From Generation X by Douglas Coupland:
Anti-sabbatical: a job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions. (p.35)
What job isn’t an anti-sabbatical, I ask you?
Well, that’s my problem, at least. Every job I take slowly turns into an anti-sabbatical even if I start with seemingly bottomless excitement and enthusiasm. Friends bet on the number of months before I say I’m ready for a new job.
The other problem I have is that I always tell my employer that I’m thinking of watercolor sketching in Crete, or moving to a Zen Monastery, or walking the Appalachian Trail or whatever. That, as you are surely saying at this moment, makes people worry about your career longevity.
So I tried, for a few years, to put this aside to become The Corporate Citizen. It didn’t work so well. Instead of Crete, I hoped I could shift my dream to something lucrative like Being CIO. The sad fact is that I’m pretty sure such a role would just be a boring job, too. The problem is that working for any big company (maybe any bureaucracy, no matter the mission) seems to result in jobs that really seem meaningless. So Being CIO just meant having a job that was More Meaningless and More Effort than the job I had and didn’t really like.
No, I didn’t quit. I need to eat. I like health insurance. Thus, I moved into a job type that I had enjoyed before and totally lucked out that there are a bunch of good folks in the company. But it still leaves the question: what do you do to make up for the fact that you aren’t going to Crete with a watercolor kit under your arm?
Do you take meaningful vacations? Do you find meaningful after-work activities? How do you make those eight-or-more hours on the job more meaningful? I’m trying a little bit of all three, which helps; but at the end of the day, what do you do? Taking a year to go to Crete still means you come back to whatever you were doing before.
Related posts:
Comments on this entry are closed.