Life on the wallaby track đźš‚

Posted on:January 17, 2024 at 03:30 PM (6 min read)

I’ve spent a good couple months thinking of what my first blog should be about. Feels weird to start my first post on a personal note but I guess this would be a valuable lesson that I would like to look back at in a few years. I will be reflecting on my one year of officially being “on the wallaby” (apparently, it’s Aussie slang for being unemployed). What was on my mind this past year? Did I grow, or did I just learn to perfect my couch potato skills?

fn unemployed_daily_life() {
    let daily_routine = vec!["Eat", "Increase screen time",
    "Workout", "Try to learn something new", "Worry"];
    println!("Repeat cycle until employment is achieved... or until sleep time!");
    for activity in daily_routine {
      exec(activity);
    }
}

Directed an entire What If…? Season

What if

After being laid off, I took things surprisingly well. I made sure to keep eating healthy, continue my 6 day PPL split and complete elden ring on my newly built PC while still constantly applying for jobs and refactoring my resume. I rarely wondered why things panned out the way they did. Sure, I was on a temporary visa and had limited time to find a new role but it can’t be that hard. Right? As time went by and with the constant rejections, I took the time machine in my head for a ride and created my own branch timelines.

Ep 1: What if I had started work earlier or later in a different team/location and avoided a layoff?

Ep 2: What If I controlled my nerves in one of my other final interviews and worked at a different company instead?

Ep 3: What if Covid didn’t happen and I didn’t lose out on an internship during sophomore year?

For any Loki fans out there, it became challenging to prune these thoughts as they kept branching so far back that it sometimes made me question my choice of pursuing a career in CS which I’ve been passionate about since middle school. Knowing which branches were a result of my actions and which weren’t, does sometimes help in the pruning process. Finding those which were under my control and working on it is probably my best bet for the future. Maybe I can’t prevent a global pandemic or an org-wide layoff but I can maybe work on my communication skills if it has been lacking. I still occasionally create branch timelines but it’s mostly about my future and I try to prune the ones leading to an unfavorable outcome.

Hope is always a wave

Being unemployed for an extended period sounds like a time filled with gradually declining hope. My outlook on coming out of this situation has almost always been like a wave, rather than a constant decline.

Here’s a little sneak peek of what it looks like:

At Equilibrium:

At the Crest:

Back At Equilibrium:

At the Trough:

Understanding the peaks and valleys of my motivation during this period sheds light on the emotional rollercoaster that is unemployment. There’s no particular trick I use to feel better but I find that amid the overdose of uncertainty, holding onto the slight hope in my skills helps me brush off the negativity at times.

New Concerns just dropped!🏆

I’d be lying if I claimed to not develop some concerns that might be accompanying me into the new year. A silver lining of being laid off is the understanding people generally show when I connect with a hiring manager or share my background in interviews. However, with a year gone by, I find myself questioning how long external circumstances can legitimately explain the challenges of finding work. It becomes slightly overwhelming when I contemplate being in a position where I’m neither considered a recent graduate nor experienced enough for mid-level roles. Maybe it’s a universal problem faced in any line of work, but it still worries me from time to time.

My social life also took a minor hit as I’ve stopped reaching out to friends (sometimes even family) with whom I often casually chat with, in the fear of not having anything currently interesting to share about my life. Oh, They might be busy with grad school or work and I probably have nothing new to talk about myself anyway.

Progress?

Where Progress

I’ve realized that the structured environment of school, college, and work has played a significant role in making me feel like I was making progress. With an extended period of free time in my hands, I often found myself correlating not working on tasks that produce valuable output with a lack of progress.

This gap year has given me insights into how I measure progress - by comparing my actions to the expected end goal to see if I’m moving forward/backward. For instance, I have been training for over a year towards holding a back lever on the gymnastic rings and finally being able to do it did feel like an achievement. But, even when I was halfway there doing “skin the cat”s, it still felt like I was on the track towards making progress since I knew how far I was from reaching the end goal of doing a back lever. Similarly, in school and college, metrics such as course duration and grades made it easy to assess progress. However, I currently struggle to see the big picture and evaluate if my actions are pushing me forward. I’ve unknowingly questioned whether everything I’ve done during this time will help me find a job. While I may have done that new project out of curiosity, there’s been a lingering thought about whether doing it will bring me closer to employment which is not a healthy way to think as I lose sight of the learnings/mistakes I’ve made while working on it. I am actively working on eliminating such a mindset and decoupling my actions from their end goals in certain cases. And I guess it’s also cool to hit the pause button on progress sometimes, but for how long? Only time will tell.