The "Adult Gap Year"

A clever new name for a life-changing habit.

Where I sit now, in Vermont, where I’ve been taking “adult gap years” for a decade.

New York Mag always finds the catchy way in. In a recent piece, they highlighted a trend I’ve seen my friends and I indulge in for the last decade or so, but apparently has recently become popularized on TikTok. The “Adult Gap Year” is the practice of taking significant breaks from your career early on (not necessarily a full year), and structuring a life where you’re not working straight through until retirement.

The title of the article has since been changed to something slightly more irritating: “Meet the 20-somethings taking mini retirements,” which feels a bit off. The people I know who have taken these breaks start in their thirties, once they’re on somewhat-stable financial and professional ground. But regardless of age, I’m thrilled to see this concept encouraged on a broader cultural scale (even if all my pitches on it were rejected years ago!!) because I regularly want to shout it from the rooftops. A career-break—which felt completely anathema to me the first time I did it—more or less changed my life.

The first time I took extended time off I was 32 (ten years ago). The creative itch I’d felt but suppressed since childhood was flaring out of control with what felt like a resurgence of feminism and my life generally not going to plan (lol, a plan). I took two months off to create for the first time since grade-school: writing tv pilots, essays, the scraps of my first novel, comedy sketches, and even doing (I’m sorry) standup comedy. Then, I went back to work. Three years later, it happened again (minus the standup; you’re welcome). My role was eliminated and I was given the option to switch roles or take severance. After that first break all I wanted was more time to write so severance felt like a dream come true. I spent 4 months working on my first novel, then found a part-time consulting gig to pay the bills. Before I went back to full-time work, I saved up and spent 6 months editing and querying my second novel (my first was dead in the water). Without these extended periods of time off, I’m not sure I’d have discovered my love for writing, let alone been able to pursue it in earnest.

Somewhere in the midst of all this my relation to work shifted fundamentally. As I explained in the most read post of this newsletter (“Unpacking the Day Job”), my work changed from something that defined me—my career—to something I did for money—my day job. An uncomfortable shift when you’ve long equated your self-worth with your professional accomplishments.

A few weeks ago—a year, almost to the day, after I sold my novel (please buy it here!!)—my full-time employer cut a chunk of our workforce, including my product, and I was let go. Luckily, I’d been aggressively saving in preparation for my book launch, so instead of scrambling for a new job, I’m taking advantage of another “gap” before the launch.

In line with the recent spate of narratives about women, not losing their ambition, exactly, but shifting away from the typical capitalist patriarchal definitions of it, my identity and pride are no longer wrapped up in my professional whereabouts; a change that feels startlingly common for women my age. As so many friends and I entered our mid-thirties with anxiety—Why do I hate the job I worked so hard to get? Why can’t I find a stable relationship? What if having kids isn’t actually for me?—we’ve left it with a profound sense of relief, understanding that the life we originally planned for ourselves, that we worked so hard in that first decade of adulthood to grasp, is only one version of a life, and rarely the right one.

The first time I stepped away from my career I was terrified: I’d worked so hard, what if I was throwing that all away? It helped that many of my closest friends were (and are) on a similar journey—shoutout to Grace, Rumana, Zee, to name a few—traveling the world and discovering new versions of themselves in the process. What I learned was that my old career was still there if I needed it, but it was also (shoutout to my MBA) a sunk cost—already incurred, no reason to stay miserable. Those friends and others have gone back to start entirely new careers after climbing and excelling in their first, finding work better aligned with who they are now, rather than who they thought they should be way back when.

Privilege is an obvious topic when it comes to taking extended time-off: anyone who can afford to do so has it. Most of the people I know who have taken this path grew up in immigrant or low-income homes, we had to support ourselves financially from the start—no reliance on parents or partners—so we pursued tedious but high-income careers out of college (tech, law, business), and couldn’t afford “gap years” when we were young. Though none of us have the kind of money to stop working entirely (not even close), the practicality (and misery) of our early choices offer windows of freedom now—a gift. Also, most people I know doing this don’t have kids. For me, the freedom to live cheaply and take time off, continues to be an input into the kids decision.

The “gap year" does not need to be a one-time thing, nor should it be if you’re the type of person that finds it useful, or, like me, life-changing. The first time I took time-off, I was just starting to discover what I liked doing beyond drinking, running, dating and other knee-jerk after work activities. In my second break, I was laser-focused on my novel, determined to be more productive—still applying a capitalist mindset to a creative life—which left me frustrated beyond belief that I wasn’t spinning words into gold daily, and my depression soared. By my third break, I’d learned that hours-worked did not directly relate to quality of work; I was easier on myself. Each time, a different part of me opened up. Now, approaching this sacred freedom again, it feels less like a short-term experiment and more like a fundamental tenet of how I want to live: less money, more time.

A big part of the fear in taking extended time-off, I think, is how it will look to employers, so let me dispel some concerns (and validate others). Most employers don’t mind time-off nearly as much as people fear! Truly. Culture has changed enough that if you say you took a year off to find yourself, or whatever, people get it, even respect it. BUT, it has limits. Unfortunately, it’s not great to have a resume where you switch jobs every few years (every now and then it’s fine, but 5 jobs with 1-2 years each, for example, gets suspicious in most industries), and companies usually don’t allow employees to take extended time off. So if you want to take breaks frequently, you’re in a bind unless you go freelance. This is a bummer for everyone’s sake. If a company wants creative, bold, multi-faceted employees (as they so often claim), they should appreciate a life where those qualities are demonstrated in and out of work, and foster periods of time where they’re cultivated.

But capitalism is wrought with hypocrisy. Tech companies wanting out-of-the-box strategies to do the same old thing. Executives insisting they care, then discarding a neat percentage-point of people to hit a metric. A person’s well-being is rarely the core motivation for an institution, and so we have to make it our own. It’s hard to even understand what that means— well being— let alone fight for it, when we’re immersed in the validation of capitalism, but a little time off, then a little more, and we begin to learn.

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