Why I Decided to Take an Adult Gap Year
The most common question I get asked nowadays is — how did you decide to take your gap year?
I interpret this as a two-part question: 1) why am I taking an adult gap year and 2) logistically, how did I make it happen. In this post, I will be addressing part 1, the why.
The answer to why I decided to take my gap year is actually kind of complex… or very very simple, depending on how you look at it. Let me explain.
first, the simple answer
Some context about me: Grew up in the suburbs, went to college, studied engineering, started working in big tech right after graduation. I then continued my career across various-sized companies as a product manager for gaming, social media, and communications-related technology platforms, and did that for roughly 6 years.
For as long as I can remember, taking a year off has been something that I have wanted to do. Well, to be more precise, for as long as I have been a working adult (adult defined as post-college graduation life), I have yearned to take a break from work aka personal sabbatical aka time off.
So the short answer is that a part of me has wanted to do this for as long as I can remember. I wanted to take a break, I wanted freedom, I wanted to walk away from my adult responsibilities.
and now for the longer one
Despite having thought about doing this for a long time, it actually wasn’t until last year where I further refined my why.
When I first started dating my partner, I shared with him this gap year dream of mine. With genuine curiosity, he asked why this was something that I wanted to do. Our conversation went something like this (or at least how I remember it going):
👦🏻 Do you want time to travel?
👩🏻 Well yes, but not just that. I will probably travel as part of it.
👦🏻 Are you looking for a career pivot?
👩🏻 No, not really. I actually really like my job.
👦🏻 Do you want to go back to school and learn something new?
👩🏻 No not that either. I mean I could go study something like X, Y, Z, but in some ways I’ve already optimized my current job to align pretty well with my interests.
👦🏻 Are you just burnt out from work and want a break? Because that’s super reasonable too.
👩🏻 Yes, there are days I’m burnt out from work, but that’s not why I want to do this.
👦🏻 Hmm….. business school? I lot of people go to business school after a few years of working as a fun break.
👩🏻 No! I did consider that, but that isn’t going to help me accomplish what I’m looking to do.
👦🏻 So what are you looking forward to doing during the year?
👩🏻 I don’t know… I guess just a break. To reflect on if the direction of my life is going the way I want it to. And yes, rest. There is definitely a part of me that just wants to rest and travel.
In this conversation, we dug deeper into my motivations. While there were many things that I didn’t have the answers to yet, these were the three things that I did know:
I needed it to be a full year of unstructured time for exploration. Not a couple of months between jobs, not one where I had something lined up afterwards. I needed long, unstructured time to explore. I’ve taken three months off work before and it wasn’t enough time to even get bored. I haven’t been bored in years. I don’t even know where my mind would go if I was bored, and I wanted to find out.
★ A big revelation I came to when discussing this point was that for many of my peers, this type of unstructured exploration is exactly what college was for, but I didn’t get this from my undergrad experience. I had gone to a public university that was focused on engineering. I mention this because public universities in the US tend to attract students who come from certain backgrounds due to factors like cost of attendance, educational opportunities, networks, etc. and because engineering programs at these type of institutions tend to focus primarily on preparing their students to get jobs after graduation. This was super evident in the marketing materials of my program, the way that everyone I knew spent their summers interning, and how most of my own college experience was focused on getting a good job. That said, I had a wonderful time in college and yes, my school did do an amazing job at setting up its graduates for a smooth transition into corporate America. I have no regrets with how I spent my time in college and the years following where I worked in tech, but it is also true to say that until now, every decision I made was focused on getting a job. And I didn’t know what it was like making decisions for my life outside of this framework.
This wasn’t the type of exploration I could do while still working my 9-5. Knowing myself, it is really hard for me to have one foot in and one foot out of the things that I do, but I know that when I am excited about something and allow myself to focus on it, amazing outcomes tend to happen. If I kept doing my 9-5 and used my 5-9 to try out different things, I would be spreading myself too thin and probably end up just defaulting to what I had already been doing for the past couple of years; finding reasons (logical and good ones at that) to put off my gap year and continuing down my current trajectory.
I was afraid of regret. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that some significant part of my decision was driven by a healthy dose of fear — the fear that I would look back on my life in 30 years and feel like I just went with the flow. Cause honestly, the path I was on was a good one and I could see myself comfortably walking down it for a long time. But a part of me knew that despite being comfortable, I would always wonder if I should’ve just taken that gap year.
A perfect application of a framework that Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, famously refers to in his own business decision making: the regret minimization framework. Basically, in X years, will I regret not doing Y? When I asked myself this, it was clear that I would probably regret NOT taking the gap year but not the other way around.
So there you have it, part 1 of how I decided to take my adult gap year.
In many ways, there are still more unknowns than knowns. But here I am, doing the thing that I have thought about for so many years, which feels SO freeing. I am intentionally trying to keep my year open and unstructured, resisting the urge to be “productive” and have all the answers right away. Allowing myself to rest physically, mentally, and emotionally. Waking up every morning and thinking about what how I want to seize the day… or not. Letting myself observe and taking note of the world around me, and reflecting on how I fit into it all. And so far it’s been pretty great :)
Let me know if you have any comments or questions below! And stay tuned for the part 2 — how I thought through logistics involved in making it all happen. Thanks for being here~
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