The exciting news: My proposed talk was accepted by one of my favorite conferences, posit::conf(2025)! That’s a data science event which includes a lot of presentations about R, my favorite programming language.
I was accepted to give a 5-minute “lightning talk.” And I’m jazzed to see some of the awesome speakers with super-interesting topics who were also chosen to give talks at that same session! Plus, I know that at many conferences, lightning talks are among the most popular.
The wistful part: As grateful and excited as I am, I can’t help but compare this with my final pre-retirement conference invitation in 2020, when I was invited to keynote the European R User Group conference. Back then, they even offered to pay to fly me to Milan! (Aside: That free trip to Italy never happened, since May 2020 was at the start of the Covid crisis and Milan was one of the global epicenters. I did end up doing all the work of putting together a keynote presentation, though, which I gave virtually from my home office.)
This time, obviously, I’ll be paying my own way to the conference – no one is going to pay your travel expenses for a 5-minute talk. I’m also going to pay the conference fee (with a discount) myself, instead of either my employer paying or qualifying for a media conference or keynote speaker pass.
I guess I’d call this the first time I truly missed my professional persona since I retired. I had a significant pang, not a small one. And it lasted awhile. Still, not bad considering it took more than nine months of retirement before it happened. And, I survived it. Plus, I have a conference to look forward to in September!
Missing . . . something
What exactly was I missing? Financial impact aside, I think I was wistful about a specific point in my life more than simply feeling the lack of a job and a title. The Italy invitation was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, when I was at a peak in my career: I’d just had a book about R published, I was hosting an R video series at InfoWorld, and I had a reasonably popular data science account on Twitter.
If I could re-create a similar career peak now, though, would I want to? That book took up most of my free/non-work time for about a year. I’m glad I did it once, but would I be willing to do that again? No, at least for now. (I know I wouldn’t because I was asked about writing another book shortly after I retired but didn’t want to give up being able to control my own schedule.)
What about hosting a regular video series? Maybe someday, but not at the moment. I like freelancing when I get inspired by an idea, but I don’t want to commit to a schedule that forces me to have ideas on demand. Anyone who’s ever published on a schedule knows that the work involved isn’t just time you spend writing columns or producing videos; it’s also the constant search for ideas that might resonate with your audience. And that involves a lot of mental energy, including when you’re theoretically “not working.”
What about social media? I’m still pretty active posting about R and generative AI on Bluesky, Mastodon, and LinkedIn, but it doesn’t feel the same as the height of Twitter’s reach. And there’s a lot more R content out there now than when I started writing about it more than a decade ago.
But even if I was still working full-time, I couldn’t re-create serendipity. The odds of me being offered another free trip to Europe to keynote a conference are pretty slim, even if I worked full-time for another decade.
Mind shift
The leader of a meditation/mind training workshop I attended last week talked a lot about the dangers of “self cherishing” and “ego grasping”, and how the desire for self-promotion and external validation is a path that leads to suffering. Errr 🙋🏻♀️ Yes. That’s been me.
In my defense, though, 1) I live in a society where career success is often defined by external validation metrics, 2) It’s awfully hard to have a career as a journalist without some kind of audience that reads or otherwise engages with your content, and 3) Anyone who uses big-tech social media is being primed to crave external validation through followers and “likes”.
Now that I’m retired, though, I have the luxury to try to let that go, at least a little. And I have been, to a degree. I spend a lot of time coding hobby projects because I think they’ll be useful, but I don’t get too discouraged if they don’t get much traction – the fun is in bringing something that works to life, not the pageviews. And, I write my retirement blog because I enjoy it, not because I think I’ll grow an audience that I can monetize someday.
So, now I’m working on applying those attitudes to my conference experience. Mostly, I’m trying not to second-guess the money I’m spending to attend a professional conference when I no longer have a full-time job or career. I still deserve to advance my technical knowledge! I’ll focus on finding freelance story ideas, learning cool new things, and being around a lot of other R enthusiasts in person – something I haven’t done in more than five years but find myself craving.
I’ll be grateful that I’ve been given a platform to speak about one of my passions: using data skills for community service.
I’ll plan to take good advantage of the free speaker training conference organizers offer (even to lightning speakers!) in hopes of learning skills that I can apply not only to the conference, but to future talks.
And, if my 5-minute lightning talk earns me a coveted speaker ribbon on my conference badge, I’ll be very happy to have it.
Conference Lightning Talk schedule:
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