Sense and Sabbaticality

Dear Admonister,

Life is going by far too quickly. I'm overtaken by events and ideas. I feel I just need to pause and reorient. I should take a sabbatical to find myself and my purpose.

Please admonish,
— Self-caring Sabbatiser

𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔯 Self-caring Sabbatiser,

I wholeheartedly concur — you should take a sabbatical. A sabbatical is the best error you will make in your life.

Nothing beats life's rat-race like a well-deserved spectator's perspective. You cannot really "miss out" if you actively tap out, now can you?

You are in full control. You choose to take this sabbatical. You will recharge and be ready to restart life in no time — and indeed, at your own time. A sabbatical is simply a tactical repositioning by advancing backward. It is nothing like eight unpaid months of burn-out recovery.

And you are full of energy and motivation. Your plans are just inspiring enough to pretend goal-setting, and vague enough to dodge commitment. After all, you wouldn't want to fall from one daily churn into another, now would you?

You're ready for a student's life 2.0 — without the homework, with more wrinkles, and less hair. You will travel the world and make new friends — and not be a stay-at-home couch potato. You will acquire new hobbies and skills — not rehash the one piano song transcription of that anime you once liked but forgot the name of.

You are eager to use this opportunity to find new answers to new questions. You certainly won't ruminate on the same old questions you've been asking for the past decade.

Undoubtedly, you are right — the life as you know it doesn't quite befit you. But here's a conundrum: if you knew how to live life well, you wouldn't need a sabbatical, now would you? Or conversely: if you can't organise ordinary life to your satisfaction, why would you trust yourself to organise a satisfying sabbatical?

After all — you are still you! You still have the same habits — and the same relapses. Your priorities and preferences remain unchanged. All your qualities and baggage stay static as usual. You are still enslaved to the same personality that brought you in the rat-race — and that now demands you escape its shackles by taking a sabbatical.

You suffer from success that feels increasingly alien, automatic, and undeserved. Congratulations, you are accidentally competent — but luckily, still too naïve to understand why. You perform beyond what is sustainable or natural. You overexploit yourself because you feel stressed about potential failure. A bit like a kamikaze pilot being worried about an empty fuel tank.

You should be stressed but for a different reason. The sabbatical you need is not a pause for resting or relaunching life, but rather one of practising failure. You simply have not yet experienced the exact setbacks in life that truly expose and test your individual limits, priorities, expectations, and place in this world.

A sabbatical is appropriate — with an important caveat. You thought it to be a jumpstart of a new chapter in life — and it may be — but disregard that. Instead, regard the sabbatical as the swan song of the life that was, the cold ice bath after a sauna, the Admonister after hope.

You will change your life — if you have the sensible courage to fail properly. Otherwise, you'll be back in the rat-race just in time to fund your next burn-out.