I was interviewed by a sociology professor at RMIT yesterday. It's for an upcoming book about people who leave the corporate rat race and do something "alternative" with their lives - generally in the sense of less conventionally "successful".
It was an interesting experience. I told her upfront that it would be better if she asks me specific questions than if I try to just tell the story, because that would lead to some serious rambling. In the end, it was exactly as I expected - many threads of thought tying together to give a fairly decent picture of what happened, albeit all quite disorganised and general.
One thing I realised was that - unlike certain other people who leave the corporate rat race to become starving artists or photographers or whatever - I didn't do it to follow any specific creative "passion". It was more of a push than a pull so to speak. Being pushed out of the corporate grind by burnout, rather than pulled out of it by ideas of concentrating on something else. ie Something more personally meaningful.
Then again, in a sense it could also be said that I simply appreciate going with the flow. Being poor and free rather than a comfortable slave. So on some very abstract, Zen-like level, having all that relatively aimless and "unproductive" time off was a pull force of sorts. The past year has been perhaps the strangest of my life - and I'm starting to think that the aimlessness and emptiness of some of it was necessary. Necessary to create the headspace for all the personal and "occupational" epiphanies that I've had.
In the end, she asked me if I'm overall happier now. It's something I haven't even asked myself directly ever since leaving the corporate world in January 2011. But yes. I am. Absolutely!
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