The Value of Disappearing

The unexpected benefits of escaping from it all (and what to put back in its place). [Don't Work: Part 03]

Jul 28, 2024

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Series: Don’t Work | Part: 3 of 10 | Reading Time: 5 mins
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This is part of the series, Don’t Work, exploring our identity and meaning around work.

“You should leave the country,” she told me.

This was not a line in a bank heist movie, but what someone told me in the middle of my sabbatical.

Three months into taking time off from work, things were feeling off. I had recently left my Very-Important-Person job, with visions of doing the next-more-important thing.

But the direction I was headed in didn’t feel right.

I didn’t know at the time, but I was in the middle of a significant transition, and struggled to explain my situation to others, let alone understand it myself.

I had made a plan! But the further I got into the plan, the more the plan felt wrong.

Did I really want the things I thought I wanted?

“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” - Joseph Campbell

I. Disappear from the rhythms of life

I reached out to my old executive coach, Anne Loehr, for advice. She had gone through a transition in her past and had a sense for what I was going through.

She recommended I leave the country. To get away and distance myself from it all.

While I didn’t end up physically escaping, the message was clear: I needed to disrupt the rhythms of my life and disappear.

But this was counterintuitive to how I was used to solving problems.

I was an expert in plowing through unease and overcoming obstacles. I could always outwork my problems. Suppressing distracting questions, and shoving discomfort back down where it came from.

“Shut the fuck up and get back to work!”

Instead, I took a sledgehammer to the architecture of my life. My days, instead of being perfectly choreographed to squeeze out the most output, became a vacuum of emptiness.

II. Disappear from your network

When I was going through my transition, I received a lot of support.

But much of it was support in the wrong direction.

We value being connected. We love to feel part of the conversation. Staying so relevant that we are needed, for some important decision or input, at a moment's notice.

But we don’t realize that our networks also create a bubble of expectations.

We see the people we know, what they are doing, how they live, and that becomes the available universe for us.

At the same time, we soak up their implicit expectations upon us. We continually ask: how will they judge our actions and choices? Playing these imperceptible status games, our movements are constricted, whether we realize it or not.

Our network can be so useful, but also so suffocating.

In my case, I was using my old network for a new problem.

Let me be clear: I don’t blame anyone. In fact, I’m grateful for the people who wanted to help. All support came with good intentions. They just had no idea what I was going through.

For example, one well-meaning colleague kept sending me networking introductions. “This would be a great person to talk to,” they’d say. While I appreciated the support, every intro pulled me back into a world I was trying to step away from. Each suggestion felt like another tether to my old identity and the expectations that came with it.

I needed something different.

What I needed was less advice and connection, and more space for exploration.
What I needed was to do the opposite of everything I had done before: no more deadlines, metrics, goals, and plans.
What I needed was to remove the voices from outside and allow the voices inside to emerge.
What I needed was to go off into the wilderness and disappear.

And in that disappearing, I was able to refind my way.

III. Disappear from structure

If you’re like me, your working life is packed, start to finish, with obligations.

The structure of our lives, built up through years of habits and increasing commitments (willingly or unwillingly), accumulate over time into an overflowing cupboard of responsibility.

We feel like we can’t get away from it all, let alone have a little moment to breathe.

The structure becomes repressive.

So what happens when you remove the structure entirely?

At first, it felt unsettling. While the old composition of my day felt like an authoritative dictator, it also left me comforted by certainty and motion. Sometimes, that’s the benefit of habits. We can just wake up and thoughtlessly follow the protocol, over and over again.

But over time, removing structure created space for my instincts to return.

Because how do we spend all this open time, free from obligations? How we want and need, of course.

The space allowed me to approach days spontaneously, letting them take me wherever I wanted to take them. What felt right to tackle today? Did I have the energy and ambition for something big? Or feel like I should slow down and putter about?

I could author each moment and flow with my days, rather than be run by them. I could explore new activities. I could experiment with potential futures. Or I could do none of the above and blissfully waste my day away.

Maybe instead of accumulating more responsibility, you need less. Maybe instead of adding new habits, you need fewer. Maybe instead of more structure, you need more wide spaces of time.

IV. What to put back in its place

Within the emptiness, I slowly added back a few areas. For me, it came down to the areas of my life that were essential and appropriate for this stage\. Maybe yours would be different.

I called them the “4 Fs” - my last name is Foerster and alliteration helps me remember things (admittedly, I had to jam the last one into the framework…).

Here is the model I used:

Here’s what an example day looked like:

For those of you who feel like taking extended time off is out of reach, I feel for you. The bad news is I’m not sure I could really have done it all without a big disconnect, like a sabbatical. The good news is that you can start incorporating these practices into the margins of your life, even if you can’t disappear completely.

The point of all this, is that disappearing allows you to return to what matters and to fully experience all that you may have pushed aside.

When you give yourself the opportunity to explore, you regain perspective. You become more grounded in who you are and how you interact with the world.

This renewed perspective becomes the foundation for you to build upon your next steps.

In the grand scheme of things, disappearing will barely matter to others, but can profoundly impact your life.

At least, it did mine.

Now, some of you might be thinking: “this sounds so unproductive!” And you’re right. How to be unproductive is something I’ll cover next.