My Last Month Before Quitting — What I Was Sorting Out at Work

Keep what gets opened. Cut what no one will read.

Twenty working days left before my last day — not counting leave and holidays.

The focus: building a handover assistant, converting Figma into readable code, tidying up unfinished work. The goal is to leave things clean, not just done.

---

Two things running in parallel

1. Design token series (where the real effort went)

Taking the Figma files an external designer left behind — inconsistent naming, no auto layout — and converting them into tokens an AI agent can actually read.

This is what I want to leave behind. Traditional handover wikis run 200 pages, expire in six months, and nobody opens them. I'd rather leave something the next person can just ask.

2. Revisiting code from early last year

Reading your own code from a year ago is strange.

Some of it makes you think "what was I thinking?" Some of it surprises you in the other direction — "I probably couldn't write something this messy now." Also documented how I used an agent for code review.

---

What the next ten years look like

Ten years into a career transition, I genuinely don't know if I want to keep going down this path or try something else.

This started after a hospitalization last year. I looked at the life list on my wall and realized none of it had anything to do with work. That made me wonder — do I really want to keep putting time into this?

Why step off the standard track?

I think it came from reading Die With Zero and The Middle Passage. A quick summary of each:

Die With Zero — Bill Perkins

Traditional finance: save → invest → leave behind more. This book argues: earn → spend it at the right time → convert it into experiences and memories.

Key ideas:

1. Time is scarcer than money

   • When you're young you have energy but usually no money. Middle age brings money and still some energy. Old age has money but not the body or time.
   • Health is an invisible asset that depreciates. Don't save experiences for retirement — schedule them into your life timeline.

2. Life's value comes from "Memory Dividends"

   Experience ≠ one-time consumption. Instead:

   • You revisit it: like in Frieren, a single trip can be replayed in memory for 30 years
   • It reshapes you: like in Frieren, a single relationship can redirect your life

3. Die with zero

   Don't sacrifice your life excessively for others. The ideal Consumption Curve peaks in middle age — not after retirement. The marginal value of experience declines with age, so optimize spending to avoid:

   • Spending down too early
   • Dying with too much left over

The Middle Passage — James Hollis

Forty isn't quite middle age — but who knows if I'll make it to eighty?

If you regularly feel any of these, the first two-thirds of this book are worth reading:

• Loss of meaning at work
• Emptiness despite conventional success
• Wanting to change, but unable to name a direction

The author divides life into two halves:

First Half

• Building identity (education, career, roles)
• Meeting social expectations
• Pursuing safety and approval

Three things we can't face

• Mortality: recognizing that time is finite
• Limitation: you can't become everything you imagined
• Isolation: no one can fully understand you

Second Half

• Dismantling the original identity
• Facing the inner self
• Living as who you actually are

Midlife isn't decline — it's the beginning of turning inward.

---

You don't have to quit to actually live

What I want isn't quick, tourist-style travel. It's concentrating time, money, and attention to get high-density lived experience.

The experiences Die With Zero describes require continuous decision-making — adjusting plans, allocating budgets, handling the unexpected. That sharpens your judgment under uncertainty. Leaving familiar environments breaks rigid patterns and helps rebuild your sense of what actually matters.

While most people are optimizing for career and money, I want to slow down for a year. Two concrete things I plan to do:

• Track spending — to calibrate the size of my reserves later, and verify whether my past estimates match real life.
• Record travel and learning — I have a bad memory. If I don't write it down, three months later I'm left with only a vague outline.

The answer to the next ten years won't emerge this year. But at least I'll gather some clues about what a version of me off the standard track actually looks like.

The life and travel side of things is written up in a companion piece: My Last Month Before Quitting — What I Was Sorting Out in Life.

The full design token series starts here: Starting from an Incomplete Figma File.