I wrapped up my graduate studies in May of 2025, after around nine years of being a part-time student and full-time wage earner. I had started a defined path toward an undergraduate degree by enrolling in the University of Maine at Augusta (UMA) in 2016 as a Cybersecurity major. The program had just begun in 2015, lead by Henry Felch, and I was excited to take advantage of the educational reimbursement program of my then employer. I had dabbled in 2006 and 2008-9 with going back to college, but it never seemed to stick. The UMA program was a good fit and I stuck with it until I graduated in 2022. The school was the right place as the faculty understood the needs of non-traditional learners, career switchers, and those with extensive work and life experience.

Before I graduated, I thought that I should consider continuing on into a graduate program because I had built up tolerance, wanted a "capstone" to my undergraduate experience (as it wound down during the first part of the pandemic), and imagined my future employers would value a graduate-level degree. Starting in late 2021, I researched options, winnowed them down, and, luckily, was accepted at The Fletcher School and Tufts University.

It is not easy being a graduate student. The amount of reading, synthesizing, and writing is substantial and quite different than corporate or personal efforts. I certainly struggled and had hours of frustration, with myself primarily, as deadlines arose and had to be met. Part of what kept me stable and focused during the school year(s) was trimming or removing social media systems from my daily life. Going into the start of the semester, I'd log out of and delete Facebook, an environment which, over time, became more and more toxic and distraction even while the core connection to community grew in importance. But the reality of the swirl of the former kept me as disciplined as I could be…

Now it's been six months since I received my Master's and the noise of the swirl, deeply amplified by the broader political scene in the United States, is too much again. There are too many stimuli driven through algorithmic forever scrolling. It's time, again, for a break. Time to spend time in creative, productive, and personal activities. Time to control my own time, something that is so valuable, constrained, and so easily disappeared for no direct benefit to self, family, or society.

Should I gamify this? Should I track and quantify a vague commitment to a certain old-as-new freedom? That's a second order question with which I shall wrestle, next.