I started a !*$¹⁴-$&^% content studio. Why I quit my job to do it

Lee Molefi
Sep 6, 2018 · 6 min read

I wasn’t at my desk on the first day of work in 2018. Ke shapile mthangala.

The 8th of January creeps in slowly. The sun greets by painting high contrast shadows against my walls and ceiling. Eighteen storeys below, the hum of city traffic grows louder and the morning glow brightens with my dipping mood. Fuck. Laying there miserable, I swap staring at the ceiling for the glossy sheen of my iPhone screen. Monday Morning Motivation memes abound. Inspiration is annoying. I have to get ready for work. Right? Right. That’s until a new thought emerges from the multi-coloured shadows of my subconscious mind.

I don’t have to go to work.

Technically, no one does. But it’s the sensible thing to do. How else does a Soweto boy get to keep the lifestyle options he has in place? A torrent of conflicting emotions rises above my early morning thought fog as the salary increase my boss promised in “just a couple of months when we land a big account” dampens my growing enthusiasm to quit there and then. I could quit via text. That would be funny. But I won’t. That’s rude. Keeping my employment status or employability neatly intact is a protective layer against all of life’s vicissitudes, bruh. Quitting my job would be silly. I’ve worked on public holidays, double-shifted during long weekends and labored for too many uncashed “exposure” checks to build a career in digital communications thus far. Quitting now, surely, would be career suicide. Having started as a intern, and then a writer and videographer at a Braamfontein-based quarterly youth magazine called Live SA in 2013, all the way to my time as a marketing and then content strategist at a top niche PR agency — I‘ve forgotten how to exist outside of my nascent career.

Whether unhealthy or not, my career is a central part of how I self-identity. Though my appetite for another “comms agency” experience sits at zilch, I know I’m fated to launch into a search for a new job, do battle with more time-sheets, gain additional industry experience, and then perhaps dive into the wavy world of bootstrap entrepreneurship. At a much later stage, of course. As a young person (whatever that means) — a black person at that— I live with a special type of anxiety when it comes to productivity. Being jobless brings me closer to fulfilling the lazy unemployed black boy stereotype of old. And winding down the boulevard of joblessness means I may have to retreat to the hood. So no. There is no way I could quit my job.

The sun climbs higher into the sky as I walk to the bank. It’s 9:05 and I texted my boss at 7:30 to let her know I would be late for work. “My bankcard is missing,” I told her. Festive cheer is overpriced. Somewhere in the dense forest of my December 2017 activities, most of my money had vanished as quickly as it appeared. The festive season shook me down for change from every direction - just in time for January, December’s uglier cousin, to take my bankcard two days prior to current events.

When I arrive at the bank, I dive into one of the larger, comfier seats. It’s got a back rest. Praise be to Allah. Every bank teller is occupied, so I whip out my phone. Social media regularly keeps me company in quiet, unoccupied moments. Today is no different. I check out the holy trinity of distracted youth: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. After two minutes of looking through filter-heavy holiday pictures on Instagram for something even faintly original, I look up to inspect my place in the queue. A teller is free. The prompter calls out politely for a ticket number that is not mine. More waiting. My Facebook feed is loaded with status updates from optimistic friends and family making bold statements about the new year and wishing the same for everyone else. I switch lanes and search for the major news stories of the morning. Twitter has never been a reliable source of news trends, I admit, but I tap on the tiny white bird anyway, hoping to find a cleverly captioned meme with five thousand retweets that might point me in the right direction. Turns out my Twitter timeline is an undetectable blip on the net that can’t be trusted with churning up insightful current affairs news or topics. Don’t get me wrong, there is news and reviews about the political matters of the day. There is some quality opinion from my favourite global journalists on issues surfacing in the United States of America and the greater West. Still, I struggle to draw on matters from a global viewpoint for pure insight into the world that surrounds me here at Africa’s bottom. There’s little to no photo, video or editorial content that chops, challenges or dares to introduce something entirely unexpected to the local social pulse. Each flick of my thumb reveals only meme-wrapped boobie traps about identity politics full of pithy anger that routinely sparks bursts of passive outrage. This routine can be trusted with landing people out of work for racism and sexism. It also earns heavily curated influencers who think of themselves as brands before human beings more money than they know what to do with.

It’s a longer wait at the bank than I thought it would be. I peel my nose from the iPhone screen to the realisation that it’s been a nine minute long wait. Still I search. I always avoid mainstream news as an entry point to current affairs in the morning. While I do turn to it for the overall current affairs climate, I’ve grown wary of keeping up with a blow-by-blow account of the news. It’s time-consuming, distracting and triggering. I am a patiently recovering depressive prone to anxiety. I’m vulnerable to getting drawn into the same short-lived bursts of passive outrage that I noted earlier, which do very little to move the needle on any cultural, social or political issue in absurd young South Africa. But there are memes on the TL so we’ll be okay.

That morning, my appetite for content that challenges my opinion with new information is met with very little. Another ticket number rings out. Not mine. Yet again. It could be the Dunning-Kruger effect. I don’t know. But I long for a content platform produced by journalists who wish they were artists; ready to investigate news and experiences through a social and cultural lens that is aware of its own absurdity, not one looking to confirm its own biases. One that might break free from the bad habits we fall into when it comes to black art and thought. Something that says to me “Hey you with the fear of the unknown, how are you enjoying that chocolate cookie spiked with false history?” How about some adventure? I want to learn about the blind spots in our collective imagination and the present day ludicrousness that has followed as a result. I want to take part in a strain of imagination rooted in telling true stories without a profit or (big P) Political agenda. Yes, roll your eyes. I did too. From a worldview that begs for a new mode of questioning. History has some examples of such platforms. I wish there was one of our own. Is this an unsustainable idea? It could be. I love those. Where do I start? I guess here. It’s 9:26 and there I sit, blank faced, a 26 years old, battling fear, reaching for the courage to self-fund a dream. Perhaps I could start a content studio. I could call Thabiso “Pretty Boys Are The Happiest” Molatlhwa and we could tell weird and wild true stories on the internet in whatever format it makes sense not to.

Thirty seven minutes later, I left the bank pondering the 1st draft of a resignation letter to my bosses. I didn’t go to work that day. The following morning was my first day serving notice. I found a sense of peace that’s difficult to explain. And in an unexpected place — deep inside the heart of a stupid decision.

That month, with a shiny new bank card in hand and a masochistic goal, I injected untold levels of anxiety into my wildest dreams. But that day, fear made way for a full-time content studio.

It’s called Boloyi

Lee Molefi

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