Freelancing: Love or let go
Freelancing may be the best thing that has ever happened to you. Here is why you still shouldn't insist that others, too, go for it.
Freelancing has lately become such a hot topic that, much as I dislike clichés, it seems fit to call it the new black. According to the Forbes, freelance/contract workers now make up nearly 30% of the U.S. workforce, and Freelancers Union's membership has doubled in the past two years. Everyone you ask and some of those you don't keep telling you that nine to five is essentially slavery and if you are still a cubicle warrior, something is definitely wrong with you.
To be sure, freelancing is popular for a reason. For a very long list of very good reasons, in fact. They clearly don't work for all, but that is no longer a valid excuse: today it's go solo or die trying. The appeal of being your own boss is so irresistible that along with the right people – the ones who are indeed comfortable operating on their own – self-employment now attracts those who really can only work in the traditional office setting.
One of the numerous websites dedicated to freelancing recently featured a series of tips for beginners from more or less established self-employed professionals. One of them insisted you should set up your alarm clock every night, wake up at the same time every morning, put on some attire appropriate for an office and sit down at your desk, again, always at the same time. Since it was apparently only a portion of what he said, I wonder if the rest of his advice advocated hiring a guy to tell you what to do and yell at you if you disobey and another one to provide distraction, both welcome and unwelcome, every now and then ("please bring your own water cooler").
This was the first time I encountered a confession like that, but it surely isn't going to be the last. It is a safe bet to say that the tendency to do what others think is right for you is not going to disappear any time soon, and in the coming years we are likely to see a slew of reluctant freelancers desperately searching for ways to make it "look like a real job."
For the freelancing world, all that is pretty harmless: read, shrug and move on. However, it is a very real problem for those who need a set of traditional attributes in order to feel at work: social pressures pushing them beyond the familiar territory these days are overwhelming. Feeling the need to comply, they escape their 9-to-5 jobs only to end up gravitating back to the life style to which they are accustomed. So what, again, was wrong with not rejecting it in the first place?
Freelancing should be about free choice. You choose your industry, your working hours, your prices, your clients – and whether someone wants to freelance at all should be his or her own decision, too. Take a deep breath and stop stigmatizing the cubicle: while utterly wrong for you and me, it still may be perfectly right for those who have different priorities. Let them live a life they enjoy. It's ok to not love freelancing. It's ok to let go.