Departure

Why leaving?

To an outsider, my world might seem close to ideal. I’ve been given so much in life. In some ways, I live at the top of Maslow’s pyramid of needs. My education brought me multiple university degrees from different countries, I have significant achievements behind me. My career is international, on different continents even. Coming from a big family with 5 siblings, with only my father being a bread-earner, I had no financial help for my efforts (though I had a lot of other types of help). I have a lot to be proud of.

But I feel empty.

Isn’t that feeling of emptiness something that comes and goes in each one of our lives? It’s very human, it somehow (depressingly) connects us all. The existential angst.

I feel guilty sometimes.
Am I spoiled for being unsatisfied? Ungrateful for being given education, EU passport, and together with it – countless opportunities?

A view of the Alps over lake Luzern from a rooftop of my former apartment

The truth is – we need perspective to appreciate the good things we are surrounded with. We get used to whatever nice thing we have, and start taking it for granted. A view of mount Pilatus and lake Luzern come to my mind as I’m writing this. I lived in Luzern for a year and a half. The lakeside view that’s ridiculously beautiful, I was stunned by it for the first few months of my stay in Switzerland. But by the end of it, I didn’t even look much at it. I had different eyes, focused on problems and other things in my busy life. We start taking most good things for granted, unless we find ways to reinvent our way of looking.

The meaning of work

My world was running around work, and I loved my life. I saw progress and direction in it. But then the storm came, restructuration at work messed it up, and I found myself with a new job that I didn’t like. I could go around why that was (tasks, stress, disorganisation, working hours, micromanagement,…), but the job was just not for me, it was alienating me from myself. I noticed that the job carries a big amount of my identity, and that new one was just way off what I wanted. I was not proud of it, not interested, and I didn’t see my value, nor future in it. My inside was telling me to leave it since the beginning, but then again my inside is not something I take for granted these last months, as it can send tricky signals.

After a few months, I got the courage and I said to my new boss that I was leaving.
….aaaand then I stayed cooking in discomfort for three more months of the notice period, before arriving at the actual bye-bye moment. 🥲

My world was running around work, and as I was approaching a line of no-more-work, without a solid plan for after, I felt many things. Excitement for sure! But also fear, under a screaming message: “What the hell are you doing with your life?!”.

What the hell are you doing with your life?

That message was common last year.

It wants to subtly say that other people have figured out life, and have it on the right track. While I was drifting, being off-track, and lost. Not running the race that my colleagues on LinkedIn are running, adding to the pressure that something is wrong with me if I don’t just go-on like everyone else. It’s funny now that I think about it. I was told by a few people that they see it courageous to fight for an extraordinary life, to live life to the fullest, and go against fears and commonality.
I know it’s fake, that feeling of others having it sorted while you don’t. Everyone knows it logically. But emotionally we still find ways to trust it. We trust Instagram which shows 99% of the time some ideal moments, 5-star photos, preferably with smiling faces enjoying the best life has to offer. Something no one lives most of the time. I couldn’t wrestle it logically, so I, unfortunately, trusted it emotionally. I felt crappy.

I have a few jobs that would want to have me, but they are not attractive at the moment. I feel ungrateful, but I also know that I don’t see myself in them. Not right now. I’d be losing myself again, feeling lost, if I just went on with it.

How do you find your purpose?

My job has to be personally meaningful to a degree, or with a meaning in the progress towards something later. A stepping stone. Meaning and purpose can be found outside of jobs, but that one is personally harder to tackle for reasons I’ll write about some other time.

I checked other jobs over the past few months, but I couldn’t find the reason why to go for them. I felt my life was like my broken and swollen leg: where usually gentle touching would be pleasurable, now it became painful on the lightest touch. No job was good enough. I needed a break.

I contemplated this break for a good while. It sounds great from one angle, more than a few people told me to go for it. But many angles are negative. Not having a base (home), not having a direction for after the trip, not having a duration – those things are all terrifying. You might have a hard time imagining it if you never found yourself in a similar situation. They were so terrifying 3 months ago that I was holding on to a job that was sucking the life out of me, thinking that that was better than the alternative. I thought I just needed more time. My situation had actually two sides: time and mental space. I needed more time, that is true. However, my self-perception – distorted by being squeezed out by draining and stressful work – was affecting me emotionally and mentally. I needed space for my mind to figure things out, and I was not giving it space in that last job. Staying was counterproductive, and giving time would not solve it.

Poisoning myself like that was not doing me any good. The job wasn’t for me. I received clear conclusions from my close ones “You’ve already checked out, so why are you still there?”.

The answer was simple again – fear.

Fear

I was continuing to work out of fear. Fear of having nothing. That “swollen leg” feeling regarding finding a new and meaningful job, lasting years.

To those who know me well, I was probably annoying with my quest for meaning the last few months.
I am searching for a greater meaning in my life, and now I’m cutting off the only few branches of some meaning that work brings? It’s all a bit ironic and confusing. This train of thought would often leave me exhausted and with anxious thoughts, going late into the night. Lack of sleep made it all a lot harder.

Meditation helped, not engaging with those thoughts. However, that felt like a temporary patch, a very needed one, but not a real solution.

I was reading about Stoic philosophy these past few months. It’s a practical philosophy focusing on acting in accordance with your values, practising self-discipline to be able to do so, and practising non-attachment (money, status, praise, pleasure…).

I was afraid, and I was also attached to being someone, a valued contributor to society. Someone with a good career, money and a PhD. A proud job, one I can stand behind. And it was more than just those 8+ hours I invest in work every day – which is already a lot! We, people, tend to look at others through the eyes of what they do. We judge, positively and negatively. We do that mostly when we don’t know someone, and we just meet. “So what do you do for a living?” is one of the first evaluations, and boxes in which we categorise people. And then we put them on our personal ladder of value (among some other things).

What we do for living” is maybe the biggest defining box we put each other in, but only until we get to know each other more.

I realised the other side of it, the one that’s there when you know someone well, for a long time. I realised that my identity, my value in people who are my friends is not attached to my profession. You are simply you – Mark, Alice, Isabella! That person that brings cakes, always remembers birthdays and wants to be beside you even when you feel broken, empty, like a played-out piñata. People forget what you do. My friends don’t really know what I did. They liked me for what I brought to them, not what I did for work.

Stoic philosophy and practising non-attachment, together with knowing what my friends and parents see in me, helped me jump off into this void of the unknown. Into this travel period of self-search, and distancing myself from whatever concepts I made about myself. Chains I bound myself with.

Knowing it’s right doesn’t make it easy

My last 2 weeks in Luzern were really difficult. There were so many things I had to do, personally and professionally. In addition, I was meeting multiple friends and stayed up late at night. I was not the most organised person, and the lack of sleep made it all even harder. When I left my apartment, I couldn’t figure out my feelings. It was all too much, too heavy.

Feeling lost feels so lonely.

Despite having the best of people supporting me, I was happy and sad, still sinking with the feelings of being lost. I made a poem through the depths of those feelings (I suck at it, I know, but I won’t get better unless I try 🙂 ). And for the whole day, my head was in a balloon of a sort.

But what was the alternative, I was reminding myself. To just get a job and go aimlessly through life?
Would I be happy in 5 years’ time if I just did nothing, and settled for mediocre?
No.

I was doing the best I could. It’s a time-out time, a pause in work life to see what strategy could work the best going forward. I don’t have solutions. Going out of everything known usually helps me see the bigger picture. This is also not the first time I’m going into the unknown.

I don’t have a purpose, I need to find it.
I hope I can find it.
I thought, talked and read about it a lot.

… and I have a plan!