Research: The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals
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I'd be a husk of personality if I didn't have this time to think slowly about life with full mental clarity. There was a month where I would wake up daily and go for an extremely long walk or bike ride and just sit next to the river for hours. Some of my best thoughts and ideas came from doing this. There was no work drama or deadlines ruining this thinking process.
This may be different if you have more that one kid or a different family situation of course.
But still: everything is individual.
I think I should be happy for this: If they'd all been as harmonic as my first one I could easily ended up giving well meant parenting advice telling others "just do as I did, be kind and careful and encouraging and it will sort itself out".
But it doesn’t matter if you’re building software or raising a family - it doesn’t have to be draining. In fact your best work will never show up when it is.
One of my girls is the sweetest, calmest, most peaceful bundle of hugs. The other is a low-sleep, hyper-energetic, demanding chatterbox. She is unyielding and relentless from 5am, every day, and raising her is draining.
I don’t mean “resentful” - we chose this experience and chose not to outsource them to childcare. But some kids are absolutely more work: if your every day is packed 5am-7pm with sales, negotiating, customer service, and all-team workshops, if you get little sleep and no weekends or half-days, year after year, you will be tired. I bootstrapped a software business to 7 figures ARR solo, and raising her is more draining. And more rewarding.
Life is hard for some people! Sorry you have to hear about it in public, but if it's that annoying for you to just hear it, imagine living it!
Whenever I feel sorry for myself it helps to think about my dad who had to live with me as his first child (and I have more siblings that children : )
no argument on that point!
And if you family is "wife+N small kids" - you can't really leave a job for long. Even if you are an IT guy with a good salary.
Baby require nothing but clothes, cheap food and love.
Teenagers require all sorts of things for school and activities. I mean, technically you don't have to provide them, I guess, but if you want a well developed kid who will have their own success, you have to do some investing.
Not to mention that spending structure change over time. Back when I was 20 - I only needed that much money to buy myself some food and drinks, a pair of sneakers or boots once a few years + some here and there spending. Nothing big.
Now I need to provide for my kid, wife who is on maternalily leave and I need to save some money for my mother (call it her additional pension) and my family because you can really have a family and no savings. God knows what will happen.
And if you have a kid (even one) - you need to spend a ton of money on clothes alone. They grew really fast, they get dirty when they eat or shit (in case diaper was put in a wrong way at night for example) etc.
Unless you are really rich - you won't be able to leave your job for long. I can imaginge 3-6 months leave if you are a Senior Developer or higher and you live in a country with stable economy\political situation.
In any other case - I doubt anyone will take such risks unless they are literally about to go insane or something.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/more-americans-live-paycheck...
It's great that you can just retire anytime I you want, hopefull without any downgrade for family's well being. I'm just saying this is not always on option.
I wonder if I will always be able to find a job that easily.
On the flip side, if you start working on retirement now, assuming you have no kids you could retire by 45. You'll still have your strength and fitness for 15-30 years after that point.
You become less and less employable in this field the older you get beyond that, unless you're either a top N% engineer, you found your own company, or you go into senior management. The gravy train doesn't last forever.
A net worth value can go up or down, money can inflate, markets can crash, life events can wipe away savings, but I was able to store some value that is beyond money and it keeps paying a dividend.
I've had some shame about not making most of my past year off though. My entrepreneurial ideas haven't taken off, I didn't quite cut it with freelancing, and I honestly didn't rest that much (just spent time worrying about $).
All learning though, I now have an idea of how much I'll need to actually feel free next time.
Any other insights though? Thanks!
Despite having all the time in the world, my creative spirit sunk to an all time low. All the wonderful things I had planned were not happening.
I do think it was a great learning experience, but I want to offer some advice. If you're going to take one, here are a few things you should do:
1. Think of at least one major thing you would want to work on. This could be travelling, photography or your side-project. It could just be watching movies, too. I think humans like having a routine and have at least one thing to dedicate themselves to.
2. Don't plan too many things. I wanted to get fit, learn to draw, write, read and in the end, I quickly ended up doing nothing.
3. I think we tend to chalk up lot of mental health issues to our work. I don't deny this could be a possibility, but if your work isn't insanely demanding, you don't need to quit your job to fix those issues.
4. If you're planning to work on your project, you need to ask yourself why you can't do it now. Even with most demanding jobs, dedicating some time to a side pursuit isn't a hard ask.
I do plan to take another one, but instead of quitting when I am frustrated as hell, I will do it when my creative spirit is high, and I am feeling more positive about my life.
The first two-ish months, I spent most of time buming around. I too got to a point where I thought I was wasting my time but it downed on me that it was actually a good thing. I had finally reached a point where I felt the need to do something more fulfilling and from there on, I naturally started filling my time with things making me more happy.
> 4. If you're planning to work on your project, you need to ask yourself why you can't do it now. Even with most demanding jobs, dedicating some time to a side pursuit isn't a hard ask.
That's illusory for a lot of us.
I can and do find some time for side pursuits because I refuse to let my work fill up my whole life as it could but taking on a significant side project would come at an unaffordable cost to my family life.
The only thing that was actually fun was travel and my wedding. Consumption of media was not. I should have improved my health but I was depressed from having less social interaction.
Now I have a baby, new job, new house, many new responsibilities, and I’m enjoying it. Where I think I failed during my break was never really acquiring the first thing you mentioned: something creative to focus on.
You should have joined a gym. I took a year off and one of my big goals was training muay Thai. A coworker dedicated every hour of his sabbatical to jujitsu.
Not only am I healthier than ever before, the friends I made are better than any techies I have ever met. Real people living and enjoying life, unlike half the comments here talking about how they miss the cult of productivity and how retirement will be affected. We all literally make 4x what a teacher or city worker make.
But following that, I’m over here crunching retirement numbers every week, and making so many decisions based on my desired retirement date. I’ve learned too much about it, but it is nice to not just scoff at anyone who invests in stocks as being a conservative stiff.
But as much as saving here and there may mean I can retire while still healthy - the map is not the territory. Maybe buying a house that fits a child and is near parks and trails will mean I’m more mentally fit. Most things are less inseparable than they appear on a spreadsheet.
One of the reasons I’ve been so conservative in where I live and how I spend lately is that my parents have got old. That’s a whole other topic, but maybe this is why having a child has so far alleviated my depression.
One day, either from retirement, ageism or sickness, you will probably have to stop working. When that happens, you will need the self-management skills to fill your time with joy and meaning. It’s probably best if you learn to do that sooner, rather than later.
I heard of people using that sabbatical to pick up consulting work. (This was before FAANG salaries, so even top engineers and managers might need the extra money, such as for kids' college, more than they need to travel or take up watercolor painting.)
Professor friends who've done sabbatical, it's much longer than a month, and seems to be a change of working scene. There's no teaching load from their university, but expectations that they'll be doing research/writing of some kind. They might do it while visiting a different university.
Regarding the class equity the article mentioned, a paid contiguous month off might be something a company could swing for all employees, as acknowledgement and incentive to stay 5+ years. A paid few or more months off would be a different matter to do.
We've really internalized the idea the every job always has to completely suck ass, huh?
With a normal "x weeks" of holiday those weeks quickly get committed. Vacations with your partner, childcare during school holidays, etc. Having an extra month above that can free up time for learning, pursuing hobbies, travel, etc. that is much more selfishly focused on your own interests, which can be massively invigorating - essentially exactly what a sabbatical is supposed to do, even if I agree that it would be nice to be even longer.
A 1 month sabbatical is just « take most of your vacation at once »
It’s great! But I would not call it a sabbatical
Another part of me feels work will always suck and I should figure out how to not work for as long as possible, using corporate jobs to fund long breaks. I heard this described at an anti-sabbatical.
I followed some advice from my collection of personal and professional mentors, which brutally summarised were:
- Focus on family and friends (work had consumed much of my attention for 8 years so this was very positive for my relationships)
- Do (bad) art, write, draw, make music, paint etc to both have fun and to enable brain plasticity
- Ask myself some questions before the sabbatical about my priorities in life, love and work, write them down and then seal the envelope and not think about them until I opened it at the end of the sabbatical
- Work on my health
- Complete a couple of personal projects
I am a much happier, well-rounded professional as a result achieving much more impact in more complex environments than ever before, and I have quadrupled my TC in the three years afterwards while decreasing my workload.
Being away was also fairly useful for my direct reports' growth, I think.
At home, things went from good to great too. Partner happy, pets happy, friends happy, me happy.
I feel incredibly fortunate that the sabbatical (and everything else that enabled it, and surrounded such a kind and generous offer from my management) took place.
I wish it was all "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately", but in earnest I was going through a bit of a rough patch and felt like I needed more time for hobbies and projects. I felt like I was drowning in duties and obligations and had no time for anything I wanted to do.
I had a bunch of stuff planned, didn't do any of them, but came back a different person with new and healthy perspectives on life. I don't think more time was what I needed at the time, but that is a hard notion to challenge if you're working a full time job. I actually had plenty of time for what I needed, which was to improve my balance in life. Have more hobbies that weren't all screen-based, to hang out with people that weren't all socially awkward engineer types.
I realize this is a bit of a luxury, but if you need it and can afford it, I would recommend taking an extended break. It's difficult to have true opinions about life if you haven't actually lived it. You can read about it all your life, but it's nothing like that.
Honestly, Blue collar workers need a sabbatical just as badly and you will NEVER see this occur outside of some exceptional anectdote which I'm sure will be mentioned in a reply to this post.
Tightly knit family structures do allow for this kind of sabbatical more often, but I do support initiatives like UBI for this (and other) reasons. Not to make it political as to which solution is best -- this is just one reason where I think it offers a good solution (all else being equal).
I was extremely burnt out when I was laid off, and while I had done a lot of work on myself, a lot had piled up and I knew I couldn't job hunt in good faith. I'm autistic as well so it would completely exhaust me on a good day.
I took six months to even just start doing 'normal'-ish things. I spent over a thousand hours processing long-overdue unprocessed emotions (i.e. decades old, for some of them), and working on accepting certain parts of myself that I hid behind the noise of work.
I was able to come to terms with accepting my own autism. I was able to drop a mental health diagnosis after much personal work. I made a side project that got a lot of good attention and that I have great hopes for. And after just a year, I'm finally able to just start doing little social step things -- like going to a bar for 20-30 minutes just to take in the ambiance. Noise for me is maybe 5-8x impactful compared to the average person due to the sensory sensitivity of autism (could be 10, but building a good estimate is hard), so even with nothing else on the schedule it takes me a good few hours to amp up to (and a day or two to cool down from and decompress/process).
I would never have been able to do that with work and all of the demands. In fact, I had to bury the hypersensitivity so deep as a survival mechanism that I didn't think I felt anything sensorially too strongly, but I also felt constantly panicked and dead inside.
Now that I'm more in tune with myself, I'll just sometimes, not always, and even more rarely look at some things, even small negative things, and just feel a leap of joy that I even get the chance to be alive to experience it. For me, it was the beauty of all of the red lights in a merging traffic jam on the freeway. That euphoria is hard to capture.
It's a lot of work and my retirement account is chomped, but I know the kind of work I want to do that lets me use my autism as a strength and gives me enough time on the side to learn how to keep innoculating against normally overstimulating environments -- it gets better with exposure and time as the brain starts deciding that certain things are no longer "new information".
The thing that people forget is that there's an opportunity cost with _not_ taking 3 months 6, or a year+ to work on yourself.
It's an exponentially impactful thing.
Investing now means you have the rest of your life to reap the benefits from what you learn. It can drastically shape the course of your life.
It's all work in the end, but good and uncomfortable work on self. I still am work-addicted at heart, but as I keep working on the trauma bonds that hold me into that particular coping mechanism, I can watch, almost entirely live, the future that I'm likely to attempt to head towards.
I've made a lot of progress as a person but there's no reason to work in a holding pattern forever. I have so much to learn and constantly feel like I'm wasting my time and at the beginning of my journey. And I still suffer a lot, too, but that's a work in progress for now. That said, I wouldn't trade how I _feel_ right now for a consistent pattern of misery.
I never, ever want to go back to that again, if I can help it. And I'd like to avoid having values to at draw me towards that way of living again.
I know this had a few purple prosey leanings at points, it's been a good journey. Thank you for reading this far if you did, and please feel free to let me know if you have any questions.
Many thanks, and much love! :D <3 <3 <3 <3 :D