I tried to take a year off. I built a production website instead.

When I told people I was leaving Nintendo, I got the same question over and over again: what are you going to do? My canned answer was that I was going to meditate in the woods. By that I meant: get a tremendous amount of time back, practice Zen, hopefully get a little enlightened, and see what happens. My last day was over a year ago on July 3rd, 2025. Enlightenment did not show up. Five lessons did, which I gather is what one gets instead.

Lesson 1. Time cannot be managed. It can only be spent badly.

Advertising never shows you the product, it shows you the life, more time with the people you love, more time with yourself, because the thing being sold with any product is time. I had bought that argument, so I went and got the time, and then I spent it the way I had spent the previous twenty-five years, by optimizing it. I left a job to get out from under a schedule, and the first thing I built was a schedule. The Zen answer, as far as I can tell, is to have no expectation about how the time gets used. Go do stuff, or don't. The catch is that the less you do, the more you think you should be doing, and the more you do, the more you wonder what you were trying to get away from, and there is no setting on the dial where this stops. I checked.

Lesson 2. You might die.

Three weeks after my last day on the job, I got severe headaches and felt like I had Covid, tested negative, and kept going. Eventually I described the symptoms to ChatGPT, which told me to see a doctor. Like, no seriously, go see a doctor, now. So the next day... after I finished the list of chores I had promised my wife I'd do, I went to urgent care, which sent me to the local ER, which did some labs and put me in an ambulance to the big hospital. My skin and eyes were yellow, and when I arrived the doctors bumped me to the top of the MRI list, which told me what I needed to know. Four days and three nights in a hospital bed. An extremely rare reaction to an antibiotic was taking out my liver, which came back fully once they stopped the drug, with no surgery and no subsequent drama.

When I got out, I looked at the chore list. I had been out of a job for three weeks and was on a mad scramble to install a water softener, learn to cook fancy dinners, plan a trip with my daughter, and fix all the things in the house that I couldn't get to before because I was busy fixing PROD, early morning to late at night, same as at work. I was closing tickets in my own backlog instead of my employer's. The liver was a memo from management to slow the f down.

Lesson 3. I towed the office with me.

I am a 47-year-old man with an Airstream, because the woods were the plan and a 47-year-old does not sleep on the ground. I bought it on October 2nd. My dad died on October 9th, and in November I started going places, three-day trips, then a week, then in March a big one, clear across from Florida to Big Bend, Texas, and back through the Deep South and the Smokies, three weeks of it. It was epic.

Left alone with unlimited time and a trailer, I will build a schedule. I will plan the route like a project, with milestones, pause a software project to take a trip, spend the trip thinking about the software project, and get home and go straight back into it as if the trip were a sprint break. On a 12-mile hike in Georgia I started dictating these lessons into my phone. I never left the office. I was towing it with me. The Zen view is that you cannot skip to enlightened; you have to be unenlightened first, thoroughly, for years, and I have been very thorough. I had assumed the unenlightened part was the job's fault, and it turns out it was me, and I brought me along.

Lesson 4. One-upmanship is very hard to extinguish.

If we are brutally honest, most of what we do is to one-up each other. The obvious versions are the house and the car, and the sneaky versions sound like "I don't one-up anyone." Oh really. Tell me more. Or they sound like this: here is my article about the five lessons I learned when I tried to take a year off and built a production website instead.

Alan Watts describes the guy sitting in his Zen lectures, cross-legged at the back of the room, announcing to everyone that he is not competing and that he has no interest in enlightenment. Everyone else in the room immediately feels one down. He has, in Watts's words, "beaten them all by refusing to play," and he knows it, which is why he sat where he could be seen not competing.

I set out to see what happens when I no longer spent most of my waking hours serving a master that is never satisfied, and what happened is that I learned my brilliant move, refusing to play corporate soldier and going off to travel instead, was itself a move. I was the guy at the back of the room. There was no substantial enlightenment. I was about as enlightened as if I had kept the office job, with slightly less stress and maybe the same amount of flapdoodling. Consider yourself one-upped.

Lesson 5. Modern tech skill ages like milk.

Tech skills used to keep. jQuery came out in 2006 and was still paying mortgages a decade later, React came out in 2013 and is still in every job posting, and I ran teams that rode one framework for the better part of ten years, which was hard enough. This year the shelf life of a skill dropped below the shelf life of the milk in your refrigerator. In February I paid for a Claude subscription and watched it build a usable website faster than I could have written the Jira ticket for one. The name for the website arrived in my mind with absolutely no effort: ratemyhifi.com. Yup, that's what I'm building: a website to show off stereos! It felt like a superpower, and a little uncomfortable, because the thing I had spent twenty-five years getting good at with entire teams had just been done in a few minutes by a chat window while I watched. Just recently, the AI frontier was careful prompt engineering, so you learn that, and then, just as you get a grip on it: why are you still engineering prompts? Engineer the harness that writes the prompts, and put it in a loop. I am not complaining, I am pointing out that the milk expires fast, and about the time you've wrapped your head around it you are standing in the dust wondering how the hell you are going to learn the next skill, which is the reversal of the one you just learned.

So that is the fifth lesson, and it is also what I did with the year. The site went live in April with real people on it, and by summer I was running it the way I used to run a team, with a written plan before any code, AI reviewers on every pull request (a story of its own), tests, and a backlog I'm not allowed to skip, and somewhere in there it dawned on me that the master that is never satisfied, the one I had left a fantastic job to get away from, had come along in the truck with everything else and was now living in a chat window that I check on from the Airstream. I still want the woods, and the tech still pulls, and I've stopped treating that as a problem to solve. The first four lessons are the woods' doing, and I doubt I would have learned any of them with a badge on. The next few articles are about the fifth one.