May 25th, 2022 was my last day at Stripe, 82 day shy of 7 years. Leaving on a Wednesday is weird, but it was the last day of school for my kids and it was fitting. I’m taking the summer off to focus on family, and recenter some parts of who I am. I’ll think about what comes next in September, but hopefully not a day sooner.
When we entered the pandemic, I had two middle schoolers. We uprooted them, moved a thousand miles to a new city, new climate, and a new experience while I started working in an office. I’d been working remotely their whole lives. While Stripe’s Seattle office was growing, they were growing into teenagers. Then the pandemic hit and we abruptly came back to Vegas. My parents are our neighbors, and I’m so happy my kids have an extra generation of wisdom, experience, and love so near. It helped make a tough time easier.
I deeply appreciated my time at Stripe, and it was my favorite job by far. It’s not perfect, but it was very good for me. I continue to miss the work, and can’t help but think more about it and unfinished projects and opportunities. This is the right choice to leave, though. My life at the moment, outside of work, has a closing window of opportunity. I’m teaching my son to drive, and he’s learning what early adult life looks like as he starts thinking about colleges. My daughter is a bit younger, no college plans yet but we have a ton of fun baking, gaming (she carries me in Valorant), and creating art. I just did my first watercolor painting, and looking forward to doing a lot more. Both of them continue to teach me a lot, but I have to be a patient student because I’m not a very good student so they’re usually not very efficient lessons.
I love to travel. Now, for the first time, I have both the financial means and the time. As much as we can do safely, we’re going to travel (and what we can do safely! There is still a pandemic). Summer in Las Vegas is miserable so I have extra motivation. My goal is to spend as little time here as we can, starting with a long trip in Seattle to reacquaint with our friends there. My wife and I have a lot of other things planned, and it’s a great perk to have not just family so close, but family we enjoy being with who also enjoy watching the kids.
Over the next 3 months, I’m going to be thinking about how life changes when so much of my time and energy isn’t focused on a job. I’ve always liked working, and I’m excited to see how the lines of being productive and being helpful move further away from doing that mostly at work. I don’t know what it looks like at all.
I wanted my last day to be celebratory and exciting. It was overshadowed by the entirely preventable, avoidable, unnecessary tragedy in Uvalde. My kids have grown up doing lockdown drills, hiding under their desks, wondering when the next shooting will happen. They both know people impacted by the mass shooting here in 2017. Gun violence is an expectation for this generation. We can stop this if we choose. I don’t mean “we” as in Democrats, I mean “we” as Americans.
We can fund groups like Everytown, so they can compete with the $60 million dollars the NRA spends in lobbying efforts every year. We can continue to demand gun safety and we can reduce the number of shootings and the number of deaths. We can vote for, and fund, people like Jessica Cisneros, ousting politicians that aggressively defend the status quo. We can stop making the deaths of so many children a divisive political issue. It will always be political, because to resolve this will require changing our laws.