Spending sabbatical in high school

I’m taking a break.

After over 20 years of the corporate grind at Nielsen, Meta, and 2K Games, I’m on sabbatical. It’s the first time I’ve had to reflect on my life, think about what I want to do next, and honestly recharge after two decades of running. And wow, did I need this.

I’ve always loved data & analytics, and it felt like my natural calling, my destiny, to do it for a living. I felt lucky to be able to do something I loved and get paid for it, and as a result any time my boss or company asked me to do something, I said yes. Jump! How high? As a result, I’d made my career the focal point of my life, as it dictated where I lived, introduced me to my closest lifelong friends, and frankly gave me purpose.

This is all great, and I have no regrets about how the past 20 years have gone. But I’m grateful to have the time to reflect, think, and recharge. I’ve earned it. And I plan to use it.

All that said, it turns out that I have a lot of time when on sabbatical. More time than I’ve had since even college, when I was rather adrift.

So I made a list of things I could do. Learn new pieces on the piano (success!). Write more blog posts (success!). Use our new apartment building’s pool regularly (failure!). Take some nature walks (failure, because it’s cold AF!). Work on new aspect of my sports power rankings (semi-success!). Get a healthier sleeping cycle (success!). Get a healthier drinking pattern (success!). Not bad.

From there, I decided to turn the TV on. At first, I went to old favorites. I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Wedding Crashers, Superbad, you get the gist. It was nice. I hadn’t seen any of these in years, and it felt like I was back among old friends. Turn the clock back, nostalgia.

I can’t say that it helped me reflect or think, necessarily, but it felt nice, and definitely helped recharge.

Next up, on a lark, I decided to watch a TV show and play a video game that were both on my bucket list.

I’m not going to sit here and say that these experiences completely transformed my life or anything, but having finished both of them this week, they did get me to reflect and think. And it’s not often that you get simultaneous media experiences with such odd commonalities despite such obvious contrasts.

So, it’s time to put the pieces together on spending the past few weeks of my sabbatical in high school.

For those uninitiated, the elevator pitches for each of these (very minor spoilers):

• Persona 5 Royal is a Japanese role-playing game where your main character is a high schooler in Tokyo with a wrongful arrest on his criminal background. By day, he makes friends, attends classes at his high school, explores the city, goes shopping, and goes on dates. By night, he explores a metaverse alternate reality, fights and collects monsters alongside teammates he meets along the way, and changes the hearts and behaviors of people in the real world by infiltrating their subconscious. It’s known for its aesthetically confident art style and UI, its music, its characters and friendships, and for being dozens of hours long.

• Euphoria is an American teen drama set in suburban California that revolves around the main character Rue Bennett, her family, and her friends. The show explores themes of addiction, friendship, sexuality, and how the modern digital communication landscape impacts all of it. Rue begins the show as a recovering addict, falls in love with the new girl at the school Jules, relapses and hits rock bottom, and finally finds a tenuous path forward. It’s known for its aesthetically confident lighting and color composition, its gratuitous nudity, its raw portrayal of addiction, and some of the best bottle episodes in recent memory.

So, on the face, not a ton in common. Yes, they’re both set in high school. They explore themes of friendship. And they’re both very aesthetically confident. Incredibly - and deservedly - so.

But where Persona 5 Royal is a raucous, “rise up against the power” adventure which has your ragtag band of teenagers eventually defeating an evil god (because JRPG), Euphoria is a cautionary tale within a cautionary tale. They couldn’t be more tonally different, even as they grapple at times with some of the same power dynamics and themes.

So is that the end of the post? Not yet. I need to brain dump some thoughts on each of them.

First, Persona 5 Royal. What a perfect time to play this game given everything that’s happening in the USA right now. You quite literally have a corporate leader infiltrating the government to try and become the new supreme ruler, getting bureaucrats to look the other way through manipulation and force. Ahem.

The only people with the courage and wherewithal to stop it are you and your band of “Phantom Thieves”, who stand up for justice and against corruption and tyranny. Along the way, there’s mistrust, disagreement, setbacks, and betrayal, but the group carries on and gets it done.

The core theme comes through - no matter how dark it seems, keep fighting for what’s right.

I loved this experience end to end so much (except for the Okumura boss fight, that can GTFO). The team you put together has such incredible personalities, the setting of modern day Tokyo is invigorating, the art style is beautiful, and the music will be stuck in my head until the day that I die.

I kept playing - over 70 hours in less than a month - because I simply wanted to be there. I wanted to be there in Tokyo, I wanted to be there with my teammates, and I wanted to be there to change the world.

I’m still reflecting and thinking about where this game places on my all-time RPG list. It’ll be near the top, for sure, among contenders like Super Mario RPG, Earthbound, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Octopath Traveler II. Perhaps that’s a post for another time. But this experience will be hard to top.

So what about Euphoria? Well, I’m certainly not getting the warm-and-fuzzies thinking about it. Aspects of it feel quite problematic - particularly the shock value nudity associated with underage characters. It’s got some uneven storytelling, particularly in the second season. That said, the performances really carried the day for me.

Zendaya’s portrayal of Rue’s addiction struggles was as real as anything I’ve ever seen on screen, period. She flat-out earned those Emmys. “That scene”, the 15 minute stretch when she truly hits rock bottom, is some of the most harrowing, terrifying, can’t-even-take-a-breath TV I’ve ever seen. Her shifts between anger, grief, desperation, and glimmers of hope are breathtaking. And that’s merely the highlight of two fantastic seasons of being with this character, hoping she finds what she needs before it’s too late, knowing the path won’t be easy.

Hunter Schafer’s Jules is another standout, particularly in the first season. She manages to zag against a more traditional “manic pixie dream girl” zig role by bringing her own insecurities to the table, foremost among those her gender identity, her femininity, and how she chooses to own them both. While it was beautiful to watch the Rules romance blossom, it also seemed destined to end, given that Rue had substituted one addiction for another, and Jules had her own life to live.

For me, the peak of the show - aside from “that scene” - was the two special episodes, dueling bottle episodes featuring Rue in a diner with Ali and Jules with her therapist. Without the crutches of shock value nudity or neon lighting, these episodes are simple an hour of dialogue, the characters breaking themselves down. Reflecting and thinking, like they’re on their own - brief - sabbaticals from each other.

Ultimately, I took the core theme of this show to be that no matter how dark it seems, find a way to keep hope alive.

It’s certainly not as uplifting as the theme from Personal 5 Royal, and there’s less implied agency in it, but it’s more similar than I expected it to be when I first started the show. Or this post, for that matter.

So here I am, several weeks into my sabbatical, having finished two high school experiences, reflecting and thinking on what it all means. It’s been a tough stretch, with corporate and government layoffs, uncertainty about global stability, worries about new pandemics and natural disasters, and even brand new airplane safety concerns. It may be a very dark time. But I know what I have to do.

No matter how dark it seems, I have to find a way to keep hope alive and keep fighting for what’s right. Sometimes to find your direction you have to go back to high school. Thank you, Persona 5 Royal and Euphoria.