Taking a sabbatical is an opportunity to remember how you want to live

Dec 01, 2023

Yesterday, I heard a personal trainer at the gym say to their client, “Alarm clocks are so unnatural. We wake up every morning with a jolt.”

Why do we set our alarms?

Usually, to wake up in time for work.

If you didn’t set an alarm, what time would you wake up naturally?

If you didn’t have meetings all day, would you take the time to cook lunch instead of scarfing down a protein bar between calls?

If you didn’t have to finish the presentation before tomorrow, would you turn off your computer and read a book?

We mold our lives around our work schedules

We often adjust our lifestyles to fit our work schedules instead of the other way around.

This starts with school.

You only get to eat when it’s lunchtime.

You only get to play during recess.

During class, you do what your teacher tells you to do.

You can’t even use the bathroom unless you raise your hand and ask for permission.

Once you graduate and enter the workforce, it’s the same thing.

Instead of your teacher telling you what to do, it’s your boss.

And there’s no more recess.

But they do allow you to use the bathroom without permission (most of the time).

What would you do if you didn’t work?

Imagine that you have enough money.

You’re not necessarily rich or poor, but you have enough to live a middle-class lifestyle. You can pay rent, buy groceries, etc.

At first, maybe you’d do what you’re already accustomed to doing on weekends and holidays. Sleep in. Cook pancakes for breakfast. Read the newspaper. Play a round of golf. Meet your friends at the bar.

But eventually, that gets old.

You realize you only did certain things on weekends and holidays because you didn’t have time to do them during the workweek.

Even if you continue to do all those weekend activities every day, you still have some free time left over. There’s a void that work used to fill.

Each person’s experience of the void is different. And that’s the point.

When you remove your work schedule, you’re forced to answer these questions on your own:

What will you do with your time?
What do you want to do?
What should you do?

When you give yourself time to just be, you take a step toward finding out who you really are.

Taking a sabbatical is an opportunity to remember how you want to live

While you’re enrolled in school or employed by a company, you’re busy.

Your schedule is full of things you didn’t necessarily plan for yourself, but you still do them in order to get a good grade or collect a paycheck.

The majority of Americans spend almost their entire lives inside the school-to-work pipeline.

So it’s understandable why some people don’t know what to do with themselves after they retire.

A sabbatical is like a mini-retirement.

It’s an opportunity to figure out how you want to live sooner than when you retire in your 60s.

It gives you time and space to answer those questions and create a lifestyle that is aligned with how you want to live.

In my experience, this process is not obvious or well-defined. Again, that’s the point.

If you’re imposing too much structure and too strict timelines on the process, it’s no longer the void. It’s just a different kind of work schedule.

You need to give yourself time and space to just be.

I’m on my second sabbatical

I graduated college in 2017, worked until 2021, took a yearlong sabbatical, worked for another year, and now I’m 8 months into my second sabbatical.

When I’m working, I’m selling my time.

If there’s a conflict between what I want to do and what the company needs me to do, it’s my obligation to my employer to prioritize the latter.

When I’m on sabbatical, I own my time.

I get out of bed whenever I wake up.

I write when I’m inspired.

I eat when I’m hungry.

I exercise when I feel sedentary.

I meditate when I’m anxious.

I go to sleep when I’m tired.

When I’m free to choose how I spend my time, I can gradually settle into a routine that feels natural for me.

What I’ve realized is that the routine that feels natural and good for me is very different from the routine that I follow when I’m working a full-time job.

It takes time

Wolf Tivy, Editor in Chief for Palladium Magazine, writes:

“There are investments you can’t make from a structured, nine-to-five, narrowly teleological environment. You have to let your life go fallow sometimes, like a crop rotation giving the land time to bring forth new fertility.”
”Working even a good job cramps your sense of possibility, imposes narrow objectives, and eats away at the little things that could grow into big things if they weren’t so oppressed by the rigors of existing structure. I’ve seen this with my friends, in how they are full of ideas and adventurous spirit a few months after I convince them to quit their jobs. The world is full of ideas and opportunities to explore, but it takes time outside of structure to even adjust your eyes to the landscape of possibility.”
— Wolf Tivy, “Quit Your Job”

A weeklong vacation might be enough to decompress and relax, but it’s not enough to feel your energy completely renew and go through several cycles of creativity.

Even a month probably isn’t enough.

Crop rotation is an apt analogy for these cycles of creativity.

“You have to let your life go fallow.”

There are seasons. The frozen focus of winter and the chaotic creativity of summer.

6-12 months is my suggestion for the type of sabbatical we’re talking about here.

Once you’ve established how you want to live …

“Sabbatical” implies that you’ll be going back to work once your period of leave is finished.

Hopefully, by the end of your sabbatical, you’ve established a new set of standards for how you want to live your life, which can serve as a framework for the jobs you're willing to accept.

When you’re looking for new jobs, you can rule out the jobs that don’t fit your standards and accept jobs that do fit your standards.

At least one positive outcome of all this should be that you find a job that’s more aligned with how you want to live.

The whole thing is a two-step process:

Take a sabbatical to realize how you want to live.
Find a job that aligns with how you want to live.

Why not stay on sabbatical forever?

Maybe you don’t have to get another job.

Your sabbatical has helped you realize how you want to live.

Now, can you get paid to continue living that way?

In my case, I like my sabbatical lifestyle. I’d rather not go back to a “normal” job if I don’t have to.

So now I’m trying to figure out how I can extend my sabbatical indefinitely.

You can’t escape all your obligations in life

There are other obligations in life besides work. Family, for example.

Even if you quit your job and take a break from your work schedule, you might still have a schedule for your remaining obligations.

The important thing is that you’ve established a baseline of your preferences for how you want to live your life.

This is your default operating system.

You can deviate from it for short periods, but you’ll burn out if you spend too much of your time upholding obligations that aren’t aligned with how you want to live.