136 Days of Unemployment
I keep a Google Doc titled "Notes". I look at it every day. I feel guilty when I look at it.
I feel guilty because Notes has my TODO list. Notes has a log of how slowly I do things, if I do them at all. I haven't had a job for one third of a year and I am not rich yet; and I don't deserve to be. I'm not doing much of anything at all.
When the year ends, I will have been unemployed for 136 days.
August Summary
One Week of Unemployment
Two Weeks of Unemployment
In August, I read a lot of books. I did some technical explorations. I was riding the high of being freshly unemployed. August was a good month.
September Summary
In September, I define my EoY goals. I define my EoY2026 goals as well. I did a lot of creative work in September. I completed David Silver's RL course—a lecture series out of Sutton's Reinforcement Learning. I did a trivial project to prove to myself that I have learned RL.
I'm also going to fail on most of my stated EoY goals.
Success:
Visit cities
Maybe:
Poetry Artifact (Hosted an event. Article to come)
Predicted Failure:
Everything else
What did I do instead?
In September, I:
- Transcribed all my written poetry to a digital format
- Hosted a poetry reading event + goodbye party
- Got my first paying customer for lifestyle.photo
- Went deep on neovim
- Wrote goodbye letters to all my friends
- Learned Nginx
- Got my post-work finances settled
- Went through a full RL course
- Visited NYC, Boston
Clearly I am doing something. Is this something useful? We will see if it pays off over the next 2/3 of a year.
October Summary
In October, I:
- Made many of improvements to lifestyle.photo.
- Published What I See Coming in LLM Reinforcement Learning
- Read full JavaScript Docs. Read full Typescript Docs.
- Produced Typst renderings of my poetry, learning some modern typesetting.
- Estimated my next 1 year finances
- Saw the New Orleans Halloween parade.
- Spent Halloween in Austin, TX.
- Reached 50+ people who I've asked my "America Question"
- Spent ~5-10h per day every single day in active conversation with people
November Summary
In November, I:
- Reached $100MRR for lifestyle.photo
- Wrote so much poetry
- Visited Denver
- Wrote So You Want To Build a Road
- Built a bayesian transaction classification system entirely in Google Sheets. (writeup pending)
- Read 1/2 of John Locke's 2nd Treatise on Government
- Spent 11 days doing absolutely nothing.
- Learned how to use Pinterest; learned about Dark Academia
- Learned how to do proper skincare
December
I'm writing this post on Dec 5, 2025. I know what I plan to do. As evidenced by the past three months, I'm not sure if I will actually do it. Here we go!
- Finish the Goodfellow Deep Learning book
- Visit Big Ben
- Win the Gemini 3 Hackathon
- Create my writeup on my poetry blackout event
- Create my writeup on my Bayesian Google Sheets transaction categorization tool