play the game, much less a shot at winning any part of it. I’m not here to celebrate a system where humans have to earn their own safety every day. But given that I have had almost every possible advantage, I want to do more than buy a car and a house and have a baby by 35. I haven’t reached “never have to work again” financial independence, but I’ve got enough buffer that I have a lot more choices than I did when I graduated. A year off gave me a chance to feel out who I might want to be when I’m not running to keep up with rent or a savings benchmark. For the first time, I got my head out of the game and started to answer that elusive question “If you didn’t have to Play Capitalism, what would you do? What would make your days worthwhile?”.

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