Article
I Left My Job for Several Months to Read Philosophy
It was Thursday, 31 March 2022, when I handed over the last of my responsibilities to my colleagues, closed my laptop and went to the library. I left my job for several months and immersed myself in philosophy. And I am immensely grateful for it. Today I am, like most people, on a merry-go-round, and it is hard for me to stop and think about the fundamental questions of my own life. That makes me value even more the chance life gave me in 2022.
That chance was a consequence of a decision I had made earlier, the decision to study philosophy at university.
And it was possible because of the trust I had built at work. They believed I would keep my word and come back, which is what happened. For that reason they did not look for a replacement, even though they were in a difficult position.
Deciding to Study Philosophy Was the Best Decision I Ever Made
Today I see that even more clearly than I did when I was making it.
It was not easy to explain that step to my family, I have written about it.
And the fact that most people find it hard to understand is probably what led me to write this article.
There Is No Time for Anything Now
People in their working years are always chasing something. They do not stop to think about their own life and about the world. They are on a merry-go-round, just as I am now.
The time we give to ourselves and to the most fundamental questions is a luxury we may allow ourselves in retirement, but rarely during our working years.
The Luxury I Gave Myself in My Most Productive Years
At twenty-six I left my job for several months and spent my days on philosophy from morning until evening. It was connected with preparing for my final examinations and the defence of my master's thesis.
It was spring, and I often sat in a park, in Riegrovy sady or on Střelecký ostrov. I read, I watched the people around me, and then I read again. I asked myself things I did not normally ask. It was time very well spent. The fact that it was connected with getting a formal qualification was a bonus. And yet that formal qualification was, in a sense, what forced me to step off the working merry-go-round. Because I need to concentrate on things properly, not move from topic to topic, from the computer to the book and back again, that does not work for me.
But the time itself, which I spent with a book and with myself, was something more than studying for examinations. Something far more important for my life. I had the chance to stop.
The Early Retirement That Is Now Also Called a Micro-Retirement
My colleagues still remember that period as the time when Richard was in early retirement.
Join the Library
Full access to my findings, personal stories, and what I learn from the people I meet.
Join the Library · €29.99 per year How I Fell in Love With Her, at First… How do you stop depending on social media? Can… How to Start With AI in a Company: Automating… Fable 5 vs Opus: I Ran the Same Audit… I Ran Object Detection on My Laptop, and Saw… Bot or Human? What My…Get the full article by email and feel free to reply if you want to discuss it further.
Summary
Common questions on this article's topic
What is a micro-retirement?
What do people use a micro-retirement for?
Can you go back to the same job after a career break?
When does it make sense to take a career break?
Why is it so hard to stop and think?
If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.
LinkedIn
Related articles
If I have learned anything from this experience, it is that my life is not driven by something predefined.
Why devote myself to a discipline even its practitioners cannot define?
Is it better to doubt or to act with determination?
More articles
It was September 2023. My life, my work, everything was completely different from now. It was simpler. I owned almost nothing. I needed to film an advert, I went up to a floor inside the company where the product I needed for that advert was, and there I noticed her for the first time. She laughs at me when I describe it like this, but at that moment the universe told me, that is her.
How and why I am gradually leaving social media and the big platforms. When I read that Meta is testing a new way to charge for organic posts that link outside its platform, it confirms how right I was to become steadily less dependent on the big platforms and on social media. It does not mean I have left them completely. It means that whether or not I stay in touch with my readers depends on them less and less, and today almost not at all.
One of my family members described a firm that has its data in several different tools, and its employees still join it by hand, in spreadsheets. That is the ordinary state of firms. When somebody tells such people not to do it by hand and to use AI, they will not understand. Most firms do not even have the basic connectors between the tools they use. These firms need help with AI transformation.
The same task, two models. Fable 5 against Opus 4.8. On paper Fable is the better model, with a larger context and stronger specs. And still it lost. Opus handled the task with a single round of checking for 721,000 tokens, while Fable needed nine rounds and burnt through 2.78 million tokens. The difference was not in the model, but in how I set the task. And I know it, because I measured it.
A few weeks ago I installed a small local AI model on my laptop that watches a live camera feed. I turned the webcam on in the dark, and in near total darkness it recognised me and the objects in the room. That such things exist, I have known for a long time. What opened my eyes was the accessibility. I installed it in one prompt, free, and it runs entirely on my machine, sending data nowhere.
I once wrote about building my own privacy-friendly analytics tool. It had bot detection from the first version, yet it was not enough. Direct visits took a strangely high share of my traffic. When someone claims that 20% of their visits are bots and 80% are humans, I used to think the same. Today I would say the opposite ratio is closer to the truth. This is how I got there.
I have Heidegger and my notebook beside me. I am asking where all of this is heading, where artificial intelligence is taking us.
Seventy per cent. That is where the first AI output begins, even when you give it the full company context and the best examples from the past. We are talking about the kind of output that cannot be defined programmatically. It is more complex. Often it is creative work. On one repeated type of output I reached eighty per cent within a week. Every further percentage point is harder than the one before.
For a long time we treated the internet as the main road. The place where work and relationships happen. Yet most of what we see on it today is, or soon will be, AI-generated: text, images, profiles and comments. The internet is turning into an online game full of bots, where you cannot be sure that a human is on the other side of anything. So I ask: was the online world the main road, or only a temporary detour that part of us will return from, back offline?
A few days ago I interviewed a senior marketer. An experienced man, years of practice. I asked him about AI. He said he barely uses it. He had one bad experience with the output and decided he was too senior for it to add value when it is not perfect. I know the other side too: professionals who automate everything that can be automated.
Four days in Catalonia. No computer, no AI, almost no social media. I bought this notebook so that I could write down what I would think about, and what I would come across and learn on the trip.