Now with a job lined up, the goal was to get myself into a mental state where I’d be excited about work again. To make this possible, I set aside a few months of break between finishing my PhD and starting work to try and figure things out. I ended up devoting about half of this time to spending time with various friends. However, for the other half I wanted to try and find a way to do a mental reset of sorts. The whole job search and dissertation writing process is largely an exercise in selling yourself and trying to convince yourself and others that what you do is important. You give a lot of talks, answer a lot of questions, and do a lot of packaging to make yourself look as exciting as possible to companies that might want to hire you and faculty who are evaluating your dissertation. While of course this process had its highlights, and ultimately led to some good outcomes, I found it exceedingly tiring. It forced me to take myself too seriously, and try to craft unifying stories around projects when no such themes necessarily existed. My goal was to do fun work that kept me intellectually stimulated. I wasn’t particularly bothered about whether all of this work tied together in some grand way. The process of selling myself to this extent made me lose motivation even further, because in painstakingly packaging everything I did I started to lose sight of what I actually enjoyed about my work in the first place.

I’ve often found that spending time in nature helps me get a better perspective on things. It’s hard to take anything too seriously when you are looking up at a gigantic sky of stars or a never ending ocean. You just feel so tiny by comparison that you quickly realize nothing you are worried about really matters all that much. Conversely, I’ve found climbing mountains similarly relaxing. As I go up, my surroundings start to look smaller and smaller, until a giant truck on the highway just starts to look like a tiny ant scurrying along the road. It does literally change the way you look at things: anything that looks big and imposing just becomes an insignificant blip in the background. This prompted a 1 month, (mostly) solo trip to Hawaii to try and clear my mind. My goal was to plan things out as little as possible, to just show up and see what I’d make of everyday. It would be kind of like my very first research forays again: no real plan, just exploration, with no pressure to accomplish any concrete goal or tie things into some big agenda.

With this in mind, I booked some flights, a few random Airbnb’s, rented some cars, landed in Kona, and trusted that I would find good ways to entertain myself.