Ask HN: Burned out. How can I make the most of a sabbatical leave?

Rediscovering your passion is probably the most important thing you can do for yourself at the moment. Going 'walkabout' as the Austrailians say has a couple of great aspects to it; first you take yourself out of your routine surroundings, second you create a different set of day to day tasks which helps keep you out of the rut you find yourself in at home.

If you are the camping type, hitting the parks can be great (Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellow stone, Carlsbad, Grand Tetons, Etc.) If you are more inspired by cultural endeavors hitting the museuems, music festivals, cultural celebrations are good. The goal of any good walkabout is first to empty yourself, which is to dump all the day to day things that wear upon your consciousness and get back to a place where your true passions can be sensed.

Let your curiosity take you down different roads. Learn a new language, explore a new culture. Recapture the wonder of learning something knew for the sake of learning it.

Remember that when you are aged and contemplating the end of your days, you probably won't be thinking "I wish I spent more time at work." :-)

Sure, for my first adventure I found a loophole in some money I was getting as the result of my father's early and tragic death (when I was 6 leaving my mom destitute) wherein it would continue as long as I was in high school. When I did an exchange year in Denmark as a highschool student, even though I had already graduated in the states, the money kept coming. It wasn't a lot (on the order of $10k/year) but enough as I stayed with a host family in Denmark who largely covered my living expenses (room and board).

For my second gap year I got two companies with great projects in a bidding war, negotiated a signing bonus and a later starting date to help me make my choice, then traveled on the time and the bonus.

Other ones have similar stories, finding some scholarships, funds, loopholes, using one project to fund another etc.

I didn't always travel alone, although I've done my fair share of travel on my own. I deal with it by mixing it up and being pretty self actualized. Denmark was the toughest, I've been watching the Big Bang theory recently and having some flashbacks to how socially awkward I used to be. I'm still awkward but going through lots of traveling, meeting new people, etc has made me a lot more of a well rounded person.

My biggest tip is to think holistically, this will help with not only financing but using your time well. For example, when I decided to move to Egypt on no funds I first made a mental list of why and what I wanted to do there. One of the things on the list was to learn Arabic, and my funds eventually came from a scholarship directed at that, although I used the funds to finance everything on my list.