Sabbaticals: another sign that how we think about work is changing
I was talking to an Uber driver who said she was on “sabbatical.” After doing hair in LA for over a decade, she moved back home to Napa to take care of her grandma who fell. Once her grandma gets better, she wants to hike the PCT.
A community in San Francisco called The Commons has a recurring meeting called Sabbatical Circle “for those of us curious about, planning to, currently going through, or recently exited sabbatical.”
I feel like I’ve been hearing “sabbatical” more often recently.
This graph from Google Trends shows that web search volume for “sabbatical” has been increasing over the past 20 years, with a big jump in 2021.
What does it mean to take a sabbatical?
The dictionary definition of “sabbatical” is “a period of paid leave granted to a university teacher or other worker for study or travel, traditionally one year for every seven years worked.”
But the term has taken on a different meaning in recent years.
You don’t have to be a professor to take a sabbatical.
You don’t even need to get permission from an employer.
Now, when people say they’re taking a “sabbatical,” they usually mean they’re taking a voluntary break from work.
Tim Ferris calls this a mini-retirement.
You have enough money saved up and you have something else you’d rather spend your time on, like traveling or working on a passion project.
Our attitude toward work is changing
I think more people taking sabbaticals is yet another groundswell indicating there is a societal shift in our attitude toward work.
The Great Resignation, quiet quitting, digital nomad, passive income, remote work, FIRE, fractional work—all signs of the underlying shift.
People are having two realizations.
First, they realize they don’t have to work.
Then, they realize they don’t want to work.
So what do they do?
They stop working.
A famous economist predicted this a century ago
It makes sense that this is happening at this point in human history.
First, we had to hunt and gather to eat.
Then we had to work to make money.
Now, our economic abundance has surpassed a level such that an increasing percentage of the population can not work and still survive, comfortably even.
John Maynard Keynes predicted this in an essay he wrote in 1930 called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”
It’s potentially destabilizing
Our whole society functions on the premise that people work in exchange for money.
If people stop working, who’s going to drive the garbage truck, cook at the restaurant, farm the fields, build the houses, run the government?
Automation could be an answer to some of this—autonomous vehicles, robot chefs.
