Breaking Free

Hate your job? You are not alone.

I have been self employed most of my life. However, I have also been employed for brief periods of time, especially when I was younger and also in between my entrepreneurial attempts.

I disliked almost every job I ever had. It was not about the money; with my skills I actually could have earned more working for bigger companies. Nor was it necessarily freedom; I could mostly write my own ticket wherever I worked.

But what I couldn’t do was steer my destiny. Somebody else made the decisions about the direction the company would go and I had to follow. It’s not that I could make better decisions; I probably could not. That wasn’t the point: succeed or fail, I wanted it to be by my own choices, my own path.

That is primarily why I have worked for myself. Not for money, not for power, but to steer my own course.

That, and because I never chased money. I chased happiness. People get that all confused. Yes, they want happiness but they think that comes from things that cost money. It doesn’t. Happiness comes from health and friends and family and from within.

I was not happy working for other people. I was sometimes filled with futile anger. I know the despair. The waking up in the morning and feeling so close to shucking it all and walking away, but to what? The money traps you, ensnares you, ties you up so tightly that you cannot breath and all you want to do is scream but even that is denied to you.

You suffer, fuming inside and getting more bitter every day. So many of us spend our entire lives that way. It’s mind numbing and that is how many end up: numb, resigned, beaten.

Most people suck it up and resign themselves to the drudgery. They are unhappy, but they feel trapped and impotent. There is no way out, so they make the best of it. They give up their dreams.

I escaped all that many decades ago. One day I walked out of the job I hated and created a job I loved. I was lucky in one sense: the company I worked for was in trouble and I found myself working several former employees jobs for no extra money. I was told that I had to travel to keep my job, but I was not paid enough to do that: I literally could not afford to wait for an expense check to reimburse me. So I walked out. Having no other prospects at the moment, I started a business and solicited the customers I knew from my job.

I’ve been free of my angst and anger since then. I’ve been free of bosses, free of humiliation and disappointment, free of restraint. I made my own life as perfectly as I could. I gave away some money, but I got back happiness, self respect and freedom. A very fair trade indeed.

It wasn’t quite as simple as that paragraph says. There were bumps in the road, setbacks. I’ve sat in the dark late at night feeling that I should give up. I did temporarily give up a few times. But mostly I stayed the course and had success on my terms. The graph pointed upward throughout.

I was lucky. Yes, yes, I was smart and I worked hard and all that, but I’d be lying through my teeth if I didn’t say that I was lucky too. I fell into the right thing at the right time and I knew the right people and it all eventually worked out. No, it didn’t all fall into place by itself; I had to work at it and I made some slips that could have been fatal, but they were not and eventually I MADE IT.

When I see that despondence in someone else, I feel such strong empathy that I want to reach out and tell them that there is hope, that there can be a better world. I want to show them that beacon of light that can lead them out of the darkness.

But I don’t have that beacon. I can’t tell you how to free yourself from chains and even if I could, you might fail and find yourself back in thicker chains, more bitter, more depressed. I escaped falling back, but sometimes only narrowly. Bad luck can take you down, can destroy hard work and laugh at talent.

I want to help you, I want to take your hand and draw you out into sunlight, but I do not know how.

All I can say is this: try. Try to shake off the chains, try to take control of your life. If you succeed, it will be the best thing you have ever done for yourself. If you fail, well, you fail, and then you try again. I had to try three times before I truly made it. Each time that I failed I cried in the dark and beat my fists and cursed myself and the world. But I mended my wounds and tried again and I did finally reach my goals. I can’t promise you that you will succeed, I can’t promise you that you won’t make things even worse for yourself. I can’t promise you anything except this:

You’ll never know unless you try.

If you fail, maybe you’ll need to go back to work again. That happened to me. I licked my wounds, I thought through my mistakes, I saved up some money and I tried again.

Or maybe you need to change course. I started my last business in 1983 and closed it in 2016. That is a true statement in one sense, but it is completely false, too. Although I had the same business cards and checking account, my business in 2016 was nothing like it was in 1983. Not one of the things I did in 1983 were things I was still doing then.

I was in the computer technology field, which is of course constantly changing. There are new things to learn every year and sometimes every day. Old technology fades away; if you do not learn the new, you soon won’t have a business at all.

So I did learn and I did change. I did programming and troubleshooting most of that time, but on constantly changing equipment, operating systems, and programming languages. I had to reinvent my business and myself time and time again.

I loved it. I had a decent income, plenty of free time, and respect from my clients. My work was challenging and interesting. I was helping people. Those were very good decades.

Everything ends. After more than thirty years of switching gears, I became tired of the pace of change. I’d had enough. I was not going to reinvent it or myself again.

I let it dwindle away. I took a part time job for a little extra money and to fill my time. I was hesitant to do that, but at this point in my life, I did not hate it. I suppose part of that was because I was not trapped; I could walk away to full retirement whenever I wanted. Eventually, I did that.

And here I am again, reinventing myself. In my technology business, I wrote constantly. Books, magazines, but mostly on my web page. I wrote help articles, how-to’s, and the site was very popular for many years. The writing helped me attract clients, but I also enjoyed it. I wrote about more than technology just because I could and it was fun.

I wrote on my site and on other sites. When the sites like HubPages started up, I wrote there. I wrote for many others that are now defunct. Parts of this story came from sites that have since folded up tents and disappeared.

Now I’m here at Medium. I like that there are no ads here. I did not like seeing my prose festooned with the ads the other sites run. I don’t really need my writing to make much money, but if it does, fine. Perhaps the last chapters of my life will be as a writer.

If not, that’s fine. I’ll do something interesting to fill my time.