A Practical Thought on Life: Part 1
Background + Thoughts on Time
Let me tell you a story of leaving a job to pursue side projects. This journey of career exploration made me think quite a bit, and I want to share those thoughts. This post covers a thought on the passage of time. More posts to come will cover thoughts on commitment and experiencing VS knowing.
How I Left my Job
Around October of 2017, I started searching for new jobs.
A product management was my target, so I looked for the right angle and chatted with a few people.
In what seemed like the blink of an eye, Thanksgiving rolled around. I took some time off to make the journey to visit my girlfriend, Serena, in Sydney, Australia. We spent 10 days together ‘down unda’ exploring the nooks of a fascinating city founded by derelicts, laughing with new friends from “uni”, and feeding friendly (if a bit needy) kangaroos.
When I returned to my apartment in New York, it felt like I hadn’t set foot there in months. How had I been gone for only 10 days?
Upon returning to the office, some questions had to be answered. What caused my perception of time to dilate? Why did it pass quickly in the office but slowly on a trip? Those 11 days away revealed the potential to slow down time. I wanted to grasp how to continue living at that slow pace.
That reflection caused me to rethink my job search and question whether another office would feel any different. I wanted more variety and exploration in my career, so why not start now? Why not spend some time trying to slow down time? That’s when I made the decision to leave.
Without the structure of work, how would days be spent? With time and freedom, I decided to follow intellectual passions.
The concepts behind blockchains consumed all my time outside of work, so I decided to go deeper in to that world. Personal projects like this blog, my newsletter of blockchain events in NYC, and a crypto-mining venture were ways to stay busy while learning more about a fascinating space.
Leaving the office would remove the “rails” I’d been riding on from school and my first job. This was an experiment in living without those external commitments.
I left my role 10 weeks ago. Since then, I learned a lot about time.
Don’t Watch Grass Grow
In a general sense, time certainly slowed down to a crawl as compared to life with a full time job. Paradoxically, it also seems like I have less of it now.
Before leaving my job, I had a few suspicions about what sped time up and slowed it down. Having new and various experiences seemed to slow down time. The habitual march in to the office every day seemed to speed it up. That logic made me believe breaking routine and seeking variety could draw out my days. It did, but not without a catch.
Without the daily rhythm provided by my office, I decided to closely track where I spent time on a weekly basis and reflect each night on my experience of time that day. My experience of time did not end up correlating with variety, but with the awareness of the passage of time.
Some days were filled with meetings, zooming from place to place and many new contexts — yet those days whizzed by. Others were spent sitting in one room while time crawled along. The days of meetings that flew by were punctuated by one similarity: looking at the clock repeatedly, counting down the minutes until the next move or meeting. On slower days, the clock barely factored in, often because I had no reason to check it.
Variety is the spice of life. Being present slows life down.
If you enjoyed this reflection, please clap a bunch! Look out for part 2 and 3 of this series.
