After the Great Resignation comes the Significant Freakout
Resigning from a job you’ve come to hate feels great, but what comes next? Self-employment has plenty of challenges, too
Years ago, Tim Allen joked, “Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work or prison.” The joke is dated not because men have more choices but because women – at least all those women not at the far left or right ends of the socioeconomic bell curve – have fewer.
Most women still have children, albeit fewer children and much later in life, especially if they belong to the professional-managerial class. But, like their male counterparts, they are still expected to devote most of their life energy to frantically climbing the greasy pole, especially if they are university educated.
Or at least they were. As has been widely remarked upon, there was a cultural sea change during the pandemic. For the first time since the 1960s, a critical mass of people, mainly but not exclusively mid-career workers in first-world nations, began wondering if they should continue to be good little company men and women.
The Great Resignation, 14 months on
In February 2021, a little-known academic at an obscure American university made an attention-grabbing prediction. While being interviewed by a Bloomberg reporter, Dr Anthony Klotz, Associate Professor of Business Administration at Texas A&M University, argued that there would be no return to pre-Coronavirus normality and that “the great resignation is coming”.
At that point, there was no data to support Dr Klotz’s counterintuitive hypothesis. But the next set of US employment figures showed that an unprecedentedly large proportion – 2.7 per cent – of the US workforce had quit their jobs in the depths of an economy-shuttering health emergency. Workers in the US, and many other countries, continue to be resignation-happy to this day.
Dr Klontz, who himself recently resigned his Texas A&M position to move to a new role at University College London, was interviewed by the Financial Times not long ago. Three observations Klotz makes in the article caught my attention.
First, Dr Klotz noted that, pre-pandemic, people arranged their lives around their work but now they want to arrange their work around their lives.
Second, he observed that “autonomy is a fundamental human need” and that, having got a taste of it during lockdowns, many workers aren’t keen to go back to being treated like children.
Third, Klotz warned that research was now starting to show a significant proportion of ‘Great Resigners’ were less happy after chucking in their supposedly soul-crushing jobs.
The opportunists vs the life changers
Great Resignation sceptics like to argue, correctly in my view, that rumours of a revolution in worker attitudes have been greatly exaggerated. They point out that workers in tight labour markets have options and are more inclined to move to jobs offering better pay and conditions. Or demand, as Amazon and Starbucks employees have of late, their existing employers treat them better.
I suspect most ‘Great Resigners’ are opportunists – I use the word non-pejoratively – looking for a better deal from employers rather than to transform their lives. It’s interesting that, after 40 odd years of relative passivity, Labour is finally starting to push back against Capital, but that’s a subject for another time. This Substack is directed to those aspiring life-changers considering leaving their job to try their luck in the gig economy.
From the age of 14-40, I worked in employee positions and never felt comfortable in any of them. I’ve spent the last decade as a self-employed content provider and have never been happier. I intend to do everything possible to avoid wage slavery for the rest of my life.
That noted, I’m not the type to go around telling a tax lawyer they should quit their job to pursue their dream of becoming a performance poet. Being an employee is hard, but so is being self-employed. Here’s what I’ve learnt about the pros and cons of being your own boss.
Freedom
Some people just aren’t cut out to defer to authority. These people will be much happier captaining their own ship as business owners.
Lots of people just want someone to tell them what to do. While I’m not one of those people, I certainly don’t think I’m better than them. (A society can survive without iconoclastic artists and disruptive entrepreneurs, but it won’t last long without dutiful agricultural labourers and soldiers.)
There’s no shame in being either a rule-breaker or a rule-taker, but you should be honest with yourself about which camp you fall into. Part of the neoliberal turn of recent decades has involved elevating entrepreneurs to the status of culture heroes. However, most people simply aren’t cut out to be business owners, let alone entrepreneurs, and will make themselves miserable if they try to be something they are not. A man’s got to know his limitations, and a woman hers.
The same thing is true with that minority of the population that chafe at the restraints involved in being an employee. During a recent Uber ride, the twentysomething driver told me he used to be a formworker but had abandoned his old career to chauffeur people around.
He was worried about the long-term damage heavy physical labour was doing to his body. But what really drove him to abandon his former career was “constantly having to deal with dickhead bosses”. Even though he worked around 50 hours a week as an Uber driver, including Friday and Saturday nights, he made significantly less than he could installing frameworks on a building site. But as he explained to me with a grin, he was much happier being his own boss.
Short of experimenting with self-employment, this is a good litmus test for any corporate drone dreaming about telling their “dickhead boss” where to go. Ask yourself if you’d still be happy being self-employed even if it meant earning less money than you do now, as well as doing work that had less social status. Unless you can answer in the affirmative, consider keeping your self-employment fantasy a fantasy.
Money
The good news about being self-employed is that you can make a lot more money than you could as an employee. If the average salary for a videographer is around $80,000, an in-demand freelance videographer could potentially make $120,000 – $160,000 a year.
The bad news about being self-employed is that you can make a lot less money than you could as an employee. They must exist, but I’ve never come across a gig-economy worker who isn’t subject to the feast-and-famine cycle. You’ll usually make a higher hourly rate as a freelancer or contractor than as an employee. But unless you can consistently get work, you risk earning less than you would as an employee.
(What will probably happen is that you will alternate between periods when your services are in such high demand that you’re working huge hours, making good coin, and having to turn away potential customers and periods when you’re obsessively monitoring job boards, living on two-minute noodles, and wondering where it all went wrong.)
Matters of the heart
As a no-longer-married man, it would be remiss of me not to warn people about the relationship consequences of pursuing the self-employment dream.
Couples mainly argue about sex and money. I don’t have anything interesting to say about the sex side of things. But I can attest that, especially if you’re a man, you should take to heart the following German proverb: “When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out the window.”
As a self-employed individual, you should expect to be financially challenged immediately after launching your business and during (difficult to predict) quiet periods even once it’s well established.
If your partner is heading off to the salt mines every day while you pursue what they are coming to view as a self-indulgent frolic, sooner or later their resentment will manifest itself. Be warned, this will occur regardless of how supportive they initially were of your business venture, or how hard you’re hustling for new clients and working for existing ones.
That being the case, I’d suggest either pursuing your self-employment ambitions when you are not in a serious relationship or only getting into serious relationships with individuals who are (a) independently wealthy or (b) exceptionally understanding.
You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em
I’ve known plenty of people who’ve lived lives of quiet desperation because they saw no option but to keep showing up to a job they had come to hate. Given that most people can return to their old line of work if their self-employment experiment fails, I’m moderately encouraging whenever a disgruntled employee tells me they are considering going out on their own.
I’m moderately rather than unreservedly encouraging because my own experiences, along with those of hundreds of other business owners I’ve interviewed over the last decade, have taught me two things.
First, neither a new job nor a new business will solve all your problems. If you’re a bitter misanthrope, you’ll remain a bitter misanthrope regardless of your employment circumstances.
Second, the grass is only ever slightly greener on the other side of the fence.
If you don’t have a demanding boss, you will have demanding clients. Free yourself from the burden of endless meetings and garrulous co-workers and you’ll need to endure long hours of deathly quiet solitude. Avoid having to take orders from others and you’ll have to start taking responsibility for every little thing yourself.
Ultimately, the only choice you have is which set of problems you want to take on. Then, as one of the more colourful denizens of the gig economy once observed, it’s always a case of “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
PS – Are you in the market for a content provider with a lot of business, finance and tech experience? If so, you may like to check out my portfolio and email me at nigel@contentsherpa.com.au if you’d like to discuss us working together.