The Zen of Unemployment, an open thread

I’ve been unemployed for exactly two months as of today. In these two months I’ve learned a lot about what matters to me, and have gained some interesting perspectives on health, happiness, and life’s greatest antihero, the unstoppable force of time.

I think I willfully ignored the amount of my own self-worth I had tied up in my ability to perform my job functions while at work. I picked a stressful, difficult, and high visibility career because it made me feel the most personal value when I didn’t fail. “I succeeded in this when most others struggle. Therefore, I am good!”

The hidden costs of this kind of emotional dependence on my work revealed themselves when life asked me to justify my existence outside of work. “I am struggling to finish basic household tasks in a day that should only take about an hour! Therefore, I am garbage!” And just like the garbage, I can’t take myself out. The good news here is that my antihero, the passage of time, had my back. Over time I got better at being at home. I stopped drinking, which improved both my mental and physical health, developed a pitifully slim scoped but achievable-for-me routine for cleaning the floors and dishes, and started walking my dogs each day to cut their energy down. I also quit ordering delivery food and spent time cooking, which benefitted my diet but also got me to the end of the day more quickly.

Improving my quality of life is a slow process and I’m not as consistent with any of these changes yet as I’d like to be. Part of the challenge is that it isn’t guaranteed to make me happy the way that performing at work did. I wrote before that I sometimes feel the most fulfilled I have ever felt, and other times I just want to sleep for days. That’s still true, but I consider each time I accomplish a middleground state a win. Consistency is the end goal and the smaller goals in between keep me heading that direction. Someday I will achieve my goal of making my bed. Someday.

The more I think about my life adjustments over these past few months, the more parallels I see to the process of overcoming addiction. I have to rebuild a life, bake in healthy routines, and come to terms with what reality actually looks like. It isn’t a perfect simile, but the process feels like it rhymes. I also feel like I finally empathize with people who struggle to transition into retirement. It’s still different because I have the fear of running out of money hanging over my head, but I finally get why having hobbies isn’t enough to conquer the absolute ocean of time an unscheduled day contains. I spend each morning from 9am to 2pm working on board games design, marketing, and asset approvals but I struggle to get from 2pm to dinner, and from dinner to bedtime. I still open half a dozen video games a day and close them after playing for 10 minutes, unable to trick my brain into getting into the flow. There are other hobbies for me to pour time into, but switching gears between them is difficult. Whichever one I commit to in the morning is what I’ll do until mid-afternoon, and then I’m stuck trying to fill time. It’s part of the reason I’ve been writing less, I think – I spend my creative juice on the board game stuff and then run out of gas for anything else.

I keep telling myself that time is my ally, but it really is a double edged sword. It might eventually bake in my habits, add up my incremental successes, and increase my creative and physical stamina for activity. But it also composes the mountain I must climb to reach the end of the day, and operates the countdown timer until my unemployment transitions from an inconvenience to an emergency. It’s both the method by which I can achieve comfort in my own skin and the direct cause of my discomfort and anxiety. Ironically, waiting enough time is also the only thing that can get me to a solution, rehired and questioning how I’ll retain these positive changes when I get back to work.

That’s all from me for now. It was really nice to post again and I’ll try my best to get back on a schedule. See you in the comments!