Here’s To Leaving
I’m starting somewhere new, which I will talk about soon, but I wanted to first talk about something I’ve been thinking about a lot: what happens when you leave.
I’ve left four jobs in my life, five if you count my short stint at Gracenote, and have noticed the “leaving” — whether because you decided to or you were “managed out” with a non-renewal of a contract — has the same feel: it sucks.
I’m terrible at leaving things.
There are certain people that as much as they talk about work/life balance, really have a work-to-live/live-to-work balance. People who get bored easily, so applying themselves to something else is easier than doing any work on their interior self. People who like to be among others doing things for even more people.
People like me in other words. I enjoy working. I like working with people, and seeing what all these ideas slamming together can do.
When it works it's great. Sometimes it doesn’t work so well, and that sucks. But what I realize anytime I leave a job — no matter how bad the situation there had become or will become — the “doing nothing” is always way, way worse than doing something you may not 100% enjoy. It’s the divide-by-zero error in the work/life balance, and I hate it.
“Doing nothing” is always way, way worse than doing something you may not 100% enjoy.
I got through it, so will you. And here’s how.
Follow your Curiosity
Take everything that you did for a living and put it aside. You don’t do that anymore. Now: what didn’t you have the headspace to pursue when you were otherwise occupied? Dive into that. Lean into curiosity.
For me that was gaming, and I dove headfirst into the culture and that world. Everything from making my own games in Unreal Engine, playing games that had recently come out as well as diving into many aspects of gaming culture, starting with Twitch.
Find and Follow the White Rabbits
At some point, something will jump out at you that sparks a moment of inspiration. For me, it was a variety Twitch streamer in a college dorm room that my son watched. What I saw was a teenager bending a new form of entertainment and media in ways that were probably instinctive to him, but totally foreign to me.
Side note: I also found some optimism, which has been in short supply lately. This teen (ImagineRC) has a supportive family, an active, engaged and supportive community, is honest about his mental health and his life, and in my interactions seems to be a genuinely nice person.
Imagine that? Being nice!
He’s not much older than my son, and its nice to see that half a continent away, there’s other young people finding their way through the world they’ve been left, making the most of things and creating community, culture and art along the way. We should hope there’s hundreds-of-thousands of ImagineRC communities, and less of Elon’s.
Diving into that culture, I found the dusty forgotten corners where all the interesting things happen. Private SMP servers, cross-game and cross-studio mods, Discord servers. This eventually bled into the other dark corners around generative AI, as these areas are all starting to merge together.
Trust Your Instinct
I’ve been in media long enough to know that the most interesting stuff happens when people fight against the safeguards put in place around new technology.
All of this, to me, reminded me of the early days of file sharing. The private Torrent trackers, private Gnutella servers, zero-day Warez underground communities. It all had that distinct feeling of people — like me — finding these new toys and breaking them in new and interesting ways.
As an experiment, I decided to test how long it would take me to make something streamable and entertaining within Unreal Engine. Five hours as it turned out. It was interesting as an experiment, but then if you squint, and look through it toward what could happen when anyone could make a cinematic game in a few hours…
The possibilities are infinite.
Be Patient
The right thing will come about at the right time. I’m a naturally anxious person, so being patient for that to happen was not easy. In fact it drove me crazy. It forced me to confront things I don’t like dealing with within myself, including the remnant traumas from two years of a pandemic and isolation in those early days.
But patience often leads to insights. It forced me to look inward to find clarity rather than outward for purpose. Ultimately, the right thing happened, and all at once, like so many things do.
Enjoy the Silence
Lastly, you don’t get much silence as an adult, especially when you have children. If you have the opportunity, even for a moment, enjoy it. Even if “quiet” is a very loud airplane.
