Self-employment Week: 73
At the tender age of 26, there isn’t a single person around me that isn’t aspiring to ‘stop trading time for money’ i.e. stop spending time working.
We dream about it, we look forward to it, we ‘work’ towards it, and we feel unsatisfied till we have it but have we ever thought about it?
Thought about why we want it & more specifically, what we’re going to do when we have it.
Early this year, I was grateful enough to be at a point where I was working really really less & still earning ‘enough’.
You can imagine how happy I must have been to be in that situation. I would jokingly call myself retired. Every time I caught up with a friend & I would tell them how little time I spent working every week, they would predictably say “How lucky”
But looking back at this time, 5 months later, I would consider this period one of the most challenging for my mental health.
Not working has left me with a deep understanding of the importance of ‘work’ in our lives.
The self-employment campaign has succeeded with the ‘freedom from work’ angle:
Work for yourself to travel the world.
Work for yourself to never go into the office.
Work for yourself to never answer to anyone.
Work for yourself to work very little.
Work for yourself to never work.
I’m not someone who enjoys traveling too much. My city is too versatile & my kittens are too adorable to leave either more than a few times a year.
(I have this theory that ‘travel the world’ is my ‘get a job’ default path. I’m only doing it because everyone else is.)
Therefore, when I was able to work for myself, get control over my life & reduce the amount I was working, I just sat around & watched TV. I did that for months.
During those months, I both loved & hated my life equally.
I couldn’t remember the last time I felt accomplished.
or valuable
or challenged
or stupid
or even smart
I couldn’t remember the last time I truly felt like I was a part of something bigger than me.
Once I reduced the number of hours I was working, I did all the things ‘they tell you to do’.
I went to cafes & restaurants
I read books
I caught up with old friends & made new ones
I showed up for family events
I went to Europe
I cared for other beings
I kept my house clean
I tinkered with cooking
I did it all but I still just wanted to work.
It’s a shame that off late, the message around work is so negative. I completely understand the frustration it’s coming from, which is why I too lost sight of the value of work in our lives.
We’re all capable of both directly & indirectly creating immensely beautiful & impactful things in the world. And we do that through our work.
I believe that it’s our responsibility to find out how. Not our responsibility to the world, but a responsibility to ourselves.
There’s a narrative in the solopreneur community that we all start this journey by doing service based work but our collective goal should either be to scale & manage those services or transition into products through teaching.
Why?
To stop trading time for money.
Our collective goal cannot be to all run away from doing work.
Shouldn’t it be to do really great work?
Work that only you can do, that you can add such specific value to that no one else can.
Because that work does exist.
But we’re too busy trying to find ‘Lazy Girl Jobs’ thinking that’s the solution.
As someone whose been Lazy Girling her way the past few months,
I can assure you that this is not the solution.
There are very few things better than finding work you enjoy doing. There is nothing that can replace that.
But when you’re stuck doing long hours of work in environments that suck, it can be hard to believe that ‘not working’ could ever be a bad thing.
But as Jim Carrey said,
“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.”
I like how all your advice is backed by experience.