| I also went on a year-ish long sabbatical after burning out at the current job, also at age 30 with no spouse or kids. At first, I just went on walks in local parks/gardens/streets, woke up late and sat in sunny cafes. I started studying kung fu. I played more music. I picked up old math problems (I had left academia; I have a PhD in math) and worked on them again; found some new ones too. I wrote up the results and put them on a blog. I got interested in the idea of translating animal sounds to human speech sounds a la style transfer or CycleGAN; that culminated in https://humantoanimal.com/ and also involved learning a whole bunch of new technologies. I tried selling services as a consultant but didn't land any clients — there's probably a whole bunch of reasons that that didn't work for me. After about a year of being unemployed I started applying for full-time roles again and now I'm working as a machine learning engineer at a household-name tech company. The flavor of burnt-out that I had was that of constantly thinking of work-related problems and how to solve them; that feeling went away after a few weeks. Being outside in nature during the workweek and during business hours really helped. Some of the things I occupied myself with were things I had wanted to do but hadn't had the time/energy for — more time outside, studying kung fu, more music — but the other things came about after idle thoughts about things that interested me. Send me an email if you want to chat in more detail! |
i've found a similar thing after exiting work situations where i'd gotten into a bad rhythm of too-much-thinking-about-the-day-job .
can take a few weeks for your brain to switch. i agree that nature helps, doing physical exercise out in nature can be even better (swimming, jogging, cycling).