Why Do Peeps Get So Burnt On White-Collar Work?
I’ve been mostly freelance since 2015, with a couple of “full-time” jobs in there, and even a few multiple-full-time-jobs-at-once periods. Mostly I’ve disliked it. Contract work is hard — you’re always hustling for new income — and even full-time work is hard, but not in the sense that most people frame it. It can be busy and lead to burnout, absolutely. The bigger problem with a lot of full-time jobs, especially white-collar ones, is/are:
It’s honestly exhausting and a giant circle of meaninglessness at some level. Plus: in the last 10 years, we moved away from actually iterating in these companies, and now most people exist just to have meetings and “jump on calls.”
My arc in a lot of these contract roles ends up being similar: I come on, I do good work for about four months, and then I start to get frustrated about how unnecessarily frantic and over-focused on “busy” the place is. One day, I push back on how dumb it all is, and now I’m a “malcontent,” even though I was typically trying to improve a process. Because I’m often not FTE, the malcontent label gets you pushed out in under a year. I’ve worked for so many places like that, I can barely count — but I’d guess it’s about 120.
A few times, I’ve tried to just put my head down and do the best work possible. In these situations, it works for a bit longer, but what happens is the absenteeism problem catches up with you: see, bosses in white-collar tend to almost universally manage up, so they don’t care that much about those under them (and especially not about contractors). When a revenue ax needs to fall, you’ve been managed in an absentee way, so you’re the first up. “Let’s get rid of Tom’s contract…” “Sir, my name is Ted…”
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I think I’m out. I think for a while I’m chasing either bartending jobs, warehouse jobs, or longer-term maybe some nursing jobs — nursing seems pretty beat up as a profession, and I’ve long heard we need more male nurses anyway, and that seems like a more direct path to semi-stable employment (who wants a robot nurse?) and helping others, which feels more the point of life than “making money through meaningless tasks for others.” As for bartending, I’d just like to hear people’s stories — and be on the other side of the bar once in a while. Warehouse? Seems fitness-y and easy and you can detach every day.
All of them, at this point, seem more relevant as a way to spend a decade earning income — which is all work really should be — than most of the white-collar crud I see on my job feeds.
(Every time I think about writing the above article, I think about Kyle Mulloy and Main Event .)
Never say never, and maybe someday I’ll leap back into the fray with a random $70,000 “email marketing automation manager” role (that will end up lasting nine months, if that), but for now I think I’m done with white-collar. I just don’t see the point. It’s all sound and fury, signifying essentially nothing unless you face sales or revenue (and even then, barely much).
What’s interesting to me here is that I think I knew I hated traditional white-collar jobs probably by 2009. I think the reason it took me so long to arrive at an action item tied to it was some sense of privilege, because virtually everyone I had known growing up ended up in law, medicine, finance, consulting, ownership, etc. Standard white-collar stuff. That was the model I understood. Even being freelance and solo was different, and I had to adapt a lot in 2015. Now I might be slinging IPAs or packing stand mixers, and that’s fine. I really do think there’s some form of dignity in most work — and if “dignity” isn’t the right word, I think there’s a lot of ways to skin the income cat without “Who just joined? Is that Rachel?”
We’ll see how this goes, but that’s my current plan.