Twenty years of not tasting

What came into focus when I finally stopped moving

Something new: I recorded myself thinking through this article on a run. The raw version lives on my YouTube channel, While YJ Runs. I'd love to hear if this format works for you. Tell me if it's terrible.

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Three weeks after I left Google, I was drinking tea over the kitchen sink, and my eyes filled up.

Not because I missed the job. Because the tea was extraordinary, and I had no memory of the last time I’d tasted it. Not “the last good one.” The last one. I’d been drinking tea for years without tasting it.

That was the first thing I noticed about leaving: the world had been there the whole time. I just wasn’t.

The world isn’t busy. You are.

The story I told myself for two decades was that life was loud and fast and I was doing my best to keep up. The truth, which I can only see in retrospect, is that the loudness was inside my head. The calendar wasn’t the problem. The voice running underneath the calendar was the problem; the one keeping a tally of unread messages while I was supposed to be reading my kid a book, the one rehearsing tomorrow’s presentation while I was supposedly on a date with the Mrs.

When that voice finally got quiet, the world didn’t slow down. I started catching up to it.

What came into focus

My kids’ faces. I could not have described, with any confidence, the exact shape of my younger one’s smile. I’d been looking at him every day. I had not been seeing him. The first month after I left, I kept catching expressions on my kids’ faces I’d somehow never registered, and the feeling wasn’t joy. It was a kind of grief for the years I’d watched them on autopilot.

My parents getting older. This one stings more. There’s a particular slowness to the way my mum reaches for her cup now that wasn’t there a few years ago, and I don’t know when it started, because I wasn’t around for the start. Slowing down meant I finally had the bandwidth to do the math on how many visits we probably have left. The number is small enough to be useful.

The trail. I run a lot. I ran a lot before, too. But I used to run through places. Now I run in them. The light coming sideways through the redwoods at 7am isn’t a backdrop anymore; it’s the whole reason I’m out there. The 5K times still matter to me, the speed work still hurts, none of that has gone away. What’s changed is that the run isn’t a transaction with my future self. It’s something happening right now, to a body that won’t always be able to do this.

My own body, generally. Hunger. Tightness in my shoulders. The specific quality of being tired versus being depleted. When you’re moving fast enough, your body becomes a vehicle you complain about and ignore. When you slow down, it turns back into the thing you live inside.

The harder seeing

Some of what came into focus was less fun.

I started noticing how much of my old identity had been outsourced to a logo. I’d known this in theory for years; everyone at a big company half-knows it. Knowing it in your body, on a Tuesday morning with no meetings on the calendar and nobody waiting for your reply, is a different thing entirely. There’s a stretch of weeks in there that I’d describe, generously, as withdrawal.

I also started seeing how much of my busyness had been a kind of hiding. If you’re always responding to the next thing, you never have to sit with the question of whether the things you’re responding to are the right things. Speed is a wonderful anesthetic. It only stops working when you stop.

And I started noticing how little I controlled. Not in a dramatic way; in a daily way. The market does what it does. My kids will become who they become. My parents will age regardless of how many flights I book. There’s a humility that arrives, uninvited, when you finally have the time to look at your life clearly. It’s not defeat. It’s more like finally putting down a bag you forgot you were carrying.

What I’d tell the version of me still inside it

I’m not going to tell anyone to quit their job. That wasn’t the lesson, and it isn’t transferable. Plenty of people I love and respect are deep inside companies right now and doing the best work of their lives. The job wasn’t the enemy.

The enemy was the gear. I had exactly one speed for twenty years, and I mistook it for who I was.

If you’re reading this from inside a calendar that owns you, the thing I’d offer isn’t slow down. It’s find one place where you have a different gear, and protect it like it matters. A run with no watch. A meal where the phone is in the other room. A walk with your kid where you have nowhere to be after. Something the optimizer in your head can’t get its hands on.

You’ll be amazed at what’s been waiting there.

The tea was there the whole time. You just have to be the kind of person who can taste it.