Mini-Retirement: Or, How I Learned to Stop Grinding and Took Two Years Off
TLDR; I spent two years not working. Not because I was laid off, not because I was burned out, but because I decided to take a chunk of my retirement now instead of waiting until I’m 65. And it was the best decision I made.
The idea came from Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek, which I’d read back in 2019. Like Inception, it lodged itself in my mind and took root. The premise was radical: instead of working when young and retiring when old, what if you redistributed those retirement years throughout your life? What if you could travel, learn, and explore while you’re still young and energetic—not when you’re too old to hike volcanoes or snorkel for hours?
Before I continue, I want to acknowledge that this choice was made possible by a set of privileges—financial, professional, and geographic—that many people don’t have. I don’t present this as a universal blueprint, only as a personal experience that might resonate with some.
Act I: The Decision
I had wanted to travel the world for extended periods since I could remember, but a 9-5 job naturally doesn’t allow for that. The timing, however, felt urgent. I knew that once my son started school, extended travel would become nearly impossible. If we were ever going to do this, it had to be now.
But here’s the thing about mini-retirements that I didn’t fully appreciate until I took one: they’re not just about travel. They’re about reclaiming time when it matters most—when you have the physical capability, when your kids are young enough to join you, when your curiosity is still driving you forward rather than fading into routine.
We are not guaranteed to live and be healthy till old, so why delay fulfillment for a period of life that may look very different than we imagine? The mini-retirement reframes the question from “can I afford to stop working?” to “can I afford not to use this time while I have it?”
My wife and I started discussing it seriously, and we managed to align everything. We roughly envisioned a two-year break, not just to travel, but also to learn new skills and position ourselves for better opportunities afterward. In late 2023, we both quit our jobs.
Act II: What We Did
We hit the road immediately and spent the first 9 months circumnavigating the earth—15 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. We watched sunrise over Mount Bromo in Java. We snorkeled with manta rays and sharks in Bora Bora’s impossibly blue lagoon. My son watched wild kangaroos on Noosa Beach in Australia, drove a tuk-tuk with me in Thailand, and learned about the food and culture of all countries we visited. I stood in Persepolis at sunset, photographed Hong Kong’s neon-lit streets, and explored the vast temple complexes of Angkor Wat.
I’ve documented the full journey on my travel blog, but what I want to share here isn’t the itinerary—it’s what travel like this actually creates. Try this exercise: explain a typical week of your working life, then explain a week you spent doing something you’ve always dreamed of. The latter will take ten times longer. That’s because those experiences create a density of memory that routine simply can’t match. Those nine months expanded my memory reservoir more than the previous nine years combined—memories and photos I’ll return to for the rest of my life. When I’m old and looking back, I’ll see a life that was lived, not just worked through.
Then we came home. And this is where the mini-retirement became more than just extended travel.
We spent the next 6 months focusing on what we cared about”: I focused on learning, while my wife focused on volunteering for good causes, and making me look bad by comparison… I finally dug into areas I’d long wanted to explore: reinforcement learning and generative AI. I chose these topics because I genuinely enjoyed them and because I wanted to work in these areas, after the mini-retirement was over. Most of my learning came from online lectures on YouTube, reading by interacting with LLMs, and building personal projects. I’ve documented some of that process in this blog.
We then did a second four-month trip: marveled at the sight of Pyramids of Giza for the first time, drank tea with Bedouins under the stars in Wadi Rum, got lost in the hill towns of Tuscany, drove the green cliffs of Ireland, and vanlifed through Iceland’s otherworldly lava fields and geothermal valleys.
Act III: The Return
A mini-retirement isn’t complete without returning to work, and this final phase was the hardest part—though not for the reasons I expected.
When I quit in 2023, the job market was weak. I hoped it would recover by 2025. It didn’t. There’s no sugarcoating it: 2025 was a difficult year to be looking for a job in tech. Years of layoffs combined with slow hiring created an unusually large pool of strong candidates fighting for fewer roles. Companies are either short on capital or investing exclusively in AI infrastructure. The sheer volume forces firms to rely on automated screening, meaning highly qualified professionals are frequently rejected by an algorithm before a human sees their name.
For context, I was searching as a senior ML engineer in Seattle. Clicking “Apply” on company websites led to exactly zero interviews. Some hiring managers later told me they receive hundreds of applications per role, and don’t have time to review them. Every interview I got came either from recruiters reaching out directly on LinkedIn or from personal referrals—and by referral, I mean having my resume placed directly in a hiring manager’s hands, not the standard HR pipeline.
But here’s what surprised me: I encountered no stigma around being unemployed for two years. Not once. In fact, every single recruiter and hiring manager expressed envy. Some praised my courage. The career gap most fear would be a liability became a conversation starter that humanized me in a sea of identical resumes.
The mini-retirement wasn’t an escape from work—it was an investment in becoming better positioned for the work I actually wanted to do. The outcome proved it: After four months of interviews, I landed a role in a cutting-edge area of AI-a role better aligned with my interests than what I had before.
What I Actually Gave Up (And What I Gained)
Let’s be honest about the trade-offs. Yes, we left a significant amount of money on the table by not working for two years. We tapped into our financial reserves. I dealt with the stress of a tough job market. If you’re early in your career, don’t have savings, or work in a less resilient field than AI, the calculus might look very different.
But here’s what I gained:
I fulfilled a long-held dream to see the world with my family while my son was young enough to be molded by it and before school locked us into a calendar. I built memories that will last a lifetime—not Instagram moments, but real texture: the smell of street food in Vietnam, my son’s joy playing at the beach in Koh Yao Yai, and observing daily rituals in Bali. I learned skills that genuinely excited me and positioned me for work I care about. I proved to myself that stepping off the treadmill didn’t mean career suicide.
Most importantly, I stopped deferring living my dreams to a distant future.
The Dream You’re Not Pursuing (And Why)
Here’s what I’ve learned over the past two years: whenever I told people I was taking a mini-retirement, the reaction was always the same. Amazement, followed by a version of “I’ve always wanted to do that, but…”. The “but” varied: fear of career gaps, financial requirements, kids, mortgages, health insurance, what people would think. All real concerns. All solvable for some—impossible for others.
I’m not here to tell you that everyone can or should take a mini-retirement. But I am here to tell you that if this is music to your ears, but seems pretty far-fetched, the obstacles might be more negotiable than you think. The job gap didn’t matter. The market was brutal, but I got through it (I had to do it anyways, if I wanted to change jobs). The money I spent bought something I literally cannot buy later: thirteen months of travel before my son started school, and six months to learn deeply instead of squeezing education into exhausted evenings.
That money part—that is usually where people stop. ‘I can’t afford it.’ But afford is the wrong word. Rolf Potts put it better than I can in Vagabonding:
All too often, we postpone our deepest travel dreams for fear that we cannot afford them, when in fact the freedom to travel isn’t the result of a hypothetical sum of riches: It is the result of a conscious decision to use whatever money we’ve saved up to create enough time to make our dreams happen.
Replace “travel” with whatever you’re deferring—learning to paint, writing a book, building a company, spending unstructured time with your loved ones—and the principle holds.
The question isn’t whether you can afford to take time off. The question is whether you can afford to keep deferring the life you actually want to live. Life isn’t meant to be stockpiled for some distant “someday.” It’s meant to be lived now—with all the risk, uncertainty, and trade-offs that entails.