The Self-Defeating Masquerade of the Future of Work
Proud freelancer? Or precarious worker?
Digital nomad? Or traveller on a budget?
Fierce solopreneur? Or laid-off worker without other options?
The Future of Work comes with a lot of buzzwords, brought forward by those of us who identify with them. I can’t help but wonder, though. Are we empowering ourselves with these new name tags? Or are we doing the powers that be a service by camouflaging an uglier truth?
I’m a freelancer. Somewhat of a nomad, too. And I honestly believe I wouldn’t have it any other way. I get to control exactly how much I want to work in order to optimize my income to free time ratio. I feel incredibly blessed, and whenever the going gets rough with work, I try to remember how fortunate I am to have so much flexibility.
No stable job could give me that. Right? Could it?
I’m starting to wonder.
What if work was five hours a day, four days a week? What if workplaces had integrated play areas with top-notch childcare? What if instead of gigs, we had written service agreements to ensure decent work conditions? What if…
Because the 9 to 5 formula is still so deeply anchored in our collective mind as the way work is, we feel like the only way out of it is to break free from the employment relationship altogether. Give up all the benefits. Social, financial, and otherwise. Employer, off the hook.
We turn around and sell them our services by the hour or milestone instead. No strings attached. We feel that’s the sacrifice we have to make if we don’t want to be tied down ourselves. We gotta admit though … we’re fooling ourselves a little bit.
The Great Mirage
As far as fooling ourselves go, no tribe illustrates the idea better than the digital nomads. Snapshots of their lives are portrayed as the holy grail of the wanderlusting freelancer. Working from a hammock, on a different tropical beach every week. Not a worry in the world.
As any of you working from home would know, the image is misleading. Just think, how many times per week do you have to explain that no, you don’t spend your days watching movies in bed?
The same applies to travelling. Just like you can’t do the dishes and work on a line of code at the same time, you can’t exactly work and travel all at once. Ask any digital nomad, and I’m fairly confident they’ll say they’d rather be able to travel, period. They work because, like the rest of us, they have to.
A few decades ago, people could just check out for months, travelling on a dollar a day or something. How many times did you have to endure that story from your uncle, who shipped to India in the ’70s with nothing but 20 dollars in his pocket?
Nobody can do that anymore. If you want to travel for months or years on end, you have to keep working. And instead of becoming macramé experts and sitting on a city square to sell their crafts, digital nomads just take their laptop along for the ride.
It’s not a revolution. It’s merely an adaptation, a mutation. And I’m thinking maybe, by glorifying our lifestyle, whether we be urban solopreneurs or adventurous digital nomads, we’re silencing issues that should get our attention. The fact that we’re being squeezed ever tighter, and that valuing our freedom above all else is robbing us of any wiggle room. The fact that businesses might actually prefer a disenfranchised, low-maintenance work force to an organized network of people demanding a bigger share of the pie.
What Freedom?
Here’s the real difference between an employee and a freelancer:
An employee is paid for twice the hours she actually works.
A freelancer is paid for half of her labour.
Freelancers don’t get paid for showing up. Not for promoting our services. Not for our accounting. Not for our fifteen-minute breaks. Not for personal days, not for drafting emails, not for going to the bathroom.
We’re not paid to wait around. In theory, it follows that we shouldn’t be expected to respond to a request at a moment’s notice either. That’s what we hang on to. What we value. Time freedom.
Instant Response
Imagine an economy comprised almost entirely of independent workers. Businesses could operate with only a minimal core team, surrounded by an army of vetted freelancers. Whenever they need software coded, a proposal drafted, a website designed, they send out a request and within minutes they have someone on it.
Once we’re all freelancers, which it would seem is the direction we’re taking, we lose all the specific benefits of our situation and are left only with perverse effects.
We unwittingly went from freedom workers to starving worker bees, ready to jump at every notification of our mobile devices, afraid to miss any opportunity for revenue.
We successfully broke down the barrier between personal and professional, but the breach only runs one way. Work made its way into our family time, our bedroom, our outings with friends, our dinner and our play dates. But our personal lives have yet to be allowed into work.
Escaping the Good Fight
As I try to push the concept of a gig economy to its limits, all I can see is a grim outcome for everybody. Did we take a wrong turn somewhere? Did we take the coward’s path?
We should be having a very serious conversation about the structure of typical employer-employee relationships. But in our shortsighted quest for greater freedom, we disengaged and took the quick way out.
In doing so, we might have served the powerful a huge win on a silver platter. There are and always will be some exceptional success stories coming from the world of freelancers. But whether those accurately represent the reality most of us live in is a whole other question.
We should take pride in our work, and in our way of life. I’m not saying we shouldn’t. But we might also want to remain careful not to oversell it either. Dissolving traditional work structures is simply not a good idea for everyone.
There’s a lot of talk around automation and AI, how it could free up human time and allow us to do our best creative work. Or to just kick back on a beach, supported by our universal basic income.
The perspective enchants me. But I fear the advent of the glorified gig worker is a step away from that dream, which won’t just materialize out of thin air. We have to work towards it.
Maybe instead of talking happy hour in Bali, we should get talking about a shorter work week. A shorter work day. Flexible but not unlimited hours. Better plans for parental leave. Letting our personal lives permeate the work place. And stop fearing attachment so much.
Maybe, just maybe, a healthier relationship with an employer is better than no relationship at all.
What do you think? Do you ever feel like the perks of freelancing can’t make up for the lost benefits of employment? Let me know. I’m always just a ping away.
