Year 29

29 has been all about rest: learning how to do it, examining my relationship with it, and practicing it.

Maybe that’s a surprising defining principle for a year filled with the unexpected. I moved from Los Angeles to Portland, trading the only city I’ve called home for one I had no previous relationships in. After Fable unexpectedly shut down operations, I job-searched for the first time since college. I watched ash fall over Eaton Canyon and woke up each January morning with whiffs of smoke, haunted by images of scorched neighborhoods that I used to drive through. I ran a half and full marathon within a year of picking up running. I had to navigate the uncertain tension over Stephanie’s parents’ decision to move to a remote island in Korea. I even started therapy this past month! In retrospect, this year has been dense with impact events; however, as I set out on my next lap around the sun, I’m feeling rested, peaceful, and enthusiastic for another year on this planet.

For the past 4 years, I’ve been practicing a weekly Sabbath. It’s taken many forms over the years, but the temporary respite I experience each week didn’t stand a chance to Chris Boardman’s announcement that Fable was shutting down. Where was the inexplicable peace when my cortisol levels spiked at the thought of making ends meet? Immediately after that All-Hands call, I applied to another PM job and anxiously refreshed the Fable Slack channel, slowly watching it turn into a ghost town.

There was something existential about the “Death of Fable.” You could not have crafted a more ideal job for me and what I wanted to spend my time thinking about everyday, so when that was taken away, I was left wondering who I was. I’ve had similar internal challenges with the other trials of the year – moving came out of examining the influence my environment has over my life; the Eaton Fire forced me to take a hard look at the savings goals I passively put my money into each month. Who was I without a career, a home, or financial security?

After the dust settled at Fable, Stephanie encouraged me to take an extended sabbatical. I complied. And from Halloween until the start of the Eaton Fire, I didn’t think about finding my next job, staying up to date on the world, nor the output of my hands. That period has been the most formative portion of this past year, and it’s why I attribute Year 29 to rest.

I’ve always associated rest-adjacent activities as lazy. In my head, rest came at the opportunity cost of doing something productive. But I was wrong. In modern training theory for running, you only get better from training if you recover from the training.¹ If I don’t rest to recover, I not only risk injury and burnout, I’m losing out on the growth. Fruit had accumulated over the the past 7 years of grinding, and this sabbatical was the harvest.

I was able to disconnect the meaning of my life from the work of my hands. Having this severance for an extended period of time, has given me margin for wonder, delight, and an identity outside of what I do to put food on the table. I’ve been able to fill my day with things like sleep², walking around the neighborhood, baking inspired cakes, reading novels, enjoying creative hobbies, and developing daily habits of prayer and remembrance.

I work in tech, and this year has been particularly disruptive for the industry with the proliferation of AI into the mainstream. I’ve seen many remarks from tech pundits that this year was an incredibly bad one to take a gap year.³ Well, oops… that’s exactly what I did! Coming out of my sabbatical was like stepping into an entirely different universe. I’ve been impressed by so many product demos over the past couple of months; the noise has been tempting to chase. But every time I go down a new rabbit hole – MCPs, agentic workflows, or whatever else tech-twitter cooks up – I compare the burden of keeping up with technology and the light-hearted delight of field recording bees in a lavender field.

I’m not sure how much longer I will continue to work in “tech” nor what that will mean in the next 5 years. However, history has shown that the pace of innovation will only accelerate.⁴ The paradox of these new technologies that should alleviate me from work is that they have made the physical limitations of work endless.⁵

I’m still breaking habits of running at full speed. But my hope is that by practicing rest a majority of this past year, I will be equipped to take on the ever accelerating world around me. My identity, the meaning of my life, and the purpose I wake up with each morning is rooted in how God sees me, not in the things I build with today’s tech.

My prayer for Year 30 is that I would design even more of my life around the person God has uniquely crafted me to be. I’m looking forward to what life will feel like on this side of the work-identity separation. Instead of asking the question “What is my dream job?”… I’ve found myself pondering “What do I want to do with all my time in Portland?”

I feel light, free, and hopeful.