We’re all fed up with work.
It’s a mood, a structure of feeling, that all of us look at waged work and think, “yuck.” But it’s difficult to act on that mood. Who can really leave work behind? I think of Rental Person Who Does Nothing and the anonymous author of “Tang Ping,” Luo Huazhong, who works two months a year and has monthly costs of 200 yuan. Both of them left work behind, but in different ways.
I, too, was fed up with work. It was somehow both soul-crushingly boring and kept me just busy enough that I stressed constantly. I needed an off-ramp, quickly. My partner had just taken a year to get a degree and leave customer service work entirely. He finished his degree and got a job in Montana, one that would cover rent entirely. Our roles swapped: I would quit my own job. I turned in my notice, moved out of the North Carolina apartment, and flew to Montana after a couple of months.
There was very little information about taking a career break when I started, with the exception of Julie de Vivre’s archive (which I highly recommend). I read about travel writers who were digital nomads but had financed themselves through sold houses and in demand careers. This, obviously, was not an option for me. I read about people who lived in communities that helped them reduce their spending considerably and so their career breaks were “permanent.” These people invariably had gardens that required a lot of work. I read about someone who cashed out $190,000 in savings. I read about Luo Huazhong and his 200 yuan a day and knew I could never do that, either.
But I did think I could manage a year on what I had saved without being wealthy, gardening or eating tofu and rice for every meal. It turns out I was right, thanks to my partner covering rent when I was in Montana. (I could have contributed toward rent, but he refused.) I covered all my other expenses which included travel to Japan and Italy, as well as travels to see my family. (Recapped here.)
As of right now, I have about $10,000 of the $24,000 that I started with. My one-year mark will be on March 31, 2025. I’m being transparent about this because, before I started, I felt doomed to work forever, parceling out my time in 1-2 week stints of vacation time that feels so oppressive. I used to think you had to be wealthy to take this much time off of work. But it’s more about assessing how much you need to live on and how much you’re willing to give up for the freedom.
I haven’t been entirely work free. I finished writing my book (though I haven’t received any money from it) and taught a couple of classes at Hugo House for Writers in the past year. I have done free book reviewing for a few sites I admire. I published a couple of paid essays. I have also been working on multiple book projects that I enjoy and hope to publish in the next year or so. These are all things I have enjoyed doing and took on willingly. Taking a break from work let me focus on things I really enjoy instead of having to cram those things into the tired hours around a commute and office stay. I used to have a 1.5 hour commute (1 hour if the traffic wasn’t bad) each way to work, meaning I went to the gym at 5 AM to ensure I fit it in, and then had to work 8 to 5. I would get home after 6 and have no energy for loving on my mammals, my partner and our two dogs, or for doing things I wanted to. I was completely drained.
Consider my day now. I start each day with coffee and work on one or more of my writing projects. My partner gets up and one of us makes a second cup of coffee for all. (Even the dog. Kidding!) Then I go to the gym, come home, take care of the dog, and make my lunch. After lunch, I do some household stuff, then I take a nap, especially if my gym session is particularly heavy. Then I’ll study one of my two languages, Italian or Japanese. I make dinner some nights, my partner makes dinner the other nights. TV before bed. And then I start all over again. On a week to week basis, my partner and I go to the hot springs in nearby Boulder. That’s our big adventure. If this sounds at all boring to you, rest assured, this is the perfect life for me. It is a nourishing routine, doing things I love, and not having to suffer 8 hours a day for someone else’s profit.
My initial concern about taking a career break was money. How would I survive!? But now my concern is: how can I go back to work after this unparalleled stint of freedom? How will I survive having to crush myself down small again to fit into a work environment?
In reading about career breaks and their endings, the key is to learn how to “sell” your time off to employers as a bonus. This means thinking of your career break as a time in which you gained skills that you can sell in the marketplace. Apparently, my Japan trip wasn’t an enjoyable encounter with a culture that has long fascinated me but an upskilling in intercultural exchange and soft peoples kills. This annoys me. Not everything we do, as humans, needs to be folded into work or seen as job training.
My time off, frankly, isn’t an employer’s business. It is deeply disturbing to me that, as a culture, we give so much power to prospective employers who can demand information at will and whose power deforms us into performing creatures who will do anything for money. This is an unfreedom: it means people live their entire lives around an imaginary figure’s expectations rather than their own desires. For example, career guides recommend, in the strongest terms, that you make sure your blog is employer friendly. Don’t write anything to upset them or make them think you won’t be a good worker. You don’t, then, even have free speech in your own time; not really. Elizabeth Anderson argues in Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives that employers govern our lives in way that are far more insidious and damaging than some forms of state control.
So that finds me here, on a snowy February morning, thinking about what my career break has meant to me. And I think it has, ultimately, meant reclaiming a kind of freedom. It has given me time to recover myself beyond the status of “worker.” It has also helped me recover pleasure in activities that began to feel like obligations. Writing, for example. Whether this career break becomes permanent, when I leave the career ladder for a different relationship to work, or is just a pause, I don’t know. But I’m sure I’ll see you back in the life of waged labor soon enough.
Kaelie Giffel 