On the Road Again

As I'm about to become a free man again after many years of employment with Symantec, one of the great benefits is to return to being a normal Internet citizen and not to have to suppress all self-expression lest I invite the wrath of my corporate masters. While most employees don't have to self-censor to quite the degree I did, as the individual most associated with such a well-known brand name (and being quite proud of it), it's hard to be open about what you're doing without running afoul of one of the vast numbers of things Forbidden By Company Policy on Pain of Instant Dismissal.

Not that I have much desire to talk about my time there; after all the recent years of struggle and stress I'm quite happy to draw a veil over that for now. Instead, I'm savouring the ability to just be a normal human being again, or at least as close to human normality as I can manage.

The other thing I have to consider now having been laid off is what employment to seek. I'm not considering that particularly deeply yet, though: one of the things my significant other had planned for November was that the two of us would go on a cruise. Having been the sort of person who never takes all his allocated vacation time, I was a little unsure when she proposed it but the idea had been growing on me.

Since we'd scheduled this months ago, and it's all paid for and non-refundable, quite how to fit starting new employment around the trip will be an interesting exercise. Browsing around job sites shows that as you'd expect there appear to be very few companies in New Zealand who are doing things that require the kind of ability I have, and fewer still where the work could provide the kind of challenge I desire, so that will probably mean either going back to some kind of start-up venture or applying to a firm based (or at least with offices) in Australia.

As I'd been contemplating that, an interesting link appeared in my feed reader this morning: an article from Cal Newport's Study Hacks blog (which is always interesting, and whose philosophy of developing excellence fits well with how I've been striving to attain mastery in my chosen field for the past 30 years) mentioned this:

In other words, when you go through life thinking “if I can make it through this, things will be better later,” you eventually forget what “better” means.

Given where I'm at now coming out of years of stressful, grinding slog, maybe that's something I should be thinking about. I've never got the "life" part of "work/life balance" particularly well sorted out, so I should probably start thinking about that for once.