Should I quit my job and become a UI/UX freelancer?
Should I quit my job and become a UI/UX freelancer?
By Parker Cho
Like many mid-twenty-year-olds trying to figure out the rest of their lives, I often feel I’m 1 Tik Tok-calling-me-old away from an existential crisis.
Am I on the right career path?
Should I quit my job?
Should I freelance?
Should I start my own business, be an entrepreneur?
I guess there’s always Grad School? What if I run out of money?
Am I doing this right?!
A few things about me, to note. I am 25 (26 in 2 months — eek!), live in New York City, and work for a hair care company producing content social media things. I’ve been at my job for a little over 2 years now, and while the company is great, I’d been starting to feel antsy. I’d convinced myself I didn’t like social media (I felt it was inauthentic) or hair (I mean, I have it, and I wash it, but that’s pretty much it) and thus felt limited by where I was.
I’ve found that one of the best ways to quiet those questions and doubts in my head, at least for a moment, is to talk to those I admire about their own life paths: to hear how they got to where they are now, and what they’ve learned along the way. Puno graciously agreed to speak with me about those things and I left the conversation feeling more focused and inspired. I wanted to share my takeaways with you, in the hopes that these words find you when you need them.
She told me about the time she worked on Call of Duty as a UX Director when she’d never played the game before.
She became the user by completely immersing herself in the game and its community: playing the game herself, finding other people who played the games, going on forums and watching videos, etc. until she began to understand what this game meant to so many people.
Make the most of what you have
I think I had started to get a little bit of tunnel vision after I’d convinced myself that I didn’t like my job/industry, and had gotten caught up in the grass is greener mentality. Puno’s voice of reason came at the perfect time when she told me how lucky I was… I sorely needed the reminder that the greatest thing you can do for yourself is to make the most of what you have.
And I realized through our conversation that if you immerse yourself deeply enough into something, and you have a natural curiosity to guide you, there will always be interesting and meaningful things you can extract from the experience. Puno spoke about that with her time on Call of Duty — and I realized I also had an immediate example in my life.
I’d decided a little while ago to watch all the Marvel movies in order. I had watched the Iron Man and Avengers trilogies, of course, and enjoyed them, so I assumed the franchise would be solid enough viewing. Mostly, it relinquished me from the decision fatigue I felt every time I turned the TV on to try to decide what to watch. Basically, I was an open but indifferent viewer at best.
Last night, I finished watching Avengers: End Game, the last of the 27 movies in the MCU, and I ugly sobbed about 6 times during the 3-hour run, because I now understood the enormous amount of storytelling that had taken place to reach this climax, I knew who all the characters were and their relationships to each other, and I had grown quite emotionally attached to them over the course of these films.
I now understood why there was such a deep fan base, and I marveled (haha) at how fulfilling it must be for both the creators and fans alike to see this entire universe come to life. I naturally found myself looking up podcasts, videos, articles, reviews, anything I could find outside of the movies because learning more about the nuances and layers brought an even greater viewing experience.
I feel like this is a great way to approach life in general — with curiosity, empathy, and a desire to always be learning about yourself and others.
What a gift it is to be able to discover pockets of the human experience, to discover worlds you didn’t know before, and to grow into a more layered, nuanced, interesting individual because of it. I think it is so valuable to have the ability to extract this kind of lesson from wherever you are in your life, both through your job, and outside of it.
I’m not sure what’s in the cards for me — where my career path will lead, where I’ll be in 5 years — but I’ll be working to stay curious. It can be hard to maintain optimism in what often feels like a rat race. But I hope you and I can always keep our gratitude: for where we are in our lives, and for what’s to come.