works of wanderlust

Tag: work life balance

  • ask me again next year

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Compared to this time last year are you happier or sadder?

    At the end of this month it will have been exactly two and a half years since I left that stable job and set out on an adventure of random and self employment. Two. And a half. Years.

    It was a story of burnout and change and balance and adventure. It is strange however, how I always seem pin that transition back to personal happiness—even now, a quarter of a decade later. 

    Last December I was quasi-employed at one of my side-gig adventures. I can’t tell you if I was happy precisely. The job was great on paper, shitty in reality. The people were interesting and fun, but the relationships were fleeting and shallow. The hours were trash, but I simultaneously had a lot of free time to write and code and a kind of routine of stability and hope that it was going somewhere.

    A year later I’ve left that place behind, been through a professional training program, started my own corporation, earned money doing technology things, and seem to have found a bit of professional balance (even if the pay is still pretty sickly.) 

    Happier was inevitable, I think.

    If that is the only measure, though, I don’t think it paints a fulsome picture.

    I am healthier, too. I seem to have solved (at least diagnosed) the problem behind this chronic cough I’ve had for a couple years. 

    I am sleeping better. Or, at least I feel less tired than in a long time and—well, you know how it feels like you had a good sleep because you wake up alert and remembering these vast and rolling narrative dreams that fill your head and heart with a blur of “what was that all about?” vibes. Yeah. That.

    My kid is doing well. My dog is cuddlier. I have good friends.

    The weather is still meh, but apart from moving across the ocean there is not much hope to fixing that part of my life besides embracing the winter.

    What else can I say, I suppose? I started posting here again in the interim between of those two points in time, this time last year and now, so perhaps the very act of routinely writing and posting and feeling like I can articulate the very notion of this passage of time and in doing so step back and look at it with even a bit of objectivity? Maybe that helps. Maybe seeing those notches of my year all lined up and progress being made, tracking the adventure of this thing untethered from some kind of vague professional virtue signalling, maybe that’s the thing that sets the tone of everything else. 

    I dunno. Ask me again next year.

  • lucid professionalism

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What made your job
    interesting in 2025?

    Some people may incorrectly tell you that technically I don’t have a job.

    They are wrong.

    I am not traditionally employed these days, true, but I do in a very real sense work for myself… which is a huge job and a lot of work.

    Living the dream… or maybe the nightmare. It really does depend on the perspective and the day of the week… and how much sleep I got last night.

    This state of existence is very much a privileged position emerging from a stable household income, a lack of consumer or property debt, and probably most importantly (I’m not even kidding) living a frugal lifestyle… at least relatively speaking. If anyone seriously asks looking for a serious answer I usually just tell them that we simply don’t buy anything we don’t actually need. We’re shitty consumers. We eat groceries not commercially prepared food.  We travel for adventure and experience, not for luxury or clout. We shop to replace, repair and maintain, not to own more stuff. 

    But I digress. 

    This state of privilege has allowed me to spin up a sole-employee, self-owned small corporation and do bit contract work as a means to keep my skills sharp and my days structured, while still leaving a tremendous amount of free time to do everything from write fiction, dabble in side projects, make art, and hang out with the dog.

    In the two and a half years since jumping ship on my last full-time gig, I have written extensively (mostly in private journals that will never be published) about the transition from salaryman middle-manager in a municipal government job to bumbling self-employed creative eking out a pittance of a living doing gigs. And as it turns out both roles are stressful, but in unique and different ways. The government work was the stress of deep accountability at multiple levels, accountability to a demanding public, to a corporate hierarchy, to direct reports, to technical fidelity, to process and security, to vendor contract fairness and a long list of other deep and abiding struggles that kept me awake into the wee hours of the night. The contractor work is the stress of building reputation, honest effort, uncertainty of next week, and the dark spectre of knowing that I am every role in my own company and no one is there to prop up any shortcomings if I forget to do something important.

    And yet in my lucid and rational moments, as much as I occasionally get that grass-is-greener mentality looking across the gap from present to past self, I am definitely happier and healthier where I am now. 

    The daily variety of living this type of professional existence is both humbling and exciting. 

    Yesterday I was reflecting on this same notion from the perspective of perspective itself: what part of this transition am I leaving behind, and in effect giving myself permission to pull down the metaphorical scaffolding of this professional notion I hold of myself as fixedly capable, instead looking to the broader variety of both gig and term jobs I could take on. Why? Because a year ago I was in a very different place as a guy (temporarily) working part-time day-by-day for a small company job that I had stepped into to fill the void of structure and a paycheque. And it turns out those are the two exactly wrong pieces that drive what makes this stage of my professional life interesting. Sure, I need to get paid… who the hell doesn’t? And sure, having something to do when I wake up each morning is important. But both of those things are somehow right now, in this privileged moment secondary to the adventure of dabbling and learning and contributing to interesting work efforts that I would never have encountered as a middle manager in government.

    It is a bit of a dream, after all. A bit surreal. A bit hard to explain clearly to anyone not experiencing it. And something that I know I will need to awake from …and then return to reality. But it sure as hell has been interesting, if nothing else.

  • cheap-ish therapy

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Who or what are you
    leaving behind in 2025?

    I was reading over old posts. I mean, half the reason I write this damn blog is that, as they say, writing is cheaper than therapy. That is to say… these words are mostly for me. It is a public journal of a sort, after all, with the key part of that being the notion of a journal.

    Four years ago (to the day) I wrote a post called “Another Life Reset” in which in my first year of writing these reflective posts I lamented on the state of my life as a bureaucratic pencil-pushing middle manager staring down the barrel of another decade or two in government IT work. It was the middle of a pandemic, after all, and my life had become something of a chaos train of salaryman red tape and taking on the stress and angst of a team full of web nerds who were spinning through a time of societal change and whathaveyou. I was deeply burnt out. Charred from the inside core and right out to the part where I was a bit of a zombie. It would take me another year or so, but I manifested that “life reset” and left that job for an open-ended pursuit. 

    It has not been a simple reset. 

    I have rolled through a small collection of random work, a laundry list of job interviews, re-training programs, and kick-starting my own small business.  And oddly enough, in the middle of so much risk and change and idealism it has been the spirit of the reset that has been the one thing pushed off to the side.

    I might even admit I’ve panicked a little bit.

    It is the thing to do, after all, when facing uncertainty. In the what-will-be two and a half years since I left my (un)comfortable stable income as a municipal employee I have found myself drifting back to the idea of that stability as a core tenant of my search rather than the reset that it was supposed to have articulated in my life. That is to say, I’ve been interviewing and pursuing familiar jobs that would literally reboot my currently reset life back into the same program.

    Not that it has worked.

    And I mean, look—the world is a crazy complex place right now.  It’s an employers market. I’m now less than a year away from fifty, and the whole notion of so-called career is as fuzzy as my chin on a Saturday morning. I kinda need to reset from the reset: to rethink the whole approach.

    I tell myself that over and over, but honestly it comes down to personal expectations and this lingering thought that I need a kind of self-granted permission to do something crazy.

    So that’s what I’m leaving behind. I’ve been thinking about it for a few months now, actually. My expectation for what this all looks like if and when it ever reboots needs to have a secondary reset. A purge of expectations. It is a leaving behind of mental frameworks for my professional self and looking ahead to a job that does more than “keep me busy” but rather gives back to the world in a meaningful way that counterbalances the whole drudgery of employment.

    I’ve set the pieces in place in 2025. Now it is time to pull down the scaffolding of my old concept of professional self and reveal what is possible. How’s that for some cheap therapy online, huh?

  • Excuses Me

    December 26 of 31 December-ish posts

    We were driving home from the last of multiple family christmas gatherings today and, as we sped north down the highway, we passed the giant outlet mall on the outskirts of the city. Then we passed about five hundred cars driving slowly bumper to bumper in the southbound direction and queuing for the mall where the possibility of countless sales, deals, bargains, and boxing day shopping bonanzas waited therein.

    We kept driving.

    What did you want this year
    … but not get?

    As a guy who has a small category on his blog about “gear” I use and like it would be too easy to write about a “thing” that I was coveting and didn’t happen to find a way of adding to my collection this year.

    On the other hand, my Christmas gifts included all manner of delicious coffee bean blends, running kit, microbrew beers, and spice mixes so I can’t really complain about my lack of holiday haul.

    It has occured to me, particularly as I look at blank notebooks, missing blog posts, and a stack of unread novels on my bedside table, that I didn’t find myself with a lot of productive time this year.

    I’ve been busy.

    What a terrible excuse, huh?

    When I did find a bit of time here or there I managed to paint many awesome sketches, upload a hearty collection of writing, and even crank out a healthy smattering of code. Not as much as I would have liked, but still… quite a bit.

    But, all that said, work was consuming this year, consuming in the way that it followed me home and drained my evenings, and sapped me of motivation. I’ve been work busy. I’ve been dad busy. I’ve been family busy. I’ve been health busy. I’ve been paying the bills busy.

    Also, put that all with the fact that I haven’t been for a decent run in over six months thanks to my knee injury, and the free time I did have was usually spent doing physiotherapy exercises and trying to get something resembling recovery going on down there. Not running and instead doing physiotherapy at the gym is far less exciting than running through the trails with my friends.

    What I’m trying to say is that productive time was not my companion this past year.

    I hope to change that up in 2023.

    I hope.

    Thing is, I can’t buy more time from the outlet mall, and no matter how long I queue on the highway I don’t think motivation will be waiting at the other end.

    But I have started thinking about my 2023 projects: drawing comics, making videos, writing more frequently here (though still unlikely back to daily right away) and generally easing my foot off the metaphorical gas of my career in favour of some creative pursuits to balance out my life.

    I didn’t get much of that in 2022, but maybe my personal boxing day deal will be to give myself this big ol’plan to put some productive time at the top my my 2023 priority list. Thanks, bud.

  • Objectively Looped In

    December 3 of 31 December-ish posts

    What’s your favourite subject in school, I ask a kid.

    Recess, he replies.

    What’s the best part of your job, I ask myself.

    Working from home a few days a week, I almost write.

    Except that’s not really true.

    What made your job
    interesting in 2022?

    I’ve spent a few posts this year writing about the possibility of job change.

    And I’ve been serious. Last week I marked the twelve year anniversary at my current employer, and at times like that, birthdays, anniversaries, new years, one tends to get reflective and contemplative about life, the universe and everything. It’s a double-shame for me because all those things tend to fall within roughly one month and I have a heckuva December feeling all philosophical about my life.

    I try to keep the line between work and my words here pretty fuzzy because, well the thing is, I’m a public servant. We have strong codes of conduct, by which I mean documents that tell us how we should conduct ourselves in our roles inside and outside of the office, and those codes of conduct do include things like internet participation and having a public opinion particularly under the flag of our professional role. That gets tricky to navigate especially when I want to write about all the things I do in our parks and the runs and walks I take on our trails and even the various fun I have in my own backyard. Why? Because those are spaces sometimes managed or governed by bylaws and services provided by my colleagues.

    For example, I have a fire pit in my backyard that I use to build adventures and that leads to me sharing stories and content here on this site.

    But there are rules for how fire pits are allowed to be used properly. Minimum clearances. Fire bans get declared routinely. Good neighbour policies exist and overlap with smoke dispersal, and noise bylaws and ash disposal. If I was to declare myself such and such an employee and suggest (which I’m definitely not doing) that my job gave me some kind of authority to set an example or declare exceptions or shrug off proper processes (all of which I also am definitely not doing) I could get into a bit of hot water for implying that professional connection.

    So, I keep a fuzzy line.

    This guy who you are reading here is just a guy, a guy who lives and plays in this place. My expertise is personal, and I (and this is actually pretty true because all I really do is work in one of our technology teams and not any of those more hands-on services) have no special knowledge or influence on anything related to these places or spaces about which I sometimes write. And I definitely have no power over decisions or budgets or political stuff. I’m just a dwarf in the silicon mines.

    That said, things do get interesting because I’m a guy who seems like he should have special knowledge, but doesn’t really. That I’m in this weird position to see behind the curtain of the show, but I’m little more than a set designer, and usually go take my seat with the rest of the audience when the show starts.

    In the context of what I do, why I do it, why I continue to do it amidst the possibility of so many other options, and deep down how that is rooted in why my job can be interesting is this: I could have a different job. I could be selling or buying or moving or building or driving or talking or any of a hundred different tasks. But at the heart of what I do is that I’m creating and informing.

    That is why things are so fuzzy.

    I try to create and inform for fun. I build websites, I draw pictures. I write stories. I grow and cook and explore and tell more tales about all that.

    And then for a job I build websites. I commission pictures. I post information. I watch as everyone else at work grows and makes and cleans and serves, and we share more information about that.

    I work daily with the teams doing the interesting work of keeping this place running.

    I know people who are integral to the functioning of our community.

    I help a million folks who live here stay informed about all of it.

    Objectively, I’m looped in. That’s a pretty sweet (and interesting) place to be even if it’s often a lot of hard, thankless work.