One month after getting laid off

In 2015 my friend Stephen gave me advice for our upcoming trip to Burning Man - my first time at the festival. He told me a cheap $25 tent from Big 5, $10 air mattress, and some blankets from home would be sufficient accommodations for the 9-day long event. Stephen had done this before, so I had no reason not to believe him. I was attending as part of his little 9-person camp, after all.

Looking back, his advice wasn’t bad. You can go to Burning Man with a cheap tent, but to those reading this: you should NOT. On the second night of the festival, the zipper to my tent got stuck open, so I “repaired” it with my pocket knife, some duct tape, and rope. The jury-rigged repair left my door perforated, and Burning Man 2015 was about to be one of the coldest on record.

It was the first time I remember being so cold I couldn’t sleep. I tried sleeping under all my clothes. I busted out the emergency solar blanket for an extra layer. My air mattress would deflate in the middle of the night, and to use the electric pump to fix it would wake up my camp mates. I was getting intimately, radically acquainted with the reality of freezing desert night.

Then there was the dust. The holes in my tent meant any dust storm would fill my space with the most powdery playa. Our tiny camp had no shower, no vacuum, and no real way of helping me. I was dusty and not getting any less so until we left the place.

I feared this before coming to Burning Man, but something happened to me when that fear become my new reality. It woke up a wildness; a hardness I hadn’t known before. It saw my suffering and said, “This is great, I’ll take it from here.” And, despite the hardships, I had the most fun I ever had in my life up to that point. I went back 5 times. I swear, it wasn’t just the party favors.

All this to say: I think I’m going through something similar. It’s been a month since I’d been put on garden leave after ~70 of my US-based colleagues and I received the news that our roles were eliminated. I was shocked at first, like everyone. I mourned my job for a good 24 hours - I even considered immediately applying to nearby Piccino, seeking a host on Craigslist - because how could I get a job in this crowded tech job market?

I realized in 2025 that AI was changing the world, fast. I’d seen Claude do “some Star Trek shit” and with it saw the rising tide of a new era. I decided to lock in and learn as much about AI-assisted development as I could, and I was having some of the best few months of my career. So, I figure, why should I stop?

I decided to keep the party going. I finally had time to work on projects I’d put off, like this website you’re probably reading from. I started working on ClassiFinder just 16 days after getting laid off, and - with Claude/Grok/Gemini’s help - had a working product just 2 weeks after that. The process of launching this product, taking this as seriously as I can, learning how to market and debug and talk to other founders, has been tremendously exciting.

To be fair, I don’t have a mortgage, I don’t have kids, so I don’t feel an immediate urgency to resolve my unemployment right this second. I feel I can afford to take a small breather. Working on my own projects, meeting like-minded folks at networking events, learning new skills, has been so fun that I might be doing this whole “being unemployed” thing all wrong. Maybe I’ll be singing a different tune in 6 months or a year when my savings start looking gaunt, my startup hasn’t shown promise, and my employment prospects remain bleak, but for now I’m having a great time.