The first day of funemployment
Navigating the strange space between the last day of a job and the first day of exploring something new
Yesterday was my last day at my job. “Job” is a container too small to describe what my experience was. It was a joy, a pleasure and a privilege to be a senior media designer at the Stanford d.school.
If you are imagining fun, challenging days full of ambiguity and fascinating people, you’ve pretty much nailed it. The original length of time I was committed to stay was one year. That turned into three. Calling what I did a “job” is like calling Redwood National Park “that place with the trees” or The Pyramids of Giza “those triangle thingies”.
It was so much more than a job, and I will spend months, if not years, unpacking what I experienced there.
That being said, that phase of my life is now over. I will always have a very large, warm place in my heart for the d.school, and I will most certainly return (in a few days to pick up things I left behind and hug people I didn’t get a chance to hug). The d.school family will always be my family. But I won’t be the “there there” the way I was before. That privilege now goes to the new people coming in.
That is as it should be, and, to whatever extent it matters, I wouldn’t have it any other way. The greatest asset of the d.school — of any place — are its people. What makes the d.school so special is that the people inside are always changing. That means the population of wonderful people outside who have been through an experience there continues to grow. Those who venture outside then come back in, bringing new challenges, information and insights. It is a dynamic ecosystem, and I am honored to be a part of it.
The joy I have for those arriving at the d.school for their first day and my eagerness for new challenges rests alongside the very real insecurity I have about what I should do on my first day of what a family member termed “my privileged funemployment.” I’m sad to not go back every day, but I’m also curious about what I might be able to make of the free time (wary of that saying about idle hands).
There is an immediate cost, however. Though it is not critical, it does introduce some difficulty.
When your job disappears, the glass bubble around your routines is shattered. A job can easily serve as an anchor for everything you build around it. I know where my habits are supposed to fall in and around my commute to work, the time spent away from home, the walk home and the time before bed. My trip to and from work was a fixed point around which other things revolved.
Now, that fixed point is gone.
The most obvious solution is to jump into a new job, and I am. The job, however, is working for myself, at least for the time being. That makes me the fixed point. I decide the physics of my work universe, including the orbital path and speed of my routines in that universe.
I am, like many in Silicon Valley, trying on the hat of an entrepreneur. In the coming days and weeks, I’ll be experimenting with ideas, projects, concepts, themes, visual designs and building new things akin to what I did at the d.school. I’ll be flexing my muscles, if you will.
But, for now, today, I took care of simple things — going to the bank and not waiting in line, getting a haircut at a relatively empty barbershop (yeah, I go to barbershops and practice observation), showing up early for lunch meetings with friends and going to my workout class at an hour of my choosing. All in all, it was a good, productive day, albeit slathered in the privilege of not having to worry about my next paycheck for a little while.
Though it doesn’t eliminate the nagging question of whether I am taking the right course of action. Only time will tell.
The night after I left the d.school, I sat down to watch “The Martian” for the first time. (Funemployment is great for catching up on movies you didn’t make time to see.) The film gave me a visual representation of what I was feeling. The next morning, I thought, will be my first sol. I would see the new world around me and make a choice. Do I wallow or do I work? Do I give in to self-pity and doubt or revel in the pride of what I have accomplished with hope for the future? Do I resign myself to inertia or do I kick it into high gear? I choose the latter.
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