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@ Avi Burra
2025-06-09 21:14:19I posted on nostr last week that I had finally had enough of the fiat job and decided to take action:
nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzpwp69zm7fewjp0vkp306adnzt7249ytxhz7mq3w5yc629u6er9zsqythwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnswf5k6ctv9ehx2ap0qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tcqyr604hwzr8vvluvp8y0s42gu4x0e725cetugnh7g293g9cggtpujww6vn8n
I'm going to document my journey from being in a well-established and well-paying fiat job into the unknown world of independent work in freedom tech in a series of articles. Will I end up finding something truly inspiring and fulfilling, while being able to support my family? We'll find out over the course of the next few weeks.
They say a watched pot never boils, but I’ve discovered a corollary: a watched lay-off never lands. It has now been ten full rotations of this curious planet since I politely asked my SVP to lay me off. The axe remains lodged somewhere in upper-management limbo, perhaps awaiting the proper ceremonial robe or a Procrustean bed that meets quarterly OKR standards.
While the paperwork drifts in the stratosphere, I’ve begun a quiet, delicious rebellion. My calendar, once a Tetris board stacked with 10–12 neon bricks of back-to-back calls, now resembles minimalist art: a single meeting block lounging at 11 a.m., sipping espresso and judging the empty white space around it. When unreasonable requests for road-maps, slide-decks, or seventeen-page AI vision statements arrive, I respond with the calm of a mountain lake: That timeline seems ambitious... shall we refine the scope? The sound you hear is the collective gasp of colleagues who thought the only acceptable answer was Yes, by yesterday.
With those reclaimed hours I’ve slipped into my mad-scientist lab (occasionally also known as sofa in the guest bedroom, or Orange Room) to experiment on MKStack. Imagine a Lego set for nostr clients, only the bricks are pure code and half the instructions are written in the margin of a philosophy book. I’m vibecoding away, torching roughly thirty thousand sats in compute every day as GPUs hum like distant Tibetan bowls. An accountant might call it reckless; I call it tuition for the University of Possibility.
The experiments are already bearing odd fruit. NosFabrica, the health-data-on-nostr project I started with nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgqgdwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkcqpqt8pwzkkhhs94e9acgw9jwca9csyl7a4tnpdttu05039um5j7d6xskflc8d and nostr:nprofile1qy88wumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmv9uq3qamnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wd4hk6tcqyprqcf0xst760qet2tglytfay2e3wmvh9asdehpjztkceyh0s5r9cpvx58v is finally getting the attention it deserves. I've built out a simple prototype for a provider directory, that only lists providers with a "credential" issued by me. I'm polishing the app now, but hope to release it for testing in the next couple of weeks.
Most gratifying of all, I’ve traded status meetings for sideline cheers. My 14-yo son is sprinting toward his final exams and soccer playoffs simultaneously - Hegel might call it thesis and antithesis, I call it Tuesday. Instead of doom-scrolling Microsoft Teams during his matches, I’m barking out instructions to him to stay onside, while curbing my desire to manhandle the incompetent refs for not calling a penalty when he's clearly being roughhoused in the box by 190-lb defenders with neck beards and chest hair.
Here’s an unexpected twist: without the daily psychic smog of corporate urgency, the sky inside my skull has cleared. Ideas that once flickered like fireflies now glow with stadium lighting. I have sketched three chapters of the sequel to 24 (called July 18), and outlined a new creative project called A Muse Stochastic (coming soon). I don’t know which, if any, of these seedlings will grow, but the soil finally feels fertile again.
Do I worry about the math? Of course. The household budget once kept afloat by a predictable salary will soon meet the iceberg of reality. Yet the anxiety is strangely weightless, as though the fear itself got furloughed. Maybe it’s naïveté, maybe faith; either way, the net I cannot see is starting to feel palpable beneath my feet.
Ten days in, the lessons are already crystallizing:
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Silence is space. Remove a dozen meetings and the mind blooms faster than AWS bills.
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Pushback is a spiritual practice. Each gentle “no” to nonsense is a “yes” to sanity.
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Compute credits are cheaper than regrets. I’ll trade a double espresso's worth of GPU time for a shot at building the future any day.
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Presence compounds. One extra hour on the training pitch yields more familial ROI than a dozen performance reviews.
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Uncertainty is a mirror. Stare into it long enough and you start seeing yourself, not your résumé.
Where does this road lead? I genuinely have no clue. The map dissolves about three steps ahead, like one of those old adventure games where the terrain renders just before you walk off a cliff. But every time I inch forward, the ground materializes. The net appears.
Next week, perhaps I’ll report that the corporate guillotine finally fell, or that I’ve secured my first contract, or that my son aced biology while scoring the winning goal. Whatever unfolds, I’ll keep threading these reflections into the loom of “The Net Appears.” After all, an abyss is just an invitation to practice flight.
Until then, may your own invisible nets breeze into view exactly when you need them, and may they be woven from stronger stuff than corporate lanyards.
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