Why I quit my Tech Job and Lived on the Road for 6 Months

Last spring I quit my cushy job at Epic Systems after 2.5 years. During that time I was getting good benefits like subsidized catered lunches, a beautiful campus with oil changes on site, general stores with snacks, coffee shops in nearly every building, and incredible health/life/disability insurance. Despite all that I was absolutely miserable and couldn't stand staying there any longer, which is why to me it was a no-brainer to leave.

For a little background as to how I ended up there we need to go back to when I graduated college. I received a BS in Physics with a Technical Focus in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and took the 2nd offer I got from a career fair I attended my senior year. The motivation for doing so was mostly fear and insecurity, as I had seen the offer exceeded what a standard Physics undergrad could expect to make outside of school and I didn't have faith that I would be able to get anything better.

Because of this and their imposed "deadline" I jumped on the offer and embraced the certainty and security by asking for a start date after the summer I graduated so that I could take time off to travel. During that summer I went to Poland, Israel, and 5 states in the US (Wisconsin, Michigan, Utah, New York, and Pennsylvania) to explore my heritage (I'm ethnically Jewish and Polish), attend music festivals, and spend time with close friends. I enjoyed the time exploring and was then excited to begin a new life on my own in Madison, WI where Epic Systems is located.

I started with all the vigor of a young professional excited to make a good impression (and enticed by the prospect of a salary bump at the completion of training) and completed the 6 month training course in just about 100 days. It was then that I started doing the actual work of being assigned customers to help understand and interpret the software when they had any issues. Honestly I wasn't very good at it, but I was determined to learn and improve with the hopes of attaining more responsibility which would further my professional growth.

Fast forward 2 years and I was disillusioned by corporate bureaucracy, career stagnation (even with more responsibility I would be doing pretty much the same thing the entire time I worked there), and the fact that my performance was determined solely on how others perceived me (which was not so conducive to growth as much as it was to ass kissing)*. I decided that this wasn't something I could handle anymore and began saving aggressively after paying off the credit card debt that had burdened me since graduating.

Many people were supportive of my decision to travel and live out of an SUV (Suburu Outback) but I could tell that most of them also thought I was crazy. "What will you do next?", "How are you going to find another job?", and "Where will you live afterwards?" were all questions I got and the answer to them was, "I don't know", "I don't know", and you guessed it "I don't know". The level of uncertainty inherent in those answers was enough to make my fellow corporate cogs shutter despite all my complaints being echoed by anyone willing to talk candidly behind closed doors.

The concept for the "mini-retirement" I took came straight from "The Four Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss, and it ended up being a fantastic trip. I got to see 20 national parks, visited 9 states, and saw a lot of the great American West while learning to live a minimalist lifestyle. Expenses were essentially just food and gas since you can camp in any National Forest for free (unless otherwise posted) and I utilized a number of apps that showed known spots as well as reviews and other helpful information (mostly iOverlander). Now that it's over the only real progress I've made on the above questions is on where to live which became "I don't know, but probably by the ocean."

The thing about this that most people don't seem to understand is that I don't need to know what comes next. I don't need my life planned out more than a couple weeks out to make sure I pay my bills on time and pretty much everywhere you go people are hiring like crazy so if worse comes to worst I can land something at $20+ with little to no effort. I've been Doordashing a bit on the road since the average I made was over $25/hour (after gas expenses) and I have some ideas in mind for how to make money (working with a friend on selling 3D printed ceramics online, learning solidity and doing DeFi bounties online, or selling BTC ATMs as an outside distributor) but I'm not necessarily married to any of them.

For the first time in my adult life my path has stopped being set along a beaten path (community college-> university-> corporate career-> etc.) and is now wide open. As Tim Ferriss says "People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty". But if you're unhappy in your corporate career, then there's no reason to live the kind of lifestyle that so many people do. With the rise of the creator economy, gig workers, and even remote work it's possible now more than ever before to do what you enjoy doing, rather than what is simply what you're "supposed" to do.

I once heard that "the amount of risk you take is directly proportional to the belief you have in yourself", so if you find yourself trembling at the thought of even considering something like taking a few months off then ask yourself "why don't I think I can make it on my own?" and really question if that belief continues to serve you.

And if you feel that this is something you'd like to do yourself, or if freeing yourself from corporate serfdom is as much a priority to you as it was to me, then you can follow me on Twitter as I continue to document my journey. https://twitter.com/abusyhippie

*Disclaimer that this isn't necessarily a knock on the company itself, but with any large corporation with 10k+ employees. I doubt that anything that bothered me there would be better at any other company of that size.