OK, maybe I will write a bit this weekend after all. I find myself in the interesting position of experiencing and understanding a subtle thing – the difference between “work brain” and “retired brain”. We’ve all had the experience of taking a vacation from work, and the blissful unwinding for a week or two. Then back to the grind. But in my case I’ve had about two years with almost zero work responsibility – the occasional board meeting, which adds up to 1-2 light-work days per quarter. Not exactly a grind. So my “vacation” had turned into something permanent, and my brain/mood/behavior had evolved into a state of “is this all there is?”. A mostly relaxed dissatisfaction. Ennui.

Then I took the assignment to help my friend. He *really* needed someone he could trust to lead a small team working to design some of the technology for a hyperscale AI datacenter. And with my retired-mode ennui dominating my mind lately, I thought, “why not?”. Help my friend, make some money, learn something new…win-win-win.

All of that win-win-win equation has turned out to be true. Yay for me. But the *price* of doing so was unforeseen. Work-brain has kicked back in, with a vengeance, bringing out some of my worst personality traits. It’s like the old Jekyll-Hyde story, and I don’t much like what Mr. Hyde is doing to me. And the type of project this turned out to be – a crazy, unrealistic schedule driven by crazy, unrealistic market expectations, workaholics, and infinite money – amplifies my negative traits. Experiencing stress and pressure to achieve someone else’s goals is simply a bad idea. At the moment, work-brain looks like:

• I check email obsessively, every few minutes, fearing that I might miss something important that just got thrown my way.
• I worry constantly that I’m going to fail. This project, team, and some of the technical disciplines are all new to me. The stakes are high. The assignment is vague, hard to understand, and best practices (the things you learn that are likely to lead to success) are thrown away.
• All my old dislikes about companies, meetings, and online passive-aggressive behavior come rushing back. I’m irritated easily and stay that way all day.
• I can’t sleep if there’s anything left undone. I lie awake at 4am mulling over what went wrong yesterday and obsessing over how to fix it.
• I can’t shut my brain down. I read science fiction, and that helps transport me away from the grind. A couple of good stiff drinks also dulls the noise, but the noise and stress are still there the next morning, plus the joy of my body whining “why did you do that?”.

So, work-mode-brain is turning out to be soooo much worse after an extended period in retired-mode. The contrast is startling. I’m not sure how I ever made it through 40 years of the grind, because now, after only two weeks back in the deep end of the pool, I dread getting up in the morning (4am or otherwise), because I know I’m going to hate the next 8-10 hours. It’s a bad way to live.

The good news is that I’m more self-aware now, having experienced a couple of years out of the grind. I think I understand what is happening and its negative effects on me. Understanding something should lead to making a better decision. It’s very obvious what I need to do – find a point (soon!) where I can exit this commitment gracefully, giving my friend time to fill the gap. And when I drift back into a state of retired-mode ennui, I can take a minute, read this essay and remind myself that things could be a lot, lot worse.