The first question anyone asked me when I was telling people I was planning to take a year off was: “what are you going to do during your year off?” It turns out that’s a really good question, one that is a bit hard to answer.
I had spent some time thinking about this and I had a prepared answer. My plan was to take the first month of my year off to just rest and recuperate. Then, I’d finally spend all my time working on all my hobbies that I had put on the side. I imagined that I would maybe spend six months or so doing that. Finally, I’d spend the last part of the year rebuilding my coding skills, which had become quite rusty after years of management, in case I’d want to reenter the workforce as a software engineer.
But even the best laid plans don’t survive the first contact with reality. Things change as we go through life, and so did my own desires.
A gap year full of hobbies?
Over the last decade, I accumulated hobbies like someone would collect baseball cards. However, I never really had any time or the energy to spend much time on them. I started doing photography, woodworking, drawing, music production, playing video games, learning Spanish, rollerblading, and rock climbing. And clearly, this is a lot! It was absolutely impossible to spend enough time in any hobby as a full-time employee, let alone eight of them.
This caused me to set myself up for failure because I really wanted to become good at all of these hobbies. I remember picking up my camera one day thinking that I wanted to become the best photographer in the world, only to put it down three weeks later. As I write this, I have not touched it in three months, which saddens me still.
So, when this idea of taking a gap year came up, my first thoughts went to my hobbies. I figured I’d have plenty of time to finally get good at all of them, so I listed them on my gap year plan under a section called “things I’d like to get better at”. I had good intentions, but I never took action.
Fast forward to today, almost six full weeks into my year off, and I now realize that things were never going to go according to plan without some extra work on my part.
Nothing suddenly changes
Taking a gap year is a monumental decision and has the potential to change your life… or not. The only things that change when you take the time off are your income and availability. You still have bills, your marital status is unchanged, and your level of happiness generally remains the same. Over time, you will heal from your whatever caused you to quit the job market, but otherwise, nothing immediately changes.
Let me thus propose a Gap Year Theorem: as you start your gap year, your days will play out exactly like your last Saturday before quitting your job.
This is what happened to me, and I think it could easily happen to others as well. Objects in motion tend to remain in motion and objects at rest tend to remain at rest. This also applies to humans and all the habits and systems that we build for ourselves at the office or at home. If you used to spend your Saturdays watching YouTube videos, playing video games and generally just passing time like me, then you are likely to do the same thing during your gap year.
I had a great desire to work on my hobbies, but it is now clear to me that I’m still lacking the motivation to do so. As I used to do before quitting my job, I now still spend a substantial amount of time watching videos on YouTube – although I will say that a lot of those videos are in Spanish and learning Spanish is a hobby of mine. I’ll give myself half a point here.
So, while I have plenty of time available to me, I’m still wasting quite a lot of it. The difference is that now I waste time seven days a week instead of just on the weekends, and it needs to change!
Prioritizing hobbies
I still want to get better at some things, however, so I decided to pick a few select hobbies to focus on. One of my goals is to maintain a certain level of good health, so exercising is important. I also want my hobbies to be fun and rewarding and since I’m already learning Spanish and loving it, I will simply keep doing that for the moment. So, to sum this up in a neat little list, during my gap year I will focus on two hobbies:
- Learning Spanish
- Rock Climbing
While I’m still interested in many other things, these are going to be my two hobbies for now. I may sprinkle other things here and there, but I will not get mad or be hard on myself if I “fail” to work on them. A few hours here and there, just for fun, shouldn’t do me any harm. Keeping my focus might be hard to do, however, because I’m very good at picking up new hobbies on the fly… Just last week I told a friend I’d love to edit videos for her, so let’s go ahead and add video editing as a new hobby… sigh.
Travelling
Because I have been learning Spanish for a few months, I am now interested in exploring Latin America and will be doing a few trips down there during the year. This is interesting because at first, I had no intention to do any travelling and this activity was definitely not on my list of things I wanted to do. However, I have been learning a lot of Spanish by watching travel videos on YouTube and being exposed to the culture and how things look like in Central or South America is slowly making me want to go explore a bit.
Let’s add traveling to my list of goals:
- Travel to Central and/or South America
Finding new sources of income
Ironically, the only way to never have to go back to work is to find other sources of income, which can be a lot of work! I don’t really want to start talking about the pros and cons of having your own business or working for yourself. There is plenty on the web that has been said about that. But I feel a pull that I can’t ignore and controlling my time and how I spend it is an amazing luxury that I’m not sure I ever want to give up again.
Potential ideas
I co-wrote a book a few years ago with a friend and I enjoyed the experience. I’m still receiving a few dollars in royalty payments – my latest check was $25, lol! – but to me that now feels like free money since the effort to write the book was spent so long ago. Based on that, I think that writing a book could be a good source of income if either the book is good, or if I write enough books to earn a living.
Another idea is to become a consultant of some sort and turn an existing hobby into a job. I’m fairly certain that I have the skills necessary to earn a living as a professional photographer. I’d be happy to start low and build myself up to a much higher standard this year.
I’m also confident that I could become a video editor, having dabbled in the field when I was younger. More recently, I created a few videos of my doing some woodworking on this YouTube channel. I don’t think my skills are up to snuff, but given some time and a few opportunities to practice, I think I could become a video editor for hire.
Finally, I could simply return to software engineering as a consultant. However, it’s the business side of the consultancy world that scares me since I’m not a super outgoing person.
My pick for the year
Given that I went through a tough professional year before jumping into my gap year, I have a lot that I want to talk about. I have spent a lot of time thinking about happiness in general and I’m very curious about ways to make work more fulfilling, especially software engineering work, which I have done for the last twenty years. I have decided then, that I will write a book about it. Let’s put that on the list:
- Research and write a book about software engineering happiness
A simple list
Are these four items the only ones on my list?
Yep. And it kinda feels like a lot, actually. I think that to remain happy with my choices I have to keep my goal list very simple. This will give me some breathing room. I signed up for a gap year to reset and refresh myself, not to be under more pressure to accomplish things. It will be easier in the future to tweak a simple list as well if things do change.
I’m also leaving space in my life for other things that are either somewhat obvious or more ephemeral, but also very important for my happiness. I want to spend time with my family, for example. I also want to give myself permission to spend time on a different hobby here and there. That’s the beauty of having a simple list. It gives me structure while giving me freedom.
So that it. Right now, these are my goals.
- Learn Spanish
- Rock Climb
- Travel to Central and/or South America
- Research and write a book about software engineering happiness
And I reserve the right to change all of this whenever I want!