My last day at Braze was last Friday. I had decided to focus on personal projects over the summer. Summer is such a precious time in Toronto so I felt there was no better time to walk across the bridge than now.
During my final week, I spent some time going back to the things I wrote on life and work since the beginning of this website (n.b., it was 2021). It felt as if I travelled back in time to chat with the younger me and surprisingly discovered that nothing has really changed.
Life: play, connection, clarity
Work: same as above
Before I dropped out of grad school in 2024, I had taken advantage of the cross-department credits and joined a graduate-level theatre studies seminar. I used it as an experiment (no pun intended) to test how much I can trust my intuition in adding playfulness into work. I had made a conscious decision to only work on it when I felt inspired, rather than forcing myself to work when all I wanted was to relax. The workload was not nothing - we had about three to four papers to read before each class, weekly response essays, and three 5-minute performances throughout the semester. On top of all that I was taking another course and working full-time.
The experiment worked out great. I had the most fun I ever had in school while getting straight A’s. The class happened every Tuesday evening, and by 3:45 pm I would have already packed my bag, waiting for an Uber, excited as a grade school student going on a Centreville field trip. Now looking back, the logic makes total sense - I was curious about the topics to begin with so it was not hard to start reading. The papers triggered more thoughts and ideas, which were turned into response essays. The performances were a great place to experiment with those ideas, which made it more valuable to cross-reference the existing ideas from the papers. School work felt like play.
This reminds me of the show Severance (2022). I roughly know the setup, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch beyond the second episode, because what’s been portrayed in the show is exactly the opposite of how I want my life/work relationship to be. I am not a fan of the idea where working hours are separated from living hours, and joy only belongs to living hours. There is a similar idea in Stoicism which questions whether the time you spend on something is dead time or alive time. To me, both work and life should be alive time; in fact, there should only be alive time.
If anything, a better show to describe my ideal work/life would probably be Ted Lasso (2020). In Ted Lasso, despite struggles and challenges, every member of the team loves their job. If you watched the show, you know that it is not entirely about the money they make as professional footballers, or the fact that football itself is a form of play. There could be more concrete examples of how Ted and team had fun while winning some championships, but sadly, I’ve used up my quota of American TV references in this section even though all this stuff lives in my head rent-free, because in a way, “I was raised by TV” - Community (2009).
It occurred to me that the decision to leave was inevitable.
Although my view on life and work hasn’t changed too much since 2021, the experiment and conceptualization mentioned above all happened during my Braze years. I basically acquired a new level of confidence in problem-solving while solving problems.
Non-ironically, working at Braze has turned me brave and brazen enough to make the decision, or maybe this was merely a self-fulfilling prophecy induced by my obsession over wordplay. Either way, I would have been too scared to walk into uncertainties like this three years ago.
It felt as if I finally had the courage to push the locked door, only to find out the door was not locked.
In fact, when walking through the door, it became clear there was no door at all.
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