A PRACTICAL, LITERARY GUIDE · FORTHCOMING

Leverage the Power of Time Off to Build Your Dream Career

On the call you have been pretending not to hear.

The system will turn you into a tool if you let it. The world needs you to be human. A sabbatical is the quiet revolution that makes it possible.

— FROM THE EDITOR'S NOTE

THE ARC

What a real sabbatical makes possible.

A figure walking away from a cold corporate grid into pale dawn mist.

ONE

Break the treadmill

Step off the loop you no longer remember choosing. The first and hardest act of a sabbatical is the walking away.

A small figure at the foot of a vast ancient mountain, looking up.

TWO

Find yourself

Stand at the foot of the force that made you. Look up. Find your own face in the ancient rock.

A figure walking forward in a bright green pastoral landscape, heart aflame.

THREE

Return to your ikigai

Walk back into the world carrying the flame. Not rested, exactly — returned, aligned, alive in a way you had forgotten was possible.

AN EXTRACT · PART VII

Now is a great time to take a career break

What? In this economy?

Read the chapter in full

EARLY READERS

What they're saying.

“I read this on three planes across two trips and finished in a hotel in Lisbon at 2am. It doesn't promise the sabbatical will be easy. It says it will be the hardest and truest thing you do — and it's the only book I've read that actually explains what happens in week three.”

— PRIYA RAMANAN · PRODUCT LEADER

“A handbook in the oldest sense — the kind you return to, then dog-ear, then give away. Patient about the fear, plainspoken about the money, very good on the part nobody tells you about: coming back as someone.”

— MARK HENDERSON · ENGINEERING DIRECTOR

“This is not a self-help book. It's closer to a manual for an initiation. The work it describes is the work I have been avoiding my whole adult life. Now I don't have the excuse.”

— SARAH CHEN · WRITER

Painterly portrait of the author at a writing desk.

SVS · AUTHOR, EDITOR, OCCASIONAL SABBATICAL-TAKER

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Twenty years of careers. Three proper sabbaticals.

I've taken three sabbaticals across a twenty-year career in tech — each one longer, each one harder, each one more necessary than I was prepared for. The last one led me to the work I was actually meant to do.

This isn't a retirement guide or a travel blog. It's an opinionated handbook for people who suspect they were built for a larger life than the one the system keeps renting back to them — and who want to know how to actually go and find it.

Read the editor's note

THE MONTHLY LETTER

One long letter. On the last Sunday of each month.

A lead essay, a few shorter notes, one quiet reading recommendation, and whichever small domestic detail I noticed that I think you might like too. No course. No funnel. You can reply to it — I read everything.

WHEN YOU'RE READY

Begin the pause.

Start with the first chapters, free. Full access — all seventeen chapters, the monthly letter, the archive — is a single one-time purchase, yours forever.

Start reading free

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