Published 2024-12-31
Tags: #life-reflection
It’s been around 3 months since I started my sabbatical. Here’s an assortment of reflections so far.
TL;DR. More time for hobbies. Got a mission statement I’m excited to pursue over a side project for the next 3 months (while traveling). Will most likely start job search in April.
Work: Mysterious driving force. When I’m working, it feels like there’s a mysterious force that compels me to get things done (Note: why do deadlines and people’s expectations matter so much to me? I have no idea, but my silly primate brain is wired that way). It’s not necessarily a bad thing though— I am very productive under this mode, and honestly, I kind of miss it.
Non-work: Existential crisis. When I’m not working, a whole new challenge emerges: how to choose activities that both fend off boredom but are still meaningful to me. (Note: at work, I don’t usually have the headspace to worry about whether or not what I’m doing is meaningful — the primal instinct to do things well already takes up most of the bandwidth).
Somewhere in between. Maybe I just need to accept that my life will be a recurring cycle between these two modes. I’ll marinate in the existential crisis juice for now, figure out where my next burst of energy should go, then tap again into the power of this mysterious driving force to do great work, hopefully in a direction that is “better” for me, whatever that means.
Joyful tinkering. Speaking of boredom, here are a couple of joyful tinkering that I got to do over the break: Wrote a song to troll a friend. Created a piano arpeggio tutorial. Collab-ed on a podcast-ish video w/ a friend. Re-brought up a reading chrome extension. Took a jazz class (also actually practicing drills daily). Went outdoor bouldering a lot — It’s nice to be able to go to Leavenworth 3x a week on weekdays
But maybe not long term. On reflection, though, I am not sure if a life of a variety of small projects is fulfilling to me. It’s fun to do in bursts, but I think I’m drawn to something more long term — something with a domain that is complex enough that it takes several months to master.
I’ve noticed this paradox where I’m actually more productive if I keep a sense of business in my schedule.
The takeaway is that I seem to be thriving when I juggle at least 2 focused goals. This pattern has been working for me even when I was working a 9–5 too — I was able to work on side projects for ~3h a day, split between morning and evenings before and after work.
Here’s a fun reflection that led to a change in my long term habit: “What is the gap between the current me and the ideal version of me?” One of the answers was — the ideal me would be able to improvise an arrangement of any song after just one listen. This realization made me decide to add a daily 30m technique drill session, on top of the already existing 30m of free play session. Here’s me committing to this daily 1h of music time, even when I get back to work.
I got to reflect on various mission statements that could inspire me and set a general direction on the kinds of problems I want to dive into when I get back to work.
Feelable world. One that stood out to me was: “Make the world a more feel-able place”. Many of our interactions (e.g. talk to people, reading a news article from your phone etc.) don’t leave much emotional impact, but a few would occasionally give you a burst of positive emotion — like when you laugh after reading a funny meme, or when you are filled with warmth after scrolling through r/aww. It would be nice if one’s interactions in the world are filled with more of such beautiful emotions.
Feelable text. Refining the abstract goal one step further, I would like to focus on just text medium for now: “Make text that people consume be more feel-able”. Here are two projects that fall under this theme:
I expect the sabbatical to run until April, mainly because of upcoming travel plans with family and friends.
During that period, my focus will be twofold: (1) Practice music every morning (also taking a weekly private lesson) (2) Work on the comedy coach side project and eventually create either a blog post or a video to summarize my learnings.
Toward the end of April, I’ll start the same old job search process again. This time, though, I’m setting stricter criteria for the next chapter of my career:
Here’s a rough sketch on where this might lead: From the comedy coach app, a research statement that I’m interested is: normie-friendly llm personalization — For someone who doesn’t understand AI, how can we empower them to tailor the AI to do what they want? E.g. for comedy coach app, is it them listing a list of comedians or streamers to impersonate, curating a list of chat snippets they liked, or picking abstract concepts like “deadpan”, “punny”, and so on? This will likely end up being both an HCI/UX problem on top of a machine learning problem.
Given this research statement, then I could foresee myself considering these opportunities:
I’m not sure which option I’ll choose yet, but that’s a problem for next year’s Stephen. For 2024, this blog post will have to do. See you next year! :)
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