And what you could learn as well - if you dare to take one

When I told people I was going on a sabbatical for half a year, I generally got two types of responses. The first response was “good for you man”. Although I am not sure if they really thought it was good for me man.

The second response was “ah yes, I will take a sabbatical someday too". But let's face it:  

How many of us have the balls - male or female - to actually do it?  

I know of only a handful who have - voluntarily - taken the leap. Besides the fact that it takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of courage to voluntarily halt your career for half a year. Indeed, why would you want to do that? Why would you burn through your savings and career opportunities just to “do nothing” for half a year?

This is a story about why.

This is a story about why doing just that - nothing - taught me how to live. The story ends with the realization that the sabbatical gave me everything I wanted and more. I hope these lessons can help you on your journey in case you are thinking about taking one yourself.

Although it might sound like a story with a happy ending, I have to warn you upfront before you continue. Taking a sabbatical might change your life forever, and you might come to some terrifying realizations.

(1) I learned I operated in a state of almost constant stress

For the first few weeks of my sabbatical, I was in a state of constant stress. Ok, no, I must be honest here. It was probably more like the first few months. Especially in hindsight, but even at the time, this realization is horrifying. It is hard to describe in words, but it basically boiled down to this:

Relaxing felt wrong.

There was always this nagging feeling that "I had to do something". Even when I had "earned my sabbatical" and planned to be off the job for six months, it felt wrong to just sit on the couch and do nothing. Even though there is plenty of evidence that doing just that can be of great benefit to your mental fitness.

The feeling only stopped after I forced myself on a digital detox for a week with nothing to do but read, listen to audiobooks, watch movies, and play the videogame I used to play as a child. Turns out the latter is not only a real trip to nostalgia-land, it helped me get in touched with my inner self and to let go a bit more. After that week, I felt more like my me again.

Simply knowing that my natural state is to be guilty about doing nothing helps me to do nothing. When I came back from my detox - all relaxed and with a birds-eye view on life - I realized that a lot of other people are in a similar state of stress. I realized that a lot of us are in such a state of stress because they are blindly following what they think is required of them by others or society.

Most of us get this kind of stress because we force ourselves into a life that we do not always want.

(2) I learned I was following what others said in a lot of cases, and not my heart

I was - and still am - a nice example of what Western society expects you to do. I did my best in school, I went to college and had a great time, then I got a well-paid job and went off to work like a good Samaritan. And then what? What’s next?

For a long time, I knew that I was part of the rat race. I felt like a wage-slave, a worker drone. Movies like Office Space, series like The Office, they really resonated with me because it was a way to cope with the realization that we are all trapped in the same cubicle, together. However, this was not the most dumb part of it all.

Even though I felt ‘it’, talked about ‘it’ with friends and wrote about ‘it’, I never acted upon it. I simply, grunted like any good drone and carried on. Once I forced myself to step out of it for a few months during sabbatical, that was when I truly had the clarity to see.

Not only was I stuck in the rat race. Almost everyone around me is stuck in the rat race. Getting out of it however, can be very hard.

For me, it meant almost instantly quitting my job once I got back and make a plan to truly get out of it. I will circle back on that in the second part of this story.

For now however, I can tell you that it is weird, almost frightening to realize how much of what we do in our lives is not what we actually want. It is also frightening to realize how little we actually need in order to be happy.  

(3) I learned that - cheesiness alert - you need to appreciate the small things

Guess which day unintentionally turned out to be one of the best days of my entire sabbatical, which includes my wedding day? It was the day I went back to Tilburg - where I grew up - and simple spent a day doing nothing. Literally, nothing.

I cycled around town, visited some of the places I used to go to, had some beers in the sun, all by my self. It was the simply the best. This nostalgia tour of Tilburg and the surrounding countryside of Brabant taught me a great deal.

I could spend thousands of euros on savings or weeks of my life traveling to exotic places, or I could simply take a train for forty minutes and have the time of my life.

In retrospect I might be over-romanticizing this day, but that is fine. Hindsight made me realize something else. Sometimes it is not the fact that you do or have these kinds of things. It is the fact that you have the chance do these kinds of things. Knowing that happiness is but forty minutes and a beer away puts things in perspective.

Sometimes however, happiness is not something you should actively strive for. Sometimes the opposite is true.

(4) I learned that happiness comes in the absence of unhappiness

It took me months before I was able to read books again. I know, this might sound weird. But I simply did not have the patience to sit down and read because there was always this nagging voice telling me to do something. Not when I was in Crete though.

During the last few weeks of our sabbatical in Crete, I felt like Buddha reincarnated. I was the self-defined pinnacle of zenness. I was as if the fog had lifted and I could finally see everything clearly.

It was at this time that I finally managed to finish the book Anti Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I was actually working on it for over a year, but as I said, my stress levels stopped me from enjoying it.  

In this book, which is one of the best I have ever read, Nassim Nicholas explains A LOT of things that have opened my eyes. Perhaps the book came in the place and at the right time, but everything clicked. One of the things he explained was 'via negativa'.

Via negativa is essentially the study of 'what not to do'. As it was described in the book, it reshaped my whole thinking. It is a beautiful thing to realize that reading a few words can change the way you look at life, but there it was.

'Happiness comes in the absence of unhappiness'.

When I read it, I actually had to lay the book down and take some time to recover. I have not been the same since.

It taught me that we should not just focus on things that make us happy. We should focus on removing the things in life that make us unhappy, after which clarity and purpose will come in its wake. I tried this. It works. Be careful though.

The results might be terrifying.

What comes after

Applying via negative to my own life helped me to understand that, when I came back to ‘work’ again and be a good drone, I had to quit my job. I knew it the moment I stepped foot in the office again.

Despite the magnificent people working there, and all the things I have learned there in the past few years, the way of working did not fit my newfound beliefs anymore. It simply gave me too much stress, and so I quit.

Most of us - most of you - reading this, have probably had prolonged periods of time when you though "this is not working out but I need to finish it". Perhaps it was a time during your study, when you had to finish your minor, bachelor or thesis. Perhaps it was a time in your work, when there weren’t so many fun projects and you had to do something you did not like. I should know because I had all these moments before in my life.

Months and months of mind-numbing and staggeringly dumb ‘work’ that drained my soul like a dementor on steroids. Still, I kept slugging on.

Why do most of us - me included - continue to do that in these situations? Why do we simply say ok? Why do some people wear it like a badge of pride that they have worked 80 hours plus a week for months on a job that did nothing to achieve their life goals or sense of purpose?

I have the answer for myself now. Just say no. But, I admit, I was lucky. Extremely lucky. I was lucky enough to to go on a sabbatical and step out of the rat race. And apparently, Lady Fortuna kept shining on me because right after I made the decision to quit she reached out to me with a great opportunity.

What that opportunity was, and what I will work on in the future, comes in part two of this story.