What if you woke up tomorrow with all the time and money in the world — no debt, no obligations, free to go anywhere and buy anything? What would you actually do? Would you, finally, be happy?
I quit my job almost exactly a year ago to chase down the honest answer, and spending this year on myself turned out to be the best decision I've ever made. Here's how it went — wins and flukes and low points included, because the polished version wouldn't teach you anything.
The gilded cage
At 24 I was at my financial peak, living in the heart of New York City with a base salary well over a quarter-million dollars a year. The apartment was more luxury hotel than apartment — a sauna, a private movie theater, a rooftop with the whole NYC skyline laid out below. I'd furnished every corner with nice things, the best TV money can buy, a 5.1 surround system I built myself. I was living a life most people only get to dream about, and I was deeply grateful for it.
There was just one problem.
“I'd spend weekday evenings just watching TV — often too lazy to even do it on my couch… instead watching it on my tiny phone screen laying in bed.”— from the draft this essay grew out of
Between working all day and catching up on chores and rest on the weekends, I'd burn what little free time I had on a phone screen in bed — too tired to even walk to the couch, let alone use the sauna or the city outside my window. My income was at an all-time high. My time spent doing what I actually wanted was at an all-time low.
When you spend enough time making enough money, you forget the point of it all. You stop valuing your time and start placing value in things instead — things you have no time to spend with. The bars on the cage are beautiful, and it's a cage all the same.
The first spark
The first catalysts were two friends, Dan and Kruti, who challenged my routines and pushed me to be more intentional about how I wanted to live. I didn't agree with everything they said — and, honestly, I cared a little too much about letting them know it — but they handed me perspective I'd been missing.
I started with an excuse. Leaving a job to do nothing felt impossible, so I framed it as strategy: I'd pursue research to fast-track an O1 visa and get back into a higher-paying role sooner — a brave-but-logical move that still pointed at more money down the line. After running it past friends, I went to my employer and we agreed on a mutual termination. Deep down, though, I knew this was the start of something much bigger than a visa play.
The day after I quit, an immense weight lifted. I'd dream about work and wake up flooded with relief, remembering I no longer had any of it. But relief came braided with a nagging obligation to put the time toward at least long-term gain. So I got to work — with a couple of friends from CMU and Stanford, I led and put together my first research paper in a matter of days. Whether or not it got accepted didn't matter; I was proud of it. (And then, honestly, I touted about it for days, not-so-subtly bringing it up to people I met. The reflex to flex was very much alive. Naming it is half the work.)
Then came the crash and the recharge. I went to the gym for the first time in my life. I slept twelve hours a day for nearly a week, feeling a little better each morning. I tore through the backlog of video games I'd never had time to play, binged the shows I'd missed, and underneath it all kept one thread going: self-improvement — better sleep, healthier food, a slowly overhauled wardrobe, the gym becoming a habit.
And all that free time made one thing impossible to ignore.
The loneliness
I was lonelier than I'd ever been. Somehow, in the most crowded city on earth, I'd cultivated a life with almost no one in it. The isolation started to feel like a verdict on me.
“I felt socially worthless — like there was something unfixably wrong with me that I couldn't overcome and something that made me unlikable to potential friends and girls alike — much later, I did figure out what this was but it had little to do with my physical appearance or my personality.”— the low point, in his own words
The easy fix would have been to go get another job — which is what most people do at this stage, and it's not really about the money. Facing your free time is scary, because it makes you look at your life at face value: everything it is and everything it isn't. So people fill the time — not out of need or desire, but to avoid having to look.
I decided not to look away. I'd heard the single most-recommended intervention for low-grade depression isn't medication or therapy — it's to keep working on improving your life in every direction you care about. (Nearly a third of Americans have low-grade depression and don't know it. I wasn't american tho so I was chilling.) So I kept lifting, kept fixing my sleep and diet, and forced myself to socialize at every rare opportunity — at first maybe once or twice a month, an eternity when you're free every single day. I'd cook dinner, invite people I liked, follow up as much as it took. Doing my part, I told myself, regardless of how often they flaked. Painfully slowly, friends started to appear, and people even began inviting me, which was new.
The trip that cracked me open was driving to Dallas with Dan and Kruti for the solar eclipse. Rental cars were sold out, so I had the genius idea of renting a U-Haul truck to drive around in for three days. We had a blast — the longest I'd been away from home in ages. That opened the door to something braver: a few of us rented a cabin for a seven-day hiking trip in Yosemite, with a few days in San Francisco first. I slept on a couch for what might have been the first time in my life, at a Stanford hacker house full of people building lives that looked nothing like a nine-to-five. Then Yosemite itself, where the sequoias and granite and starlit skies did their quiet work. With each day I missed home a little less.
Seven days to leave
Then, in a single phone call, everything changed.
Just as I was laying down roots — routines, leisure, the first real sense of belonging in years — I learned I had seven days to leave the United States. My time off work hadn't simply paused my visa with the grace period I'd assumed; my unemployment days were running out in a way that would put a mark on my record, jeopardizing every future reentry. To protect that future, I had to leave before it happened.
What followed was the most chaotic week of my life — worse than any finals week I'd ever been criminally underprepared for. I had to decide, fast, what to do with my possessions, which at the time felt like the sum total of the adult life I'd built. One by one, every option ran out as I discovered how absurdly expensive it is to ship things out of the country. I paid someone $1,000 to throw away a $1,400 bed. The dining table where my friends had gathered, broken into pieces. My collection of 40-plus board games, each one sleeved by hand. My custom sound system, my curated wardrobe, my $2,000 couch — all of it locked into a storage unit in New York, with no visa to ever come back for it. To this day, it's all still there.
In the end I flew to India with two suitcases. One I'd stuffed with my gaming PC — I needed at least that, so it wouldn't feel like I'd lost every single thing.
I'd lived in the US since I was 18; it was the only place I knew how to be an adult. Between that and the goodbyes to friends new and old, the departure felt less like a relocation than like having my whole adult life torn away at the root. And yet:
“I never once felt sad. There was always a plan and a hope.”— the line that explains how he survives loss
That's the truest thing about how I'm wired. My antidote to despair has never been to process the grief; it's to have a forward path. As long as there was a plan, there wasn't room for despair.
Back to roots
I stepped into Nagpur — my mother's family city, where I'd spent childhood summers — for the first time in nearly six years. I went from a fancy apartment in a global city to stray animals in the road, the neighborhood stinking, light and noise bleeding into my room all night, and a heat that felt like a relentless assault on the senses.
The shock didn't bring sadness so much as a surreal disconnection. The adventures in Europe and Japan I'd talked up after Yosemite suddenly sounded like a lie I'd told myself. But there were real reunions, too — places and rituals I'd loved every summer growing up. And there was a plan: the O1 visa stood in front of me like a clear road back to the life I'd left. Because there was hope, there wasn't despair. I rebuilt a routine and leaned hard into self-improvement, reading the best books I could find — Why We Sleep, Mindset, Atomic Habits — the way I read everything: not to accumulate, but to operationalize.
Then I booked a trip to Budapest, partly to step away from home and partly to reconnect with friends who'd promised to meet me there. As the date neared, almost all of them dropped out; one committed for a couple of days. I went anyway, and told myself I'd have fun even if it ended up being just me.
For eight of the ten days, it was.
Budapest, and the thing I'd learned
The first night, sitting alone at dinner, the old fear came roaring back. The whole trip suddenly felt like a waste of time and money — different country, sure, but still me, eating alone.
The very next day, it changed completely. Armed with the intentional-socializing muscles I'd built back in the States, I went to a co-working meetup — aiming for people living there, not just passing through. I got lucky and found a great group, which led to dinner that same night, plans the next day, and more people after that. By the time I left I had real friends to say goodbye to, and the trip had cracked open a door I hadn't known was there: much longer solo travel.
I decided Japan was next — three months, this time. In between, back in India, I kept investing in myself: Invisalign, eye surgery so I could finally see without glasses. But mostly I was learning to live with less each month, to be content with myself, and getting genuinely excited learning Japanese for the trip ahead.
Osaka, and liking myself
The three months in Japan turned out to be the best time of my life. I figured out my direction and grew more, in more ways, than I had in years. It felt like exponential growth — every time I grew, the next round came faster. I was scaling, the way software startups only dream about. By the end I'd learned to sing and to hold conversations in Japanese, gotten good at badminton, and made over a hundred friends — more than twenty of them close — in three months. And the biggest thing of all:
“Liking myself and having a great time while truly not thinking about whether others liked me made me that much more like-able, to guys and girls alike.”— the discovery the whole year was building toward
That's the answer to the thing that had felt unfixably wrong with me in New York. It was never my face or my personality. It was that I wanted so badly to be liked that the wanting got in the way. The moment I stopped performing for approval and just genuinely enjoyed being me, people responded — strangers at meetups started commenting on my "aura," assuming I was an actor or a model. A beautiful New Yorker in Japan told me I had great facial features, which was unbelievable to me to be hearing, because a year earlier I'd felt insecure about every single part of who I was. For the first time in years I had people to celebrate Halloween and Christmas and New Year's with — friends I hope keep an eye on me as I grow, and remember me, as I remember them.
In Japan I also built the system I still run today: a list of everything I might want to do, an hour a day for a month on each, so I could tell a real calling from a passing interest — then monthly goals, structure for the dozens of things I'm curious about. Learning to make things on the internet, this essay included, is one of those goals — and the point isn't the views; it's what I learn on the way.
When this trip ended and I flew back to the heat and noise of India, I was unfazed — completely different from every return before it.
“I felt like I had truly internalized everything that brought me happiness and didn't depend on the location or other people for it anymore.”— the proof the fix held
I had a clear path forward, and I got to work. I don't know exactly where it leads — only, more surely than I've known anything, that it's the right one.
What I'd actually tell you
I've still got finances to figure out — I'd rather not drain my savings to nothing before I work out how to make money on my own terms again. A 40-hour-a-week job is my absolute last resort; recruiters reach out every week, and I can now keep those offers at bay, peacefully, while I build the things I want to build. Funny thing is, even purely as an engineer, I think I grew more this unemployed year than in years of employment before it.
So, the takeaway. Here's what I'd recommend almost anyone:
- Find a way — a few months, ideally — to live with no obligations, so you can actually figure out what you want from your life.
- You can't discover what you want to do while you spend every hour on what you need to do. The need crowds out the want, every time.
- Ask the unlimited-time-and-money question for real: what would you do with your days that would feel meaningful? That tells you how much money you actually need.
- Then earn just enough to fund that — and reclaim the rest of your time for the things you'd have done anyway.
Figure out what you're spending your one and only life's time making money for. That's the whole thing.
I'm a long way from perfect. I still have late nights and unproductive days and intrusive thoughts — they're just spread far, far thinner than they used to be. I was lost in a forest for a while there. Now I've found a road, and I don't know where it leads, but I'm going to keep walking it.
If any of this resonates — if you're staring at your own gilded cage, or you're someone I'd want to build the next thing with — come say hi. The best things in my life started as a conversation.