Welcome, friends, to the inaugural unemployment report!

Today is my first day away from work. I spent most of it walking around, and then I went to a yoga class. I felt ill at ease walking, as if I was the whole time trying to escape. At yoga, the guy talked to us about the beginning of the bhagavad gita. He described the central thesis as resisting inaction in the face of uncertainty. The character, arjuna, finds himself in a battlefield, where he will be complicit in the death of many people regardless of what he does next, but he cannot stop. Action is required of him anyways. We are told that the only way you lose yourself is through inaction¹.

I am about to have a lot of time. The same amount of time, but no clear course to pursue in spending it. I hope to spend it really well, or at least well enough to do the things that I want to do and be an alive person in the world with hopes and dreams. To think of my life as more of a project.

In service of this, I’ll be making weekly posts detailing what I am doing, so that if I’m not doing good things, you can make tsk tsk noises at me, and I can make them at myself also as I’m writing. I plan for each one to contain a retrospective of what was done in the past week, and then some broad goals for the coming week.

I don’t think I’m really going to be very highly output-oriented for the near term. I want to desire more than I want to accomplish. I want a changed orientation towards the world, where I have more things I’m excited about, and am somehow productively engaged in the pursuit of these things. I do think most of the time, producing outputs is by far the best way to fulfill these goals, but I’m also open to exploring nonstandard approaches. I want to have good thoughts about the world and feel positively about things.

I would like to do whatever is highest leverage for me at any given time. I think often this is resolving Maslow issues, stuff like going outside and talking to people and things that give me the psychological foundation to pursue more noble ambitions. This is of course a balance but I think I’m basically not the type of person who is ever in danger of too much social interaction time, so for now I basically approve of maximizing this. Being a person in the world and experiencing things is the point of it all anyways.

This past week was my last week at my job. Main accomplishments include:

• doing a bunch of really annoying offboarding tasks re: account management and 2fa for infinite cloud services and such
• trying to have grace with my friends for being cold and emotionally distant with me after I said I was leaving, since I know it’s downstream of them caring a lot about the work and thinking of me as important to it, which are both good things in the long run.
• having broadly unproductive thoughts about my trajectory in the world, and trying to think about the future

Next week, I want to

• spend a lot of time walking around
• start reading a lot more (~15 hours maybe?)
• bake something fun
• take a bit of a gander at the job market more generally to see if there are things I feel excited about
• make progress coming up with good projects to do. List many options. Maybe the goal for the end of the week will be to have concretely committed to a first project².
• write at least a brief retrospective on the Alliance. mainly regarding my relationship to it (I think I had this failure mode of repeatedly trying to convince myself to become more excited about things in a totally futile way), maybe also about project itself, but that seems less pressing.
• prepare for a waymo technical interview

On a new job: I am of two minds about this. I think I have this impulse to not find a new job because having a job would be easier, and there’s something more romantic and compelling about struggling against my own lack of purpose/ambition in the more focused arena of vast freedom. This is clearly a bit silly, and certainly in the medium to long term I want and need a job. Jobs are good. Basically I like working, I like having coworkers and chatting to them and having to learn a variety of things in the course of work and all of that.

For Waymo in particular (the only thing I applied to), I feel like there’s a decent chance I could be excited about the mission and there would be wholesome and interesting technical problems that I might like. I do worry that I’ll learn less about myself if I leap back into a type of thing that I’m basically already familiar with (being a software engineer at a normal company). But jobs are a really effective vehicle for interfacing with the world and people in it. How much will I be able to do that on my own? I guess we’ll find out soon. Either way I would like to have a real story for why my next job is the best thing that I could be doing with myself. That story could be “casey totally fails to do anything useful otherwise” but I’m hoping for a better one.

Text me your thoughts and feelings.