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How difficult is it to return to work life from an absence like this? I see many young people living and traveling in vans but I think about what they will retu

by Ajay-p 3y ago

How difficult is it to return to work life from an absence like this? I see many young people living and traveling in vans but I think about what they will return to. I see that they work on the road (planting trees to example) but I feel it will be difficult to return to a career, and fixed lifestyle.

empath-nirvana 3y ago
I took 3 months to go backpacking in Central America after I hit a dead end in my career. I talked about it in the first interview when I came back, and I think we spend more time talking about my experiences backpacking than we talked about programming in that interview. I also met my wife (who was also backpacking) on that trip, now happily married with 3 kids and making about 4.5x more a year than I was when I quit to go travel. I think there is a point, probably somewhere after 6-9 months where employers might see it less as a fun 'sabbatical' and more of like "this person doesn't really want a job", though.
yardie 3y ago
I took a year off to travel in my 20s. When I was done it took 6 months to find a job in my field. I then took 2 years off to travel in my late 30s. And it took 1 month to find a job in my field. The companies that used that time off against me I probably wouldn't be happy working there anyway. The others that were curious about that special time were regaled with stories of being a fish out of water or finding solutions to real problems with nothing but duct tape and hand tools. And, yes returning to a fixed, landbased, lifestyle has not been easy but it works for us, right at this moment. I know I can travel again. I've seen the greener grass and know I can leave this life behind and go back to it at any time.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
I spent my twenties hitchhiking the world, with not even a van, I was often sleeping in my tent or at mosques and gurdwaras. Along the way I made a lot of connections and I learned several languages to proficiency. Hitchhiking is, after all, talking to people every day, often relative elites in their countries if they own their own car. That international experience eventually got me steady work, to this day. My tree-planting, fruit-picking, busking, or Christmas-lights-rigging friends generally managed to move on to very respectable careers, or simply living from renting out property they bought -- if you were making a couple of hundred euro a day, but living on 5€ as a shoestring traveler, you could eventually buy a flat and begin the real estate investment game. We all frequently joke about how bourgeois we have become today. That said, my circle was all Eastern Europeans, and things might be harder for USA Americans where cost of living is high and blank stretches on your CV are viewed with suspicion.

by Ajay-p 3y ago

empath-nirvana 3y ago

I took 3 months to go backpacking in Central America after I hit a dead end in my career. I talked about it in the first interview when I came back, and I think we spend more time talking about my experiences backpacking than we talked about programming in that interview. I also met my wife (who was also backpacking) on that trip, now happily married with 3 kids and making about 4.5x more a year than I was when I quit to go travel. I think there is a point, probably somewhere after 6-9 months where employers might see it less as a fun 'sabbatical' and more of like "this person doesn't really want a job", though.

yardie 3y ago

I took a year off to travel in my 20s. When I was done it took 6 months to find a job in my field. I then took 2 years off to travel in my late 30s. And it took 1 month to find a job in my field. The companies that used that time off against me I probably wouldn't be happy working there anyway. The others that were curious about that special time were regaled with stories of being a fish out of water or finding solutions to real problems with nothing but duct tape and hand tools. And, yes returning to a fixed, landbased, lifestyle has not been easy but it works for us, right at this moment. I know I can travel again. I've seen the greener grass and know I can leave this life behind and go back to it at any time.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

I spent my twenties hitchhiking the world, with not even a van, I was often sleeping in my tent or at mosques and gurdwaras. Along the way I made a lot of connections and I learned several languages to proficiency. Hitchhiking is, after all, talking to people every day, often relative elites in their countries if they own their own car. That international experience eventually got me steady work, to this day. My tree-planting, fruit-picking, busking, or Christmas-lights-rigging friends generally managed to move on to very respectable careers, or simply living from renting out property they bought -- if you were making a couple of hundred euro a day, but living on 5€ as a shoestring traveler, you could eventually buy a flat and begin the real estate investment game. We all frequently joke about how bourgeois we have become today. That said, my circle was all Eastern Europeans, and things might be harder for USA Americans where cost of living is high and blank stretches on your CV are viewed with suspicion.