Living on Borrowed Time
Why Getting Laid Off Was the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me
This is a special guest post by Mel Chua, a Being In-Between course alum who traded the safety of a lucrative job supporting other people’s dreams — for the wild ride of chasing his own. Read on to hear what happened.
Being without a job and living off savings feels like living on borrowed time. Every purchase feels like a countdown. Every day without a plan feels like a question mark looming over your future.
But here’s the thing: the borrowed time started adding up a long time ago. Every hour at a job is time traded for money. For dreamers like me, the cost of that time has been forgoing my own dreams, and instead helping someone else achieve theirs.
Assuming the average employee works a 40 hour work week, receives 10 days of paid time off, and an additional 14-20 days of vacation, he/she would spend approximately 1,789 - 1,811 hrs working a year. For someone who starts working at 25 and retires around 65, that’s 71,560 hrs on the low end. That’s 3,000 days (give or take) of your life working towards someone else’s dream. I could go on but you get my drift and I’d rather not do more math-ing.
So WHY do we trade our time for money, working on someone else’s dream?
One word: COMFORT. As humans, our default mode is to find the path of least resistance. A full-time job, especially in tech, has a sneaky way of numbing you to that question. It gives you structure, income, and benefits. It sells you a dream you think you should want: stable income, extended healthcare, a 401k, a modest home, a small family, and a dopey golden retriever named Max.
On the flip side, discovering, planning, executing, and then persisting towards your dream rarely inspires images of comfortable Netflix and Chill nights. With a job we’re not just offered security, we’re given the path, told what the dream is, and we continue to persist in order to subsist (see what I did there?). Chasing a dream, building a life you are proud to call your own is often not very comfortable - in fact, it can be outright painful!
This is why it takes a kick in the proverbial ass to start something of your own. After I lost my job, moped around for a month, I spent the rest of the year meeting with successful entrepreneurs to learn their stories.
There was one common trend: every successful entrepreneur I spoke to could pinpoint the trigger and date when they chose to make a change - a real red pill vs blue pill situation here!
While all the stories were varied, all of them involved hitting a sort of rock bottom, seeing life for what it was, and making the decision to change. This decision always led to an obsession, whether it was to work out 6 hours a day for a year, quit a well paying job as an accountant to open and toil over a dance studio for 5 years, or start a software company with the obsession to increase developer productivity.
Formula: Hit rock bottom. See your situation for what it really is. Make a decision. Obsession with the process.
Now I understand that it may actually be your dream to work at a job, helping someone achieve theirs. There is nothing wrong with this. But this message is a kick in the ass for those who feel that there should be more to life than a 9 to 5. So bear with me - who knows, maybe you’ll discover something new about yourself.
Don’t get me wrong, this money that we work for and (hopefully) save up, has been the reason why I’ve been able to spend the last year exploring and interviewing entrepreneurs. If money = time, I’ve been depositing time in the bank for the last 15 years. I’ve spent the last year making some big withdrawals from my time bank and I’ve used these time withdrawals to refocus myself on how I want to live and remember the rest of my life.
I bet you’re now asking, so what are you actually doing now? Are you living your best Eat, Pray, Love life in Bali? Or just doom scrolling IG like the rest of us?
Unemployment, despite what I used to think, does not necessarily mean being unproductive. In fact, unemployment, paired with purpose, is a dynamite combination for productivity. Over the last few months I’ve “worked” more hours than I ever have when I was employed and being paid. And while I didn’t quite live my Eat, Pray, Love life in Bali, I did learn to embrace my joblessness, and re-discover the dreams I had as a child, before Reality showed up wearing a hoodie, with a job offer and a mortgage in hand.
What dreams did you have for yourself as a child—before “realistic goals” and mortgage payments got in the way?
Was your dream really to build elaborate forms and shiny Submit buttons for a software startup (my last job)? To answer support tickets for a slightly shinier version of Shopify? To work as a deli guy (my first job after high school)?
I know mine wasn’t.
As a kid, I wanted to start a gaming company. Make music videos. Write a novel. Become a detective like Sherlock Holmes (minus the pipe—maybe).
No, I’m not Sherlock Holmes… yet. But in the last year I co-founded a board game company with a friend. I teach social dance weekly at a local dance school, as well as run my own private studio, which I use to film dance videos. I do engineering consulting work to keep myself financially afloat. And hey—I'm writing this blog article (working my way towards becoming a novelist).
Our first card game, Bananarchy, is in pre-launch, check it out here (shameless plug).
It’s by far the most fun and fulfilling “working” experience I’ve had in a long time. I wear many hats: delving in art direction, creating pre-launch market, production and manufacturing strategy, making fancy cost analysis spreadsheets, producing social media videos, hiring and managing a graphic designer and an animator, running play tests of the game, coding and automating our launch and website… amongst many other things.
I don’t know exactly where this path will lead. Losing my six-figure job of five years was my rock bottom, but was also the kick in the ass I needed. I work more hours now than I ever did as a software engineer. But I’m having way more fun and learning a ton.
Because for the first time in a long time, I’m building my dream—not someone else’s.
So if you’ve been laid off, or you’re thinking about quitting, or you just feel stuck—ask yourself:
What was your childhood dream?
It’s still there. It’s just waiting for you to remember.
To contact Mel, or to be one of the first to get a copy of Bananarchy, message him here.
Been through a career transition? Share your story to support others in the same boat.
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