We're leaving work for a while. To go traveling, and to spend more time with family. It's a frightening decision. Why are we doing it? Why now?
Our context
We've lived in the US for 13+ years now. It's been incredible in so many ways, especially career wise. We love it here. But we're also far from our parents, our families, and the next generation of nieces and nephews are growing up without us.
We ourselves are in our early 40s (very early!) and love traveling. We're healthy, and hungry to spend more time seeing more of the world.
The tradeoff
While we stay working we are trading time (with friends, with family, traveling, etc.) for money.
10 years ago the equation was easy. Our parents were young, the kids were mostly not even born, we were young. And we had very little money. There wasn't really that much of a choice to be made – we had to work.
If we wait another 10 years we will have screwed it up. Vital years with our folks will have slipped by. The kids will have grown up without us. And we'll be into our 50s… Is some more money really worth those losses? Absolutely not.
So. The time to change has been approaching. And we've made the call that it is time to quit now. At least for a while.
What's next?
Given this reasoning, our priority is to spend time with parents, the kids, and friends. We'll focus on that and then also build in a bunch of traveling in between. There is a lot of the world still to see.
After that, who knows. I expect that we'll learn a lot, we'll change, and it will become clearer what to do next. We don't need to decide now.
We're certainly not in a position to never work again. And that isn't even even something that I want. I love my work at Google, maybe I'll be back again! But we'll cross that bridge later.
How long?
Who knows? At least a year. Maybe more. We specifically don't want to decide now.