The unemployment blueprint (part 1/x)

Warning: This is by no means a guide, do not get guided.

“A loving heart is the truest wisdom” - Charles Dickens

This has nothing to do with anything I’m about to tell you today, but I heard it this morning, and it’s an important line, so if you just read one line, it should be from an actual writer.

Also, I have bad memory. Like god god-awful memory. So I don’t know what I have shared with you and what I have not. So I might sound like a broken record, so, well, sucks to be you.

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Where it all began: Quitting in this brutal market

You know how when you’re 5 years old, and you see a switchboard. You’re like “Ooh, wonder what will happen if I put my hand into this electric socket”, or in my case, true story, pretending to mix a couple of drops of each leftover medicine amongst other liquids and powders that I could find to try to “create smoke (or explosions)” as scientists do in labs.

The adult version of that is - what if I just quit this job today without even a pl of a plan, and just, well, go figure.

It’s too beautiful a morning to be salty about my ex-employer, but in short, if you’re keeping your fingers crossed that you get affected by the next round of layoffs, that is probably a fairly strong indicator that you should move on with your life.

So, we quit. Now what?

I honestly didn’t know. I probably still don’t. I just knew that collecting a paycheque while questioning “What exactly is the point of all this” every day, wasn’t how I wanted to live life (for now, for a bit, while my bank account was only low-volume screaming, not high-volume yelling at me).

I am not passionate about anything. Okay, correction, I am not passionate about anything that pays. The job market is absolutely terrible, and things that paid well seemed like entering season infinity of what I had already been doing, so I decided to do nothing for a while.

Hence, this blueprint.

Okay, before the blueprint

Deep down, we all wish that when we leave something behind, it collapses overnight. That we are indispensable. And next day when we look in the morning papers, we will see that the business has filed for bankruptcy because they realised they are nothing without Hari.

It won’t happen. They will continue to be. And so will you.

The blueprint

Some of these are for before quitting, and some of these are for after. None of these are proven, they’re just what I did and what I am doing.

Am I happy? That is a question that never has a clear answer because happiness is one of many elusive ideas. On a comparative scale, am I happier than when I worked my last job? Significantly.

Finance

1. Fund your freedom

I will gladly do a call and chart this out with you, for anybody interested. Have money in the bank that takes care of you for the time that you’re giving yourself and then some more.

The calculation

The question that automatically follows is how much. It is very personal and varied and I am happy to go into more details for anybody who reaches out. For me it was 3L and the calculation was 30k per month for 10 months after I move to the farm I’m building in Idukki, Kerala (which meant zero rent, minimal food and miscellaneous expenses). Life had different plans for me, so I had to tweak quite a bit, and figure Bombay rent amongst other things.

Downsizing isn’t just for companies

We work jobs we hate to buy things we love for two days. We work jobs that take our youth, health and relationships away only to retire with money that then pays for the repair of that bad health, and some regrets and “only if”s and “what if”s.

A lot of things you can technically survive without. I just bought myself Nike panda high dunks yesterday. And this is very important to disclose, because I want to heavily emphasise that this isn’t about deprivation, it’s about mindfulness.

This is a 1 year old draft. 1 year older editor’s notes: don’t buy the high dunks.

The point is, question your current lifestyle, make cutbacks, move back in with parents if you feel comfortable and have the privilege to, move into a smaller house, smaller city (cleaner air ftw), again, there’s a million ways to do this. I’m currently living on 1/3rd of what I used to make, in a metro city, with some significant privileges.

A great book to help guide your thoughts in this direction of a more minimal lifestyle is one called Goodbye Things

Epilogue, editor’s notes and promises

I wrote this a year and some months ago. Today I’m about ~600 days into not being in the corporate world. I was deleting old notes and drafts, and stumbled upon this. Thanks to my bad memory, I can’t remember if I’ve published this already, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading the writer I was, so I want to publish this as is.

I don’t think I have the same level of creativity today.

Do not overestimate me. Don’t even estimate me. I’m truly capable of a stellar below average performance.

That being said, I’d like to write to you with a part 2, with more scribbles, structures, and struggles of living without a “job” job, especially with middle class parents who worry for your homelessness.

Below are some notes on what I wanted to write about last year, untouched.

Pay yourself a salary

Relationships

Curate who you surround yourself with

Call home

Do more date nights

Tuck your kids to bed

Reconnect with old friends

Find ways to spend time with people without spending money (excessively)

Self: leisure, growth, and everything in between

I saved the best, the most important, and the most challenging one for the last.

“If only I had the time”

Well, now you do. Now what?

Everyone wants freedom. Freedom to do what, nobody knows. I mean, I don’t either.

Have end dates in mind for things, and then break those deadlines, but have new end dates then.

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Hope you enjoyed that unformatted word vomit.

Because another hobby of mine alongside joblessness is sticking it to the algorithms, I will send you this email at 7:32 am.

Don’t forget to tell me if you need more blueprint wisdom. Can’t promise I won’t forget to write it, though.

Love,

H.