I did have a one year sabbatical. I hiked and volunteered on farms mostly. I worked at a animal refuge farm in India and a goat farm in Montana. I hiked in the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, and Tetons. I hiked in Canyon, Texas and at Glacier too. I headed south for winter and explored the civic side of the civil war and the civil rights movement, hoping to learn something that would help me understand what was happening in our country. I toured Little Rock High, Fort Sumter, White Haven and Jackson’s Barracks. I read Lincoln’s speeches. I learned to cross country ski and visited my mom a lot. I went to Virginia with my family and took a detour to DC with my sister while we were there.

I’m back to working now. I moved to live near the mountains so I can hike and I volunteer on an animal refuge farm every week. My mom passed not too long after. I am forever grateful for that experience.

Procrastinate for eleven months, panic at the last minute, ask for a do over, fail, then try to learn Rust in 3 days and program a roguelike.

Buy a minivan, remove back seats. Add a bed and a battery bank, a small travel fridge and a hob for cooking then start camping at the nearest national parks. Refine my load out and start venturing farther and farther out.

I’m assuming money is not an option?

Learn shit. Painting class, cooking class, poetry, random community college shit. Hire a language tutor if I could. And I’d hire a personal trainer and chef, since I’d have time to try and work on myself. Maybe a coding boot camp if I can keep up, so I can come back with a whole new career. I think I’d make that my goal. Dabble in as many things as I can to see what I like. And I also just like learning random shit.

When I have three months left, I’ll take a trip to visit all the places I’ve been interested in moving to. I’d hope to come back healthier and smarter, in some way.

I would also leave myself two weeks to just be before I had to go back to real life.

I just quit yesterday with nothing else lined up. Gonna take a WHOLE MONTH for healing (isn’t it ridiculous how ridiculous that feels?) and then figure out my next move. I wanna build an app or something.

Spend time with my kids and play video games while they’re at school

I would spend my year trying to turn my side business into my actual business then I couldn’t quite my job and work for myself doing what I do now but for more money

I’d probably start designing and building a rolling ball clock/ sculpture, then hit some sort of obstacle and switch to making a self recirculating eddy current tube, get frustrated and try to design and build an electronically commutated counter rotating propeller driver, get frustrated and try to build a garage sized 3d printer, get frustrated and try to build a delayed action door closer get frustrated and try to build a co-planar compound cycloidal reducer, get frustrated and then forget my wife’s anniversary until 4pm the day before.

Hey, I actually did this! It was the best time of my life.

My aim was to migrate to south america, specialize in my career and get in/stay in shape.

I spent my days going to the gym, learning spanish, doing impromptu streams on twitch (I found a little community in my preperations to quit my job) , and I did travel to the country I wanted to migrate to and to NY to see a band that rarely plays live, visit my family in a different country and to visit my bud that lived in scandinavia.

I spent a month with my family preparing a portfolio.

I saved money during my career, about $16k over several years,and figured, if time is money, money is time.

I’m happy to answer any questions.

I’ll go nuts and get myself hospitalized in a psych ward

Nothing! I’m super-serious, and I plan on doing exactly that for the following 6 months (quit my job, taking a break to address burnout and reorient): nothing.

By that, I mean I’ll allow myself to get as much sleep as I humanly can, try to feed myself healthier food (and more regularly), develop my hobbies (mini painting, playing the bass, sketching, writing), re-establish a semblance of a social life by exploring the city and its options, spending more time with friends… Pretty much just living life. No goals, no quotas, no deadlines, no performance metrics, no side-hustle, no Work™.

A full year of multi month hikes across the world. I want to see it all and meet new people.

I can recommend a big stupid project where it’s not a big deal if you fail.

Until recently, for me that would’ve meant “run Windows programs on Android,” mashing together Wine and e.g. Unicorn Engine… but now there’s like six different “userland emulators” vying for preference. FEX-emu, Box86, others with even sillier names.

I did manage a bespoke 8-bit FPS. That only took about two months. And then I’ve been idly tweaking it over the last two years. Splitscreen multiplayer, as a joke, was maybe not the best idea.

What’d take both time and space is some extremely low-end VR. I am convinced that Quest-ish headsets could cost, like, fifty bucks. The big players keep iterating clever hacks from a decade ago. Solving those problem, instead of avoiding those problems. Light should be collimated by default, which means a point source, which is any single LED. Rendering has to be detached from software performance, which means projecting the nearby world to e.g. floating dots instead of directly making a flat image. Inside-out tracking is at least the right idea, but it doesn’t have to be especially good in order to ground an inertial estimate.

Technically not a sabbatical, but I saved up a bunch of money, quit my job, and have been studying abroad in Japan.

Sleep, play with my cats, hang out with my wife, organize all my shit, prune my emails and pictures, finish my homelab and the other tech projects I have going on, go to Disney a bunch.