Caution: "Career Break" Ahead

"Career Break."

Yet another interviewer looks up at me, reading this aloud, as if the question suggests itself.

There are words written underneath this heading, but no one seems to read them.

I obligingly fill in the blanks—I went back to school, I improved open source projects, I directed several successful art installations for which I developed novel technologies—but I can feel the rusted, creaking weight of antique industrial attitudes behind the question.

I didn’t take a "career break," my friend. I just didn’t work for a company for a couple of years.

I’ve been trying to use LinkedIn’s system as it was designed. Trying to be honest in how I represent myself, because integrity is important to me.

If you want to indicate a span of time that doesn’t relate back to being gainfully employed, LinkedIn offers, sparingly, a field called "Professional Development." You then get an anonymous-looking calendar icon (strike 1—it looks out of place next to a line of company logos) and a subheading (strike 2) that says:

"Career Break."

The phrase is a roadblock. It conjures images of stalling out, pulling off to the side of the road to rest while everyone else zooms past. But I didn’t stall. I didn’t pull off the road—I built entirely new roads.

The truth is, the last couple of years have been some of the most productive and fulfilling of my career. I spent the time completing my degree in Mathematics, becoming conversationally competent in Irish (Gaeilge), and improving my French to a near-fluent level. I built the Metapub website, helped expand several open-source projects with significant additions, and directed tech-driven art installations that captured the imaginations of thousands.

Yet somehow, the term "Career Break" doesn’t capture any of that. Instead, it implies I was idling, waiting for something to happen.

But here's the thing: even if I hadn’t done any of that—even if I had spent those years simply resting—that time still shouldn’t be seen as a liability. Rest is not a failure. It’s a deeply human need, and this world is cruel enough without punishing people for taking time to rest, reflect, or heal. And in an increasingly automated world, shouldn’t we be celebrating the very human act of rest and repair?

By the time you’re reading this, I may have changed my LinkedIn profile. Why? Because it's a waste of everyone's time for me to be implicitly held to account for it. Instead, it’ll be replaced by some creative reaccounting using my artistic contracting firm, Community Capture Corp .

Or maybe—if LinkedIn finally wises up and offers more flexible options for representing time—it’ll say something less triggering to interviewers than:

"Career Break."

This expression evokes total idleness only due to the unexamined biases of a frankly 19th century industrialist, Protestant culture, in which it is assumed that if one is not turning the cranks of capital, then one is surely doing nothing at all (or worse). After all, work is supposed to be a deeply unpleasant activity that one does to demonstrate one's moral virtue.

Logically, then, anyone who doesn't have a job for some period of time lacks virtue -- even if it's a job they neither need nor enjoy.

But then, how do I reconcile this with modern notions like “find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”? The idea that work must always be tied to productivity or a paycheck clashes with the reality that true passion and fulfillment aren’t always found in traditional employment. The assumption remains: if you’re not working for someone else, you are not "contributing".

But here's the twist: even if someone chooses to do nothing, that choice should be just as valid. If we want to move forward as a society--particularly as advances in AI push us closer to realizing the 19th-century dreams of industrial automation removing the more onerous aspects of labor from our lives--we need to abandon the idea that rest or “nothing” is inherently negative. Rest, idleness, and moments of pause can be revolutionary. In a world that demands constant productivity, choosing to step back, to reflect, or even to simply be is not a failure—it’s a right.

So when people see "Career Break" and rush to judgment, I challenge them to think differently. Maybe that time was spent on personal growth or creative endeavors. Maybe it was spent resting or recharging. And maybe it doesn’t need to be justified at all.

In a world that’s rapidly changing—where automation, creativity, and adaptability are the future—our approach to evaluating people and work has to evolve. We are not just the sum of our calendric parts; we are complex individuals whose involvements, contributions, and trajectories don't always fit neatly into a linear social media profile box.

It’s time to stop looking backward and start embracing a forward-thinking view of what work, growth, and contribution to society really mean.