Two Weeks of Nothing

I had an exciting few months. I went on a many-month anticipated family trip, switched jobs, and moved in with my partner. The latter two were concurrent. Now, I have about two weeks before my new job begins. Two weeks of nothing.

I’m somewhat financially solvent, enough that I could consider going on a long trip. But I wanted to take this time to explicitly do nothing exciting, mostly because I just felt exhausted by the logistics the past few months required. I didn’t want to figure anything out ahead of time. So I set out with more or less no plan for what to do.

This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but ask yourself - when was the last time you had two uninterrupted weeks with no objective? For me, it’s winter break during freshman year of college - almost 9 years ago. After that, I got my first internship, and the career flywheel got going. I expect many folks at a similar career stage to be similar. Once you are out of the winter/summer break routine of grade school, especially if you live in a city¹, your time becomes mostly spoken for unless you take explicit action². Even if you experience a layoff / firing, there’s the duress of needing to find a new job, which is an implicit objective guiding your decision making.

Nothing-time imposes a different set of constraints from routine guided by objective - the time is all yours to do with what you will, but, there’s a very fixed end date. This seems to have resulted in a lot of creativity and energy. I feel almost ravenous for new ideas and experiences. To use an AI analogy (sorry), it feels like I’m undergoing a big backprop step for the first time in a while, where my brain’s weights are changing quite actively.

In the free time so far, I’ve made this website, learned vim beyond layman terms (previously I didn’t even know what visual mode was), established a consistent meditation practice, done a lot of vibe coding (another post on that later), and done a bunch of random stuff I’ve been thinking about trying but haven’t gotten around to (trying lap swimming, doing the SF crosstown trek, going to concerts and staying till the end), Overall having a blast and feeling quite productive. Despite not starting out with any concrete goals, they naturally arose.

I would love to be able to “enter” this state more often. I think that a big inducing factor was having the “nothing time” directly following a tumultuous period. You often learn a lot of implicit lessons in these periods, but if you don’t pause to soak in the insights, it’s easy for the insights to get lost. There’s also something probably “unseating” about tumult that might prime you for more change.

I think you realistically need at least 5 days (two days of rest, two days of creativity, one day to get ready for life again) to make a period like this meaningful, and ideally it’s scheduled right after something impactful and a bit difficult (like the completion of a major project). Give it a try, you might be surprised how impactful it is.