Time is On My Side
Summer wanderings
Ah, summer, my worst season. Summer and I do not get along. Too much heat, too much light, too much noise, too much cultural baggage. I burn, I sweat, I fester, I sulk. Which is why it came as a surprise that I took the summer for myself. I quit my job at an opportune moment and called it a sabbatical.
My intentions were simple enough: step away from Zoom, Slack, quarterly planning, performance reviews, and the everydayness of corporate tech work to make some space and assess what was next for me.
More practically, I wanted to get back to walking, reading, and writing. These were the foundational practices during the most prolific and enjoyable parts of my career. I longed to feel generative again and to have ideas with depth, meaning, and pleasant uncertainty, ideas whose remit extended beyond the boundaries of one company. I missed the opportunities of the internet as a common place for finding your people and feeling like a part of a group that actually had ideas instead of opinions or pleas for attention.
The summer is now mostly spent, and I am writing to say: not much has happened. I swept away the everyday to make space for the profound, and my days refilled with everyday things. No a-has, no takeaways, no transformation, no strong convictions about the future of technology, design, or Frank. But also: no crises, no existential dread (at least about myself), and very few reservations about quitting as the right choice. I am more spacious inside and enjoying a refreshed ability to attend to the things in front of me. Most people call this a vacation, I guess.
I must admit: it feels awkward to write about this summer. First, because of the privilege—so many people are looking for work right now or can’t leave the work they’ve got. Second, because my writing faculties have rusted—my sentences are crunchy and the cursor pushes to the right much slower than it used to. I scrapped other writing and put off sending this because of my creakiness. And third, well, because there’s a pressure to have noticeable outcomes to life choices like this. I made space, and after 3 months, all I have is a more internalized sense of that space.
But free time also means freedom from expectations. I asked AI what we do with time, and it came back with words that were commercial and violent. We spend time, save time, take time, and make it; manage, track, and save it; we kill time, we pass it, we waste it, borrow, and steal it. We abuse time and it beats us back up, either in retribution or self-defense. It’s a zero-sum perspective of the material of our lives; it makes us prisoners to our own utility.
The AI said nothing about love, loyalty, or enthusiasm. When you wrap those up, it becomes clear that the best thing to do with time is to devote it. That is how you get time on your side. When you are working with time instead of against it, every bit matters, it all counts, even the fallow times, the empty times, the time off the path.
