The Day Rate Blues

Freelancing is the new normal. Does that mean loneliness is, too?

Diary Of A Freelance Journalist has long been lost to the travails of Tumblr and vestiges of my youth. I wrote it about a decade ago, when trying to be funny was something that took up vast swathes of my time. It featured entries about befriending every barista in the neighbourhood, annoying a variety of editors at exactly 3:15pm each day, watching bizarre Youtube clips out of a sheer lack of anything else to do and listening religiously to Australian youth radio so as to have enough currency to feel part of -if nothing else- a burgeoning Twitter community.

With the benefit of hindsight, what a naive 21-year-old me was trying to get at is that being a freelancer is fabulous if you want to work in your pyjamas, catch public transport only when there’s nobody else around and not have to sit in endless meetings with puffed-up creative directors for whom you share a healthy, mutual disrespect. But it’s absolutely shocking for your mental health.

There are many flexible definitions of freelancing in the post-gig-economy world. But if we’re going off the traditional one, where your home is the office and a cafe is your meeting room, it’s essentially condemning yourself to a specific form of loneliness for around 40+ hours a week.

Some of us are downing watery Americanos while furiously writing the next Fleabag or Conversations With Friends. But the majority are staring at our phones, wishing for someone to give us something to do, or craftily avoiding the work we do have because we need to stretch it out for the next few days like leftovers in a neglected family fridge. We start personal projects before realising that we might need somebody else’s help to bring them to fruition. Taking all day to read the newspaper. That sort of thing.

Being a freelancer in your thirties is different to your early twenties, when everyone is essentially a freelancer unless they’re a medical student. It means having a rolodex of all your friends on sabbaticals, between jobs, with children or on maternity leave. It means knowing the gym schedule so well that you can be there when there is only you and the guy who spends 5 hours a day on his right bicep.

It means avoiding brushing your teeth and getting dressed for as long as humanly possible, because once that happens you need to admit that you’re all dressed up with nowhere to go. We jump at the opportunity to get pulled into offices for two-day stints where nobody knows our name, lie about our careers at group dinners and spend way too much time on LinkedIn, which is as fruitless and heartbreaking as early-era Tinder.

At 32, I’ve now been a freelancer in some professional capacity for over half my working life. As I frequently tell people, it’s the kind of thing that’s great until it isn’t. And it’s at this point, which comes for everyone in my position no matter how many decent headhunters they know, that things can take a turn quite quickly. A deluge becomes a drought, and you are cut adrift for days, weeks, wandering around the city and wondering about the status of about 16 roles you applied for out of sheer desperation.

Outside of specific areas like journalism, freelancing used to be considered an unusual decision to make when you weren’t a mother of two young children trying have more control over your hours. It was seen as a stopgap between Actual Employment and a Proper Adult Role. That’s just not true anymore. In the UK alone, freelancing has jumped 43% since 2008 to encompass some 2 million people. That’s a lot of bereft souls asking for the WiFi password at once.

What this growth in individualised workers will inevitably lead to is an epidemic of solitude and disconnection that’s previously been the terrain of our elderly population. Whether you’re on a job, between them or chasing the next one, freelancing necessitates large amounts of time spent alone. WeWork set-ups, co-sharing spaces and trendy cafes where everyone ‘mingles’ by staring at their Macbooks wearing noise-cancelling headphones doesn’t exactly solve the problem.

Everyone knows that freelancers gain autonomy when they give up sick leave, superannuation and a boss. But what they lose is a community, practically the only reason offices need to exist in 2019. In reality, short of important client meetings (which can be done on Zoom anyway), nobody needs to go into work anymore. It’s the argument that’s most recently been levelled at City Airport’s expansion by Extinction Rebellion, but it rings true across the board; thanks to today’s transformational technological tools, we could arguably do it all from home.

The reason we don’t is so we can talk shit with our co-workers, who replace our uni mates that replaced our school friends. We eat lunch with them, banter before big presentations, blow off steam at Friday drinks. These people end up at our weddings, become godparents to our kids. We don’t realise it while it’s happening, but they are exceptionally important to us.

Freelancing professionally removes you almost entirely from this equation. Perhaps some people prefer it that way, especially those with other dependents in the home. Maybe they’ve been in the workforce 30 years and had enough. For everyone else freelancing, there are no duvet days, office mental health programs, duties of care. If someone looks like they’re going through the wars at the office, you do something about it. It’s almost impossible to deduce that through email to someone on their couch.

It’s possible we over-invested in the positives of living life by a day rate to the point where the drawbacks are now considered fundamentally normal. And to be fair, I enjoy occasionally going into different offices and working on different clients. But that’s rare; most freelancers I know are treated like commodities. You do the job, you fuck off, you do the next one. I’ve completed ‘jobs’ for 17 clients and 4 agencies this year and in addition to chasing nearly all of them for money (let’s not get into it), I’ve also had to repeatedly request feedback. Your Uber driver currently gets more interaction.

I feel like not enough freelancers are talking about loneliness because they don’t want to be accused of having their cake and eating it, too. But the perception we have of this industry — and it is an industry unto itself — is stuck in the early 2000s. For creatives like me, it’s not a lifestyle choice but often the only choice. I work in branding and any workplace I’ve set foot in this year has at least been half ‘staffed’ by freelancers. In a period of dramatic economic uncertainty, many companies don’t want to commit to full-time hiring. This in turns cements a new normal of resources available on tap that can be easily dispensed with depending on cashflow. It’s a vicious cycle.

Freelancing might be a healthy life choice, but solitude isn’t. It affects everything from the state of your mind to your diet, and in severe cases, it can kill you. And sure, we’re not 90 years old, but Instagram DMs and Facebook banter don’t do a great job of replacing human interaction, either. I’m ten years and half the world away from that piece I wrote as a joke and I still know every local barista’s name and backstory. Without realising it, I’ve been actively trying and form relationships with people that most of us typically see as a service, or a means to end.

Perhaps it’s because I know the feeling.