Until one week ago, I had a job — the longest-held job of my entire life. Then, on Monday morning, I walked into the office, a mostly empty 20th-floor space in Manhattan’s Financial District that I was not in the habit of visiting, to meet my boss, who was visiting from Washington, D.C., for the day. Immediately, I learned the reason for her visit: The company was eliminating my position.

My response: “It’s about time!”

I had been expecting this. In mid-November, the company — a medium-sized media company where I was the vice president of “digital initiatives” — had transferred administration of three of its publications to another division, one in which I was not involved. In practice, this meant that roughly half of my daily duties went poof! I had little left to do, and figured I’d be out the door by January. Instead, I lingered, and lingered long enough to shrug it off and start to think, Maybe I’m safe! And that, of course, is when the other shoe dropped. As a screenwriter, God is a total hack.

Surprised or not, I was far from upset or freaked out. We’ve got some money saved, I’ll receive severance payments (not enough, but still), and there’s New York State unemployment to count on — which maxes out at around twice the weekly rate it did the first time I filed for benefits, back in 2001. So, yes, I have a history of being laid off: FoxNews.com sent me away from its news desk 25 years ago, and in 2018 Hearst told me bye-bye after it acquired Rodale, including Runner’s World, where I was the digital director. And somewhere in between I lost another job, the story of which I told on Canned, a podcast about getting fired. That’s four jobs in 30 years — not too bad for a career in media, where nothing is ever stable for long.

As layoffs go, this most recent was one of the kindest I’ve experienced. It made sense. Given the circumstances, I would’ve laid me off, too. So once it was over, I felt liberated. No longer would I have to care how the company was doing or fret over how I’d solve its myriad problems. In fact, I simply wasn’t allowed to anymore! Now I could breathe. I’d experienced this kind of thing before, in smaller doses, every time I’d filed a freelance story on deadline: A weight I didn’t even realize I’d been bearing was removed from my shoulders, and I could relax and clear my mind. This layoff was that times a thousand — all my deadlines had been erased. I was free.

But as we all learned in the 2004 classic Team America: World Police, freedom isn’t free. No, there’s a hefty fuckin’ fee. And the price I’m paying for my suddenly limitless amount of free time is this: deep anxiety over how to spend it.

The New York City white-collar layoff dream is this: Without work occupying the better part of your day, you’re suddenly capable of enjoying all the city has to offer, from coffee dates with friends to museum visits to just walking around your neighborhood and seeing what’s going on. (Oh, hey, look, they’re renovating Sam’s!) Yes, you’ll be applying for jobs from time to time, and the prospect of poverty is always lurking in the back of your mind, but for once both the future and the present are open to your whims. Write that novel, study Italian, forage wild chives in Prospect Park, crochet a scarf, begin the daily stretching routine you’ve promised yourself for a decade, clean the bathroom, clean the pantry, get the hell out of town for a few weeks to see friends down South or in Southeast Asia, put a cardboard box full of things you don’t want anymore on the sidewalk so that you don’t feel bad about picking up items from other people’s cardboard boxes full of discards, or just do nothing at all. Sit, be still, think, wait, observe.

The anxiety — my anxiety — kicks in because I want to do all of the above, and more, but because of the very nature of time, I have to make choices. My days are still only as long as they ever were, which was never long enough. Within them, I want to do things: I want to write that novel¹, I’m working on a podcast (more details soon!), I have two newsletter projects starting to simmer that are nothing like Trying!, and there’s Trying! itself, of course. But I can’t do all of them, and I certainly can’t do all of them while also making space for doing nothing at all, for relishing the dolce far niente of joblessness. Or can I? Can I use this “empty” time to establish a routine so disciplined that it allows me to be both productive and lazy, occupied and unoccupied, depending on when you happen to glimpse me?

Probably not, because I also just joined the Park Slope Food Coop, so I’ve got shifts to plan, shifts to work, shifts to bank so that when, inevitably, I take a new job and my free time evaporates, my family and I can still have access to affordable produce.

I can no longer tell what’s important and what’s not. When I had a job, I often felt my life trickling away. I didn’t have the time to spend on the things I thought I could accomplish that would make my existence meaningful. And I despaired, thinking it would never end, that I’d never get the opportunity to create the works I was meant to create. Now I’m trying to do all of them, which means I’ll probably finish none of them, because I’m unwilling to sacrifice one for the others — or, really, to bet on the success of one at the expense of the others. I can’t calculate those odds.

The stupid irony is that my daily life has not really changed since the layoff. I wake up, make coffee, go running or climbing, then sit at the computer for most of the day, reading and writing until it’s time to make dinner. I continue to spend more than 16 hours a day in one room of my apartment. And as weird and perhaps boring as it sounds — and as crazily different it is from the life I once led as a travel writer — I like this existence. I’m comfortable with the routine, the occasional monotony. Like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, I can think, I can wait, and I can even fast². I’ve learned to tolerate boredom just as, when I was a teenage skateboarder, I learned to tolerate pain.

Boredom is itself a kind of freedom. Within boredom, my mind can play — I puzzle things out, toy with sentences and stories I may someday write, imagine encounters that will never occur. At work, I liked to think, I was good at my job because I was willing to take on the tasks that were boring but also essential, that needed to be approached with forethought and care. And now, still, I’m doing the boring things. I’m getting our taxes ready. This morning I rolled over my 401(k). When this newsletter is out the door, I’ll bake a loaf of bread that’s been rising since last night. I will fold the laundry. Nothing may change, but nothing has to change right away. I can wait. I can think. The novel(s) will get written. The podcast will get produced. Dinner will be on the table. The life I have always imagined for myself will be the life I live. Enlightenment, I’m pretty sure, is just around the corner. I hope it comes with a paycheck. 🪨🪨🪨