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Why I Left a Successful Creator Career for Full-Time Work
Spoiler: it wasn’t the money.
A few weeks ago, I was at the Taylor Swift concert in Munich. One of my friends Sinem was in the area so we met up for coffee! Despite being friends since 2020, we’ve only met in person twice — once at my wedding, and then this past July in Germany.
She’s such a successful creator, really the whole package. She has a thriving business: she works on projects she believes in, she gets to write as much as she likes, and she learns new skills all the time.
She leads a very full life outside of work, too. She was in Munich because she’d just finished up a multi-day yoga retreat. She goes on frequent holidays, she has time for her friends and family, and she pursues nonwork hobbies, too.
She’s happy with her life, and she deserves every success and ounce of joy because she built it all herself with her partner, Philip.
As we caught up over kaffee und kuchen, I reflected that until recently, I had what she had. I had workdays that were done by 12 or 1 pm. I wrote about what I wanted, whether that was AI image generators or cat myths. I went for runs when I felt like it, I spent time on extravagant baking projects, and I always had time to read my books.
Today, my time is owned by someone else. I work for a paycheck. I do tasks to further someone else’s business.
And I could not be happier with my decision. This is even though I took a significant pay cut at my first job. Yes, you read that correctly: when I originally went back to full-time employment in January 2024, my take-home salary was lower than what I was making as a freelancer. It was still worth it.
Since I “retired” from being a creator and went back to full-time work, I get asked a lot: why? From the outside, it looks like I threw away something amazing for just another 9–5. But from the inside, it was the right call.
Here’s why.
I was bored and burned out.
I should have suspected the boredom aspect might be the case when the other conventional WFH wisdom failed to apply to me: I never once felt the urge to just sit down and watch Netflix for hours on…
