If you're gonna do this, go drive a truck in a mining area. (In Australia this basically means WA) They're often desperate for drivers and the pay is insane.
this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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This is literally the route I took in my life. Entered the workforce in the early 2000s in IT as helpdesk. Worked till I had a resume good enough for the next level up. Lived below my means. Take several months off to do whatever. Apply for a higher level position. Rinse and repeat every couple years until I was in my 40s at a company I intend to retire with.
I always lived in a smaller place than what I could afford. Never owned a new car. My current vehicle is a 2001 pickup truck, purchased in like 2018. So, gotta trade one luxury for another.
2 caveats: IT as a career was not in the state its in now. Much easier to move up and around. I'm also now in my late 40s and looking to buy my first home, since I wasn't building a nest egg my whole life, and that's no fun.
Also, it was really important to have some significant achievements on the resume as I left each place to show growth professionally so I could always jump up in role/salary with each move.
My career is solid and I make a great salary for my age, but homes are just insane. My brother is 6 years younger and took a more traditional route and started a family, he was able to score a good home before COVID.
Still, I wouldn't trade anything material for the life I took and the places I went.
This gets a lot easier if you have somewhere reliable and preferably free to stay when you need to start working again. Even if you have paid off your own place or been given a place for free you have bills to pay on it. I guess you can rent it out while you are away, but that seems less than ideal to me as how do you keep it maintained if you aren't in the country? It just ends up being another cost.
I would have loved to have done this but the housing situation has always put me off.
Boomer here - that's pretty much how I managed my software career. Do a contract job for 6 mos to a year, then do theatre until I needed to work again. Had to go back to fulltime work once I got married and had kids. I miss those days tho. Also, fuck your tiny stereotyping brain if you think a whole generation has the same likes and dislikes.
Man I love you! (Platonically, of course).
How does that work when you don't live with your parents?
Rents are extremely expensive and would slow down the "build a safety net" part of the cycle.
Live with roommates, stop living with roommates since you're now traveling, no rent payment.
As someone with kids, that's not happening. Then again, my sibling did this and went on a year-long trip with their kids, and it worked out for them.
Tried something like this. Recruiters told me the gap didn't look good and I should lie about needing that time off for my mental health. The 1st class honours degree I was told would allow me to walk into a job was deemed essentially worthless since I had only around 2 year's industry experience. Took me months to get another role offered - a 15k paycut and overall a major downgrade - which I had to take to pay the rent. 0/10, would not recommend.
the gap didn’t look good
Yeah, live your entire fucking life to be attractive to that guy.
The only thing worth learning from this is that if there's so little need for work to be done that "having gaps in the resume" is enough that they'd rather go without, then the work does not need to be done.
It's beyond time for UBI.
Yeah.... I don't really think anyone really cares about anyone's education anymore, at least not past your first employer.
I have to spend a lot of time teaching people in their residencies at my job, and where they went school doesn't really bring anything to the table. In fact, a lot of the people who went to fancy private medical schools were either overwhelmed by having to talk to our impoverished patient population, or didn't ever develop healthy ways to mitigate interpersonal conflict.
I think the problem might be how quickly you quit to do it. It takes a good year to train a new person to be productive. If they only get about a year of productivity from you after training you for a year (and a junior level amount of productivity at that), then it's not worth their time and effort to invest in you. If you did it every 5-7 years instead, it would probably go over better. That's long enough to see whole projects through to completion and then just take a break in between.
There's also the issue of how long you take off. If you take off 6 months to a year, it's less likely that new technology comes in and changes everything than if you take off 2 years. Ex: 2 years from today you can expect huge swaths of industries to adopt using AI tools in day-to-day tasks. Another ex: I'm an engineer, not a CS person. I've helped design computer systems, but sophisticated coding isn't the main part of my job. In the last 3ish years I've seen every system I've encountered switch to containerization.
You'd have to find a job that pays enough for this lifestyle. And with the kind of resume this produces, it's a pipe dream.
Nah, you just need to adjust life styles. I've been doing this exact thing for five years now in the IT industry. I rely on contracts for full employment for 8 months and relax for 4 months.
This is what my old housemate did, starting in the 90s. Worked out quite well for him. My dad used went round the world with the navy in the 50s and used to talk about how some other cultures did stuff like this.
"Sounds like we're paying these guys too much"
Only works if you are not working a shitty job and living paycheck to paycheck. Good fucking luck in most economies greedy billionaires are keeping this from happening.
Yeah wtf jobs is she getting where she builds up a safety net in 1-2 years? I've been at this shit for a decade and have 3 digits in my bank account
Edit: I should disclose the fact that I have been making minimum wage this whole time. That said, most people I know make nearly average wages, and still have 3-4 digits in their bank accounts at all times
Living with parents probably (/gen, non-derogatory)
There's a thing called lifestyle creep. You may not necessarily be living paycheck to paycheck on the bare minimum. Going out with friends, having the latest phone, having hobbies, if you cut out all fun you may be able to save up significantly. You can also live like a bum in the least accommodating space you can stand. Being comfortable is expensive, but not everybody wants to be uncomfortable for long stretches just to fuck off to the Bahamas for a month every few years. That or credit card debt.
I think current 'lifestyle creep' for many is getting used to things like 'health insurance' and 'something other than beans and rice'. Hard to give up simple human dignity once you've had a taste of it.
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I mean, I don't see how it's possible if you're only going to have entry level skills... You're not really building up a wealth of marketable skills if you quit all the jobs after a year.
It works if you can build up the relationships and reputation, which will depend heavily on the industry and the job.
I know two people who do this, and they have jobs that allow them to.
One is an emergency room physician. His shifts are staffed through a middleman at 3 different local hospitals, and the nature of the work is that he just does work during the shift and doesn't bring any home with him or continuing onto the next shift he works. He gets paid very well when he's working (average annual salary of an emergency physician in the U.S. is about $375,000 per year). And occasionally just lines up a long sabbatical, does volunteer work overseas (Doctors Without Borders/MSF), and takes time off for himself and his family. He basically budgets a $200k lifestyle and takes unpaid time off. But his pathway basically required him to just dominate school, from kindergarten through a bachelor's degree and 4 years of medical school, and then put in his time as a resident.
Another friend of mine works as an electrician and lighting crew member on TV shows and movies. He always has to line up his next project after the current one ends, but occasionally can line something up in the future so that he can take a calculated 3-6 months between projects. He's got a good working relationship with some producers and directors, so he basically knows he can find a job anytime with whatever production those people happen to be working on. Whenever he has enough cash, he can go and travel, timed out to where he's not paying rent for an unoccupied apartment. Then he lines up another gig, signs a new lease, and then continues working. I think he lives very frugally on the job (I think stuff like food is covered when filming on location, so not a lot of out of pocket expenses for food/drink while working), and saves money that way.
With that, I think there are a few opportunities to think through which careers might actually allow for this.
Project-based jobs, where people work for a few months or a year towards a particular project completion, might be good for intentionally taking gaps between projects. I wonder if construction and similar industries would allow for this. Academia often has formal sabbatical policies, too, but that's relatively late career.
Personal independent gigs can do this, if you can earn enough money doing it (so, like, not Uber and Doordash). Some people do contract design work, create independent art, write essays and op eds for different publications, etc. If you're paid by the job, taking a break doesn't really hurt your "resume," so to speak. Even some who are expected to publish on a defined schedule can get ahead of the curve by producing a bunch of work for publication on that schedule (some webcomic authors and social media influencers are known to do this).
Jobs where you are employed by some firm but actually work for a client that hired your firm might also be a good candidate, if you have the seniority and flexibility and credibility to just take unpaid time off while still being on the books and website as an employee. I know people who took off a year of parental leave as lawyers, but it really depends on practice area and firm culture whether that will permanently hold them back on career growth.
Jobs that are basically shift work are designed so that no one person is totally indispensable or non replaceable, which gives the worker the flexibility to leave without hard feelings, and come back whenever they're ready. My emergency medicine friend probably fits in this category. But also, maybe any kind of 24/7 coverage job sorta fits this category, too, in health care, IT, critical infrastructure, etc.
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If you're ever on the backpacking circuit you'll meet people like that. They work just long enough to save up for their next trip.
But also, they travel frugally, not having a luxurious lifestyle between earning higher than average wage.
I wish. It takes me around 6 months and hundreds of applications to get a job. That strategy isn't sustainable for me.
I've got a buddy who does a variation of this. He's got a little shack pretty close to town. He'll work in the oil field for a few months, come hang out with everyone, and live a "normal" life. Then when he's saved up enough he rolls out and lives in the woods with his dog hunting and fishing and growing veggies. We go by and check on his place every so often to make sure no one has broken in and it's not rotting to the ground.
When he no longer has the money to stay in the woods he comes back. I say that, but he's got the skills to feed himself out there. I think he gets bored after a year or two and wants to be around people for a while.
I asked him about retirement once and he's got another shack right on a lake that's been paid off since the 90s. His plan is to go there and fish and not come back.
Didn’t know this phenomenon had a name. That’s what I’m doing right now however. I want to have enough money to be unemployed for a year or two.
I thought Gen Z aren't really into drinking or drugs. I hope they do this. Make holes in your resume the norm so they can't hold anything against you. I have friends that did/do this and they got it out of their system. They're pretty happy with their lives.
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I’ve done this for the past several years. Not on purpose. I keep telling myself I’ll settle down.
I got a new job a year ago. It looked promising and I was ready to make a life here. But I don’t see myself in it. Leaving soon. Saved enough for modest living and adventurous cheapish traveling for at least a year.
Before that job I was mostly on the road for a year and a half, with some temporary odd jobs here and there.
It has its pros and cons. It’s exciting and adventurous. Sometimes it’s intense. I basically have no retirement savings. Super hard to find a partner.
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