Forgive me Astro, for I have not written. It has been 6 months since my last blog.
My fellow ex-Catholics will pick up what I’m putting down here.
I’ve been thinking about this blog post a lot lately and have jotted down notes and bits and bobs here and there, but I finally feel like I am in a good enough head space to actually reflect on what 2024 was and how it has shaped up what 2025 could be. Let’s dive in…
2024 started out great, my wife and I had recently just moved into an amazing condo with an ocean view on the shores of Cozumel, Mexico. We’d already been living in the country for a year but we were in a house that only had AC in the bedroom, didn’t get all that great of airflow, and was kind of tucked into the jungle so it was buggy AF. So when we scored this condo, we were on cloud nine. Waking up, getting in a work out, having a cup of coffee, all while staring out at the ocean was doing wonders for my soul.
February wasn’t too bad until the end of the month where we both picked up a pretty bad case of Covid that laid us out for the better part of two weeks. We’d had it before, but it was while we were in Peru at altitude and so we figured this couldn’t be as bad as that. Which, it ultimately kind of was and wasn’t. The breathing challenges weren’t there, but the brain fog and lethargy/exhaustion were significantly worse. Fortunately we were never in a position where we felt it was threatening and just kind of holed up and rode it out.
March rolls around and I end up tweaking my lower back on the right side. This is something I’m familiar with as I’ve done it several times, but I must have been overly compensating for it when I was walking because it ended up triggering one of the worst cases of piriformis syndrome I’ve ever dealt with. Being in IT, I sit… a lot… and so I’ve dealt with this issue before on a couple of occasions. This time, however, was beyond anything I had ever experienced. Usually after a week or so it starts to get better, but we were getting into April and I could barely get out of bed without immense pain and ended up needing to involve a doctor. It wasn’t until May or so that I finally started to get some actual relief after making a few lifestyle changes such as adding stretching and a standing desk to my life. Ultimately I was still dealing with it off and on all the way through August or so making it one of the longest issues I’ve ever dealt with.
Things were kind of just plodding along through the summer without too many issues. We, well, I was finally able to get back under the water and do a little diving. We were in the midst of hurricane season and ended up going through Hurricane Beryl which was a trip. And we went back to Los Angeles to visit my wife’s family and stock up on a year’s worth of supplies. Something one does when you live in Mexico and you can’t always get the little things you want there.
Coming back from that trip, we were amped. We were stoked to be home, looking forward to the coming cooler weather, my body was starting to feel really good again when bam! Out of nowhere, I was laid off from my job. When I say out of nowhere, I mean literally, out of nowhere. I’ve never felt more blindsided by something in my life. I’ve been extremely fortunate that this was not something I’d experienced too much in my career, but on the flip side of that, I was completely unprepared for how this would impact our lives.
I work in tech, and I’d been hearing about how the market had been rough, especially watching company after company go through significant reductions in staff. I think I recently read over 100,000 people were laid off from tech last year which is a mind boggling stat in its own right. But when you couple that with the age of AI and a significant slowdown in hiring, I vastly underestimated how difficult the transition was going to be. One of the things that I did understand was that the remote work culture had shifted while I was at my previous job and that the work from anywhere mentality was going away with all of the return to office mandates. So my wife and I made the difficult decision to sell everything we didn’t need, pack up our stuff, and temporarily move in with her parents in California. We were extremely fortunate to have both our parents offer this to us, but I didn’t have moving back in with our parents in our 40s on the bingo card. We ultimately chose California because it gave me the best opportunity to land a gig between remote, hybrid, and in person in the area.
Hiring and interviewing today is vastly different than what it was the last time I went through the process. Before, you’d just gussy up your resume, fire it off to a few places, get a couple of interviews, pick the right one, and 6-8 weeks later you were starting your new gig. Not anymore. AI has made this a massive cluster to where jobs are being posted and then getting inundated with hundreds, if not thousands, of automated resume submissions. Quite frequently for people who have nowhere near the skill sets the job requires which means your resume is getting buried in a pile of cruft. I had started to see this a bit in my previous role, even without actively hiring. It’s also a buyer’s market now so companies are putting up a job posting to essentially farm resumes for when they actually do need to hire. I applied to roles back in October that, to this day, I’m still getting the canned “Thanks for your application…” something something better candidate/role was filled/not hiring for this role now/etc… It’s insane and I’ve got 25+ years in the industry across various disciplines and almost 10 years of management experience under my belt. Getting an interview request felt a bit like winning the lottery only to then be hit with the crushing anxiety of not messing it up because who knows when the next one will come. It ended up giving me a severe case of Imposter Syndrome and had me questioning if I ever even really had worked in the industry, let alone knew what I was doing.
I went through a couple of rounds of hiring with some companies, and even made it to the seventh… yes, you read that right, seventh round with a company before being cut from the process. At that same company, I still had another round that needed to be done and a presentation round. In hindsight, I think I dodged a bullet there even though it would have been nice to have gotten something for all of that effort.
Looking back at the last 4 months, I don’t think I ever realized how down and depressed I actually got. It’s kind of hard to see the forest from the trees when you’re in the thick of it, but now that I’ve come out the other side, it was bad. Not in a, I’m going to do something drastic about it way, but in a, nothing matters and nothing makes me happy, kind of way. We were doing some fun things like going to football games or plays, and I would enjoy the moment, but as soon as it had passed, it was like a haze came back over me and all I could think about was what I needed to be doing to get a job.
I’m now in a much better place, I’ve been working for a little over a month at a new role and we’ve recently moved up to Washington state to a new apartment. While I didn’t really expect to be living in the US in 2025, or really ever again for that matter, things are looking up. I’m excited by this new home we’re putting together and this next chapter in our lives. It’s great to feel motivated again to do things that make me happy and not just mindlessly shutting my brain off watching who knows what I turned on to pass the time. I’ve even started programming for fun again which is something I’ve not done in… 3 years? The past has a dark and stormy cloud hovering over it, but the future is bright and sunny even if it’s currently gray and foggy as I type this out. 2025 feels like it is going to be significantly better than 2024 and I’m honestly looking forward to seeing what it brings.