My dear reader.

For the past 11 months I have been spending down my savings.

This was intentional — after starting to divest from the stock market in June of 2024 I decided to repurpose a big chunk of that money to cover a year-long sabbatical in 2025, during which the majority of my tiny business (except for this newsletter, and sometimes even that) has been closed.

The most honest thing I can tell you about my gap year is that the reality has been much different from the initial fantasy. Mostly that’s because 2025 wound up being defined by two major things, both agonizing and both entirely outside of my control. The first, my father’s cancer diagnosis and death (and the subsequent need to relocate my disabled mother and take over all the details of her life and care). The second, my country’s rapid fall into authoritarianism alongside a general worsening of worldwide collapse. (What a time to be alive, right?)

So no, the day-to-day of gap year didn’t look at all the way I envisioned when I first planned it, and yet of course I still unearthed so much about myself through this experience.

In the realm of work and money, this week I’d like to tell you about the five most useful things I’ve learned through 11 months of low/no paid work.

1.There can be so much freedom in decoupling your job from your identity

The business of self-employment can be a real mindfuck, especially my kind of self-employment where so much of the business is, well, me.

When you spend many hours each week (for many many years) selling yourself and the offerings you’ve created with your brain and body, it’s easy for the line between person and product to blur. It is not an exaggeration to say that these past 11 months of no business, coming at the end of two and a half years since leaving social media and deciding to no longer post any personal photos on the internet, has fundamentally changed my own understanding of myself. My identity and personhood now feel fully decoupled from my job in a way that I genuinely never thought would be possible. I no longer care about looking cool on the internet, no longer need people to think I’m aspirational or attractive or interesting or smart or or or. The part of me that was constantly seeking that kind of validation from the online world (and therefore through my job), the part of me that wanted to be seen as “special” in this very public way, is simply… gone.

I still need a job, because I still need to earn money. But in decoupling my job from my identity I am now able to ask more generative questions, such as: Given that I need to earn, what is the most pleasurable, most relationally connective, and most values-aligned way to do that? Right now the answer is: writing this newsletter each week, which I am devoted to doing as well as I can – out of respect for you, the reader, whose attention and support I do not ever take for granted, as well as respect for myself and the craft/lineage of honest storytelling that I am honored to be a part of.

In order to stop supplementing from savings though, either the income from this newsletter will need to grow or I’ll need to add other offerings in 2026 to reach my monthly ‘enough’ number. So the freedom I’ve gained this year isn’t the freedom from work, it’s the freedom of no longer feeling like my job needs to define me. I finally (finally!) feel like who I am is not dependent on how I earn the money I need in order to survive inside of capitalism, and this is an absolute blessing, let me tell you.

2.“Investment” doesn’t need to mean what capitalism tells us it means

If capitalism excels at anything it is taking the wonders of an abundant, lush, complex, interdependent world and narrowing it down into the equation of: money = good, more money = better, most money = best.

Through the lens of capitalism, nothing is worth anything until it is turned into money. An old growth forest? Meh. Lumber? Money. Clean water? Shrug. A place to quickly and easily dump toxic factory waste? Profitable. Taken to its most extreme we get the current commercialization of self, where it feels like we aren’t allowed to have non-monetized hobbies anymore, as if our lives/selves are the new strip mine and we must extract every bit of “value” that we can.

And so of course in this context investing means turning our money into more money, no matter the long-term consequences. Which isn’t to say that many of us don’t sincerely need more money — gross inequality is a feature of capitalism, not a bug, and I am wholly uninterested in judging individual people and what they choose to do to survive. What I judge, harshly, are the systems that got us here and the fact that the stock market (extractive, exploitative) can be blasting off while millions (literally, millions) of people cannot afford groceries. How is that a “strong” economy? Make it make sense!

So this past year, while earning much less than usual and relying on my savings to pay my bills, I thought again and again about how I might reimagine and expand what it means to invest for the future (my own personal future, as well as our collective future). Because having more money by itself is meaningless. What even is money? What most of us actually want is what money gives us access to under capitalism — housing, healthcare, nutrition, education, entertainment, socialization — and through a massive reduction in earning this year (and in the number of hours worked) I’ve become more curious than ever about how to invest in these outcomes outside of the current monetary system.

If the purpose of investing under capitalism is to put your money somewhere with the hope that that money grows into more money, then how can I grow more of what I actually want (the things money gives us access to) with a different, non-monetary input? What happens when I invest time, or energy, or attention. When I invest love and care. When showing up for each other becomes the new startup capital to be cherished and nurtured. Where might that lead us instead?

3.Money is not always the answer

It has become embarrassingly clear to me that the first solution I reach for in any kind of problem-solving situation is money. A friend and I call this spending at the problem.

A recent example:

I am rehabbing a leg injury¹ right now, and last week I heard the hosts of a popular running podcast mention a supplement they take to aid recovery. My first thought was: “I should buy that!” When actually what I should do is just continue on with the unsexy daily work of physical therapy. Buying yet another supplement is not going to magically fix my leg. Spending at my injury is not the answer here.

Similarly, a big focus for me over the past year has been learning to distinguish between a problem I am actually trying to solve vs a problem I am being told I should solve. For example, I have recently started using a stationary bike for low-impact cross training, and the painful crotch feeling of doing this without padded shorts is… oh god. If I’m going to continue cycling then yes, to me, this is an actual problem and yes, I will likely use money to solve it.

But (for a different example) the beauty industry’s “problem” with my aging face? I am personally not interested in solving that (nor many of the other problems that corporations spend billions of dollars telling us we have) and so one of the most fun little rebellion projects I’ve undertaken in gap year is to get as free from advertising as possible. Unsubscribing from every single shopping-related newsletter. Paying close attention to where these “buy buy buy” messages come into my life (much less often without social media though), and trying to opt-out.

4.Choosing not to earn hasn’t just changed the way I spend, it changes the way I think

One of the most insidious functions of capitalism is the way it frames having or not having money as the only worthwhile question. Meaning: if you have the money for something, great! Buy it! The only reason not to buy, in this paradigm, is if you don’t have the funds, and even then there’s an entire predatory industry of credit and debt ready to step right in. The question under capitalism is always: how do I get more money so I can buy more stuff? And then once you spend spend spend, the cycle continues. By design. And the people who are enriched by this are certainly not us.

In response, something I’ve changed this year is that instead of asking myself “do I have the money to afford this?” I am now first asking “am I willing to work more hours to replenish this money if I do spend it in this way?” Sometimes the answer is yes, but most of the time it’s not.

5.Removing myself from the culturally-sanctioned morality of being a “hard worker” is both terrifying and liberating

One of the most fascinating parts of gap year has been watching different people’s reactions to the fact that I am currently choosing not to work. I can see it on someone’s face and hear it in their voice when they think this decision of mine is reckless or indulgent, or that it somehow makes me less valuable/relevant/interesting.

It says something about our cultural norms that most conversations (in the sauna at the gym, for example) putter out after I give people an unimpressive and unsatisfactory answer to their “so, what do you do” question by saying “for work? oh, I’m taking some time off from working right now.” They don’t tend to ask follow-up questions because I have broken the conventional script. And so I don’t get to tell them about learning to grow potatoes this summer. I don’t tell them about my afternoon naps. I don’t tell them about the fears I had to process about divesting from both the stock market and the fantasy of traditional retirement in order to give myself permission to take this year off. I don’t tell them about the many unpaid hours of navigating the Medicare system on behalf of my mother. I don’t tell them that I now know the names of the people who work at the library. I don’t tell them about the food donation program I’ve started in my neighborhood, to help make it easier for busy families to stock our local food pantry. I don’t tell them how much better my eyes feel with less screen time. I don’t tell them about playing with my dogs or reading fantasy novels or being able to be more present and available to my friends because I am well-rested.

I don’t tell them any of this, because they don’t ask and, honestly, I don’t need their approval. I don’t need capitalism’s approval. I know (more clearly than ever) how much money is enough for me, and I don’t need to keep striving for more and more and more (and to keep being a “hard worker” in a specific wage-earning context) in order to be worthy and whole.

Being able to take a year off from the majority of my paid work is, without a doubt, a massive privilege. Whether someone thinks that spending down my savings in this way is stupid or not doesn’t change the fact that I had the savings in the first place, which under such oppressive systems is a luxury many people cannot dream of.

But/and: if the people who at least somewhat benefit from the status quo aren’t willing to question it, where will we go but deeper down the same path? If we can’t disrupt the judgement someone feels toward me for choosing not to work for a while, how can we hope to change the systemic judgement and punishment of people who can’t work (and therefore can’t thrive and were never supposed to thrive) under the conditions of industrial imperialism? The system that says it’s shameful for me to not be working and earning at my “full potential” (barf) is the same system that treats as disposable anyone who isn’t a productive cog in the machine — such as anyone who is disabled, or who is an unpaid caretaker, or who is unhoused, or who is simply not “performing” at the level and in the ways capitalism demands.

Fuck all of that, is how I feel. Let’s rip it down brick by brick. And one of those bricks is the internalized voice that says our worth is our output, when of course it is not, and never was, and never will be.

There is so much more I could say on this topic of money and work and worth. You might have noticed that there’s a little “vol 1” after the title of today’s newsletter, and that’s because I envision this as a periodic series, one where we can continue to talk about money and enoughness together. Especially as material conditions shift and change for so many of us so rapidly — I know I’m not the only person in the US on non-employer-sponsored health insurance who logged into the open enrollment portal last week and saw a monthly cost increase of 112% next year. A hundred and twelve percent!

So more to come in this series for sure, and as always you are welcome to ask any questions in the comments, or share specific aspects of this topic you’d like me to write about in more detail.

With love & hope & radical solidarity,

Nic