A beginner's guide to funemployment

I've done quite a bit of it over the years. Americans (and probably a lot of other people around the world) have internalized this utterly BS "you are your work" ethos that causes them to actually feel guilty when not making money. The widely-believed, though not always stated, societal value judgment is that if you're not useful enough for others to pay you money, you're not valuable. If you're not willing to trade life-hours for money, you're lazy and therefore not valuable. The only escape from this judgment is to do socially accepted "wow that's so cool I wish I could do that" things like travel or taking extended ski trips or spending weeks climbing mountains. The key is, you should be expending considerable money and/or effort doing this things in order for your lack of money-making initiative to be excusable for any extended length of time.

Thoreau spent much of his life not working, but "sauntering" in the woods, studying and enjoying nature. He would be excoriated as a worthless loafer in today's America, and that only shows how far we've fallen, in my opinion, in our vision of what a life should be like. When people ask me, as they frequently do, what I've "been doing" (meaning, what work) I frequently respond "hanging out". Out of embarrassing weakness I sometimes add "and traveling", knowing that I'm being judged and that traveling is a semi-acceptable excuse for a lack of effort to turn the hours of my life into money. Articles like this help to lessen that weakness.

Building an experimental Elephant As A Service side-project is no doubt going to be somewhat enjoyable in itself, but I don’t trust you to not be doing it for the CV and Hacker News points.

That rings true. I have a couple side projects I'd like to work on. That's not right. I wouldn't like to work on them. I would like to have worked on them. But the actual process of working on them isn't fun to me. That's why I do things like the Pomodoro technique to try and be productive (at home, no less -- I don't need it at work). I say, it's great experience, it's a useful time expenditure, it looks good to future employers. I don't say, wow I really enjoy learning AngularJS and wrestling with CSS to make a basic fucking responsive design that seems like it should take 30 seconds.

OP really hit the nail on the head -- one of the hardest parts of the time off is not having work-related goals and being OK with it. When you're employed it's easy to spend time imagining what you'd do with your time off. When you have this long stretch of time off, it's hard not to think about work. I was ashamed anytime my mind would drift to worrying about "what work will I do next?". In the end I think this is natural and OK, but it's important to fight the urges.

However, I don't agree that you should have 0 goals. You should have personal goals, just not work/career related goals (and OP kind of means this).

All of those non-work things you told yourself you want to do? Now is the time to do them. Travel the world, go backpacking for weeks in the woods, live out of your car, read too many books, appreciate art, volunteer. Take chances and explore.

The single biggest question you come to terms with in your time off will be "Who am I?".

You'll realize that since childhood you've always been working towards career/life goals. Get good grades in K-12, do well on SATs, get into a good college, choose a good major in school and work hard to learn, get internships, get that perfect job, work your way up the ladder in that job, get married, buy a house, have kids, make more money so your kids can repeat this cycle.

When you take the time off without goals in the typical "life flow" you'll have moments of existential crisis because you're not doing what you're "supposed" to be doing. These are important times. Learn to embrace the feeling. Smile and remind yourself that you're not doing what you're "supposed" to be doing because you're doing whatever the hell you want to do.

Just don't squander your unhinged time. Spend it wisely exploring the world and yourself.

When you get back to the "real world" you'll never see it the same again :)

For example, I have some friends who took a summer off and biked from Saskatchewan (Canada), through the Rockies, and down to California. It changed their lives.

Personally, I've always wanted to take a month to backpack and explore in the Rockies — instead of a four day weekend here and there.

Look, it's great that you are financially secure enough that you can take half a year off. Seriously! I am happy for you. But most people aren't in that position. Most people are barely getting by, and for those folks, unemployment is terrifying, because unlike you they have no guarantees that a new gig will be available for them the moment they decide to start looking for one.

Part of the reason "funemployment" grates so much is because of an assumption buried inside it -- namely, that you will only be unemployed as long as you choose to be. It's fun in the same way a roller coaster is fun -- it's a simulation of risk presented inside an environment you know to be controlled. The sensation you get when a roller coaster crests a hill and starts downward is the same one you would get if an airplane you were on suddenly lurched into a steep dive. What makes the coaster fun is that you know it's going to pull out of the dive before you hit the ground and die. What makes the airliner plunge frightening is that you don't.

Unemployment is only fun if you know it's temporary. Programmers and other tech folks are among the very few in this job market who have that luxury. For everyone else, losing their job is an airliner plunge -- a sudden "oh shit" moment with no guarantees that it will end happily. So glib terms like "funemployment" kind of rub your good fortune in the faces of those who get a pink slip and wonder how they're going to make their next rent payment.

Up here in the Yukon, tons of my friends are funemployed, doing all the things one never seems to find time for - knitting, a big vegetable garden, hunting, fishing, building a log cabin, etc. etc. It's hard to imagine where there is time for work!

On the one hand, having these goals during my funemployment keep me from the utterly depressing and maddening nothingness I've experienced when I left things completely open (I have a personal post titled 'Why do I get up in the morning?' from such a period that hurts to read).

On the other hand, it keeps me from pursuing, as others here have pointed out, the should-do goals that are really mostly left-overs from my hard-work-to-succeed days. I feel now that these goals were not as essential to my short- or long-term happiness as I thought initially.

Perhaps others are better at this, though. My brain just seems to implode or create problems for the sake of it when it is not almost obsessively occupied with something, however pointless it may be, and I've been this way since I was a child. It's possible I have ADHD or some form of OCD.

Things I learned:

- You can live about 4 months in Arkansas on 1 month of SF rent.

- When you set goals for yourself and miss them, it is very easy to isolate the cause. You.

- Time seems to pass slower.

I left my startup in late 2012. I was completely burned out. Founding a startup was so hard that I had to change my self-concept to an Important Person who Never Wastes Time in order to cope. I lost the ability to do "useless" things. For example, I couldn't motivate myself to play music because I'd never be as good as real musicians. I knew this was stupid, but I still couldn't get rid of it.

I keep telling myself I will really stop worrying about work to recuperate, but I can never bring myself to do it. I had been thinking about how I could bring that older, better part of myself back, and I think you may have introduced it to me. Thanks!

I've lived a sometimes extreme version this for the past 8 years, mostly on the pacific coast of South America. My first few years were rough because I didn't know what I was doing, and it's a powerful experience that may not be for everyone, but I wish everyone had the opportunity to test it out.

In my beginner years, I was waaaay worse at networking than anyone reading this. The jobs I picked up were so bad, and so badly paid, and in such a bad market for software, that I dropped programming for money and spent the first three years of my funemployment doing union carpentry and union meat packing in the United States -- for 3 months a year. It turns out that 9 months surfing and 3 months of hard, enjoyable physical labor is a pretty winning combination, so I was pretty happy, but I eventually got into Ruby contracting for agencies.

During my funemployment in South America, I kept my love affair with code alive in a big way. I learned Ruby and its massive standard library pretty well, and also learned a new framework called Merb (which together with DataMapper made a heck of a lot more sense to me than Rails); I worked my way through 'On Lisp' for the second time; I saw the release of Arc and, giddy with excitement, took it apart from the comfort of a hammock; I experimented with Ruby metaprogramming by writing a program to play workout music and call out station changes for Crossfit workouts; I wrote an app for a friend's document translation business; I wrote a simple call-forwarding SaaS to teach myself Twilio and Paypal integration; I worked through the EMYCIN examples in Norvig's PAIP in Ruby ... all way less than part-time.

Most important to me personally, I finally ended up with a passion project that I actually cared a lot about.

A few years ago I fell utterly in love with CoffeeScript, and while walking along a road that leads to Liguiqui, in Manabì, I realized that I knew enough about the CoffeeScript AST that I could add Lisp-style macros to it, without even forking the language. I quickly sketched it out in a notebook, and for the next month or so I spent at least a few hours each week exploring the idea, which I got down to 100 lines (http://mrluc.github.io/macros.coffee/docs/macros.html) and eventually presented to Ruby.mn when I came back to the States.

I'm not an expert on 'funemployment' -- but I'm not a beginner anymore, and it's been remarkably good to me, and I sing its praises to people who have the means to try it out. I just turned 31 and though my retirement savings are quite meager, I have some land and a house in South America now, and a great network of friends and family in both the US and abroad, and coupled with my ability to work remotely (even on connections as small as 5k/s), well, I feel pretty thankful.