Legit, fear of being “killed” by the system stops me from slowing down. One time in my life I quite a job due to stress without my next move planned out and it was real rough. I’d love to be able to slow down, to the point I’m finding myself missing the pandemic work from home life. I wanna leave my current job, but I need to make sure I have something else lined up first, and who really knows if that will be better.
I wanna ignore all the noise around me and just find myself, but I’m afraid of the wolf.
What was unemployment like? I’m about to be there soon for the first time ever.
It really depends on if you know you’re going back to work and if you have money to last you.
Best of luck! Not sure where you’re at, hopefully somewhere they got some kind of unemployment. In my country at least, there are no unemployment benefits that I’m aware of at least, so had to strictly figure out budgeting and luckily I had managed to keep some savings and was able to live with family.
I tried to do a bunch of personal projects, YouTube, a small company with a friend, but a lot of things just going nowhere. I pretty quickly got part time work to make ends meet, literally going to a place walking distance from my home that was related to but not quite the field I’m in, and while they couldn’t afford me full time that work got me into a financial position where I could keep my head above water, and I continued to do my own sort of freelance work in my field where I could get it
Honestly, I was really naive about how easy getting a better job would be. I had recently gotten my Master’s, had a good amount of experience from my previous job, so I thought I’d be in a shiny new job in a month or two. Month five was when I got the part time stuff going.
But I was kind of amazed at how, when I kept telling myself I got no money to spend, I found ways to not spend money, so I got WAAAAY better at saving during that time. But also, I don’t wanna go through that stress again where every little unexpected expense, car repairs, family emergency, etc, made me feel so hopeless, like if my value kept doing nothing but going down, what was the point of me doing anything?
Getting out of it was honestly a good amount of luck, my freelance stuff led to me meeting my next employer completely by chance and it just so happened they were looking for someone with my specific training. It was honestly kind of insane.
tl;dr:
Was naive, wish I had things planned better. Seeing all your savings drain away is soul-crushing. Think I learned about myself figuring out personal projects. Getting work feels like just luck of the draw in the end.
On the other hand, it’s possible to do what’s needed without constant anxiety. Even without anxiety, leaving a job without plan could be identified as being a bad idea, depending on the situation.
In countries that take acceptable care of their citizens (which I definitely wouldn’t count the US as, if that’s where you’re coming from), many more people live with an inappropriately large amount of anxiety than with too little.
I should not have laughed so hard at this. I think I identified with the bunny too much.
So you see: the path goes on for your whole life
Nom.
