Into The Unknown - Why I Quit My Job To Take A Break

About a month ago, I told my boss I wanted to quit my job.

In a little over a month from today, I will have served my notice period and plunged headfirst “into the unknown”.

Being an intuitive person, it’s not always easy for me to articulate my motivations. I’ll still try and explain why I made the relatively rare (yet increasingly common) decision to take a break.

The more practical, external reasons first.

1. Over the last 3 years, we’ve seen ChatGPT go from a toy to a tool that can potentially do anything. We’ve seen AI grow powerful. I want to spend more time understanding, learning, and taming it.

2. LLMs open a world of opportunity for learning anything. It’s ridiculously easy to find information, get personalised guidance, and do hands-on projects. I want to use this to get closer to computers by building applications. This will be the computer science degree I never got. I of course, plan to use it to learn cooking, woodworking, and good knows what.

3. In my job, I was further away from the frontier that I’d wanted. Moreover, while Zeotap had been excellent in navigating the difficult market situation, I believe all jobs are at risk with the advent of AI and I didn’t want to be caught off guard, working heads down in a job far-removed from the centre of action.

And now, the personal and the nebulous.

1. When I talk about ‘understanding’ AI, I don’t just mean watching a YouTube video on how the transformer architecture works. I mean going back a century or so and seeing what the industrial revolution did. Or what computers (and the internet) did to manual jobs a few decades ago. I want to figure out what AI might do. And if I’m lucky, position myself so that I ride the wave. I do fancy myself a Prometheus.

2. Since the beginning, I chose the default option on life’s big decisions. These defaults were virtue(?) of my social and financial background, family’s preferences, my own fears. 10th, Science, an IIT degree, a well-paying job. Just about to do my MBA, I woke up. I made a decision, and promptly went back to sleep. Having decided not to do an MBA, I figured I’ll stray off the beaten path. It’s been three years since I first had that thought. If I don’t go off-roading now, I never will.

3. What sealed the deal for me was a 5 day break I took over the Holi weekend. I was able to get a lot of work done and my output was better than it had been in the longest time. You may not realise it but 8+ hours a day spent at a job you don’t think about on the weekends is not a good bargain for that paycheck.

And that, dear reader, is why I told my boss I wanted to leave and go on a break, “at least until next March”. It’s a risky move. It’s a bet. If I try returning to the workforce, recruiters may think I was fired and couldn’t get a job for an year. Writings like these will make it difficult for me to return to corporate civilization if things don’t work out. Yet, here I am. Writing. Betting.

I don’t yet know the specifics of what I will do during the break. Maybe I’ll end up being an excellent cook. Or a poet. Maybe I’ll get rid of my habit of daydreaming.

I plan to work out the details over the next one month. I’ll share my plan here. Watch out this space for more.