What now? Musings at the beginning of a gap year

I quit my tech job at the end of 2023. What happens now?

Four months ago, I quit my tech job of three years at a startup in Silicon Valley and moved back to India. Trust me, I had a wonderful job and a wonderful workplace. I was working on some ultracool robotics technology which was actually commercially viable (ikr what are the chances) and I had a stellar team with me. 60 hour work weeks were not alien but with my all-in-or-nothing philosophy, I felt like I had found the love of my adulting/working life. But sometimes when life gets too comfortable, mine tells me to get up and leave. And I usually pamper my guts. Some may call it extreme overconfidence but in all honesty, I just got incredibly curious about alternate realities. What if I had majored in something different? What if I had not decided to work in robotic controls? What if I had found wrenches and Allen keys before my mid-20s? What if I could race 100 km ultramarathons?

But let me try to be humble by saying that the decision was made over several years, although the execution was swift. I gave my notice in November 2023 and in a month, I was planning to clear out all my assets and leave the country. Everything I owned except for whatever would fit in two suitcases, including my motorcycles, furniture, kitchen things, book collection etc. had to first go on a spreadsheet and then onto Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, where I had originally found them. I can’t deny that I did feel a little exhilarated each time something got sold, my Venmo buzzed with incoming money and I crossed it out from my 50-item garage sale list. I canceled all my insurance and unnecessary subscriptions, updated all my addresses, figured out how to handle my investments and savings and made a list of people to say goodbye to. It was like spring cleaning, but in the middle of fall. Or like the kind of stuff people do when they know they are going to die soon.

A month went by and I landed in India. And since I had a lot of free time anyway, I got married. All jokes aside, although the reverse migration and marriage were unrelated topics, the marriage consumed me for a month after moving back. It was a good softlanding though, since there was something like my marriage to be excited about and a good distraction to my family from the fact that their daughter, who they spent a lot of money on for a Masters degree in the US and was earning in dollars, decided to take a break from it. The concept of a gap year is still alien back home, which I can confirm, and I like to think that I got acceptance on the strength of my stubbornness and savings. 

So what happens now? I created a spreadsheet literally titled “Gap year” and filled it with all the kind of things I want to learn, build and grow and the kind of stories I want to tell about it. I created a section on what kind of an employer I want to be for myself (since I am ‘self-employed’ now) and also tried to convert my exploration bucket list into the OKR format (What is OKR?). Say what you may about corporate goal-setting methods destroying creativity, but this kind of stuff is pretty useful when you need to create some structure for yourself and your team in the early chaotic days of startup life. And it is an amazing antidote for my procrastinative tendencies towards thinking. Something is only limiting if it cannot grow and evolve and my spreadsheet permits an infinite number of cells to keep growing my bucket list and TILs. I am a doer and I like checklists. Now I just need to figure out what to fill it with.

Want to know what else I am up to? Check out my website!