My name is Jon Tillman. I am not the Jon Tillman with a doctorate in dietetics, not the Jon Tillman that represents the 3rd District in the Santa Barbera County Planning Commission, not the Jon Tillman that plays football for the Coast Guard Academy, not the Jon Tillman that does marketing for the Comal County A&M Club, the other one…
Moving Around
I was born on September 30, 1976 in Tifton, Georgia. My family moved around a good deal when I was growing up. By the time I was 12 years old, I had lived in Tifton, in Athens, Georgia, in Opelika, Alabama, in Auburn, Alabama, and finally settling (for a time anyway) in Boone, North Carolina.
This trend of moving every few years seems to have stuck with me, because once I was out on my own, I moved around a good bit, living variously in Valle Crucis, North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina, Winston Salem, North Carolina, West Palm Beach, Florida and Little River, SC before moving to London England, where I am based for the moment.
Dot com boom & bust
I have been developing websites and internet services semi-professionally for over a decade now. I rode the dotcom boom all the way up and down in the nineties as a Coldfusion developer, and then spent the latter nineties and early noughties as a white-collar web weenie.
Burnout struck, hard, late in 2005, and I quit my job as chief web weenie for a niche luxury goods retailer in order to pursue what Chinese philosophers have called “the good life”, and to examine the possibility that I could make a living without a job, by doing things that I loved, instead of spending so many waking hours trading my labor for money doing things that I did not enjoy or believe in the importance of.
The Way Ahead
Since late in 2005 I have been “out of work”, a “house husband”, or “a bum”, depending on how you would like to look at it, and I have been recently trying to understand, so as to to tell other people, what exactly it is that I have been doing with my time.
First, there is all of the mundaneness; laundry, house-cleaning, cooking, selling everything we owned and moving to England. These little things have taken up a pretty decent portion of my time, but not as much as you might expect. I have been left with quite a bit of free time in which to pursue other interests.
Which have mostly been comprised of reading philosophy, writing, and thinking about society, it’s future, and my place in it. I have filled notebook after notebook with my writings and observations, and shelf after shelf with books, internet bookmarks and articles. It has all been great fun for me, and I have noticed that, even when I spent several weeks doing research and taking notes and writing reactions to what I read for ten, twelve or more hours a day, it never once entered my mind that what I was doing might be considered “work”.
So, occasioned by our move to England, I have once again had to take a long hard look at all of this and decide what it is that I am going to do with all of that, and with myself and my time in general. After much hand-wringing and flip-flopping, I believe that I have come up with a plan; I am going to attempt to be a writer – full-time so to speak – for money even…
I have been sorting through my notes and writings, trying to make some sort of logical sense of them (my research methods can be best described as schizophrenic) and I believe that writing is what I am meant to do; it is the thing that comes most naturally to me, feels “right” while I am doing it, and makes me happiest to have done it.
The more I dig into my notes and writings, the more I draw them together into something coherent, the more I become convinced that, not only is this the thing for me, but that I actually have something to say.