Individual gig work is in a negatively defined lifestyle. You don’t want either the constraints of traditional employment, or the responsibilities that come with growth beyond individual scale as a small business or startup. These are both types of freedom, and there are consequences to choosing them that show up as constraints elsewhere in your working life. The freedom of gig-work comes with a price-tag.
You know best what choices you’ve made/are making/plan to make, but let me help you see the consequences of those choices.
Choices
First, consider this pick-2-of-3 triangle. For the moment, trust me that as a gig worker, you have to choose 2 of 3 and can’t have all 3. Identify your current choice. Don’t peek ahead.
It may be easier to think about what you’re currently most willing to give up.
Done? You didn’t peek ahead?
Okay. Consequences.
Consequences
Look at the side defined by your 2 choices (opposite the vertex you sacrificed). Those are the consequences you can expect, within about a year or so.
When you give up integrity of methods (in terms of skilled discipline and/or ethics) you break the feedback loop of mindful practice and growth that keeps your cognitive abilities and procedural-ethical judgments strong and growing. So you experience cognitive decline.
When you give up standard of living, you experience chronic anxiety, but this is of a subtle variety. The thing is, the anxiety is not caused by decline in standard of living itself, but social factors. You cannot keep up the class lifestyle expected of someone doing the things you are doing. And family and friends are often the biggest source of this anxiety because you care about them and they care about you. This dissonance between how you work, and how you must live to conform to the expectations of your milieu, creates chronic anxiety and increasing financial worry.
When you give up autonomy of goals (ie cede agency over deciding what’s worth doing/caring about and why) you can generally expect to get a lot more work. There is always a lot of demand for people who will do what they’re told within a sharply bounded scope, no questions asked. And you will tend to take the work, because you will start to measure your life by the numbers that get driven up by sheer quantity of work — dollars, fawning testimonials, awards. And you will find yourself getting overworked and exhausted. Again there’s a subtlety. It’s not the work itself that exhausts you, but the fact that you have to do it to a professional standard while studiously not caring (or pretending not to care) about why you’re doing it and for whom. Suspending the need for meaningfulness is exhausting!
But wait, there’s more! We’re not done yet! Not only are there consequences to your choices, there are natural compensatory behaviors that kick in, almost unconsciously.
Natural Patterns of Compensation
Yup. You may not realize what your getting yourself into until much later, but your subconscious tends to catch on and start doing its thing. Look at the next phrase on your side of the triangle to predict what it will do.
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You will compensate for cognitive decline by seeking out skilled hobbies and interests. Narrow paths of personal accomplishment where you can get a feedback loop of strengthening high-integrity behaviors going. This temporarily relieves the sense of decline (like scratching an itch) and restores confidence, but without addressing the root cause.
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You will compensate for chronic social anxiety by investing increasing energy into premium mediocrity (looking more successful than you actually are). Again, this temporarily relieves the social pressure and anxiety symptoms without addressing the root cause.
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You will compensate for overwork and exhaustion with hedonistic excess. The finest wines! The finest clothes! The best business cards! Giving up on the search for meaning displaces those instincts to peripheral consumption tastes and pleasure orientation. Again, this only temporarily relieves the growing lack of meaning and sense of a void at the core of your work, without addressing the root cause.
We’re still not done! When you give in to natural, subconscious compensatory impulses for too long, leaving root causes unaddressed, you will naturally get to a point where that spells a particular ugly end for you. So here’s how your story ends down each of the 3 paths, if you don’t do something to alter course.
Endgames
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If you neglect integrity of methods for long enough, you will end up irrelevant and ridiculed as a faddish joke from another era, and eventually forgotten.
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If you neglect standard of living for long enough, you will descend into shameful poverty as you eventually fail to keep up even premium mediocre appearances.
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If you neglect autonomy of goals for long enough, your fate is descent into corruption and moral decay, as you gradually lose your moral compass and make increasingly terrible decisions. Each questionable decision will make the next one easier.
So that’s what’s in store for you down each of the pick-two-of-three paths.
Grim, huh?
Yes, but you can fix it, in one of three ways.
The Fix!
First, you can always increase your ambition level, and grow beyond individual gig-work. Of course, you’ll end up with different tradeoffs and constraints to navigate, but maybe that’s the challenge you want next.
Second, you can always try to go back to the world of traditional jobs if you can, and accept the constraints there. A good job will usually offer all three. But you know the price-tag that comes with that, otherwise you wouldn’t be subscribed to this list. But sometimes, that price tag can become acceptable when life circumstances change.
But third: if you want to stay in the gig economy, you can hack the triangle!
Yes you have to pick 2 of 3, but you don’t have to make the same choices in all situations and at all times. You can rotate through them in various creative ways! This creates a much more unstable lifestyle, but it allows you to address the root causes of the pathologies that lie in wait down each pure path. It’s like keeping a set of spinning plates spinning by darting among them.
There are 3 basic ways to do this.
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Gig-division multiplexing (GDM): Have multiple parallel gigs going, where you pick a different 2/3 in each. This may take a while to spin up since in the early days, you may be in wing-and-prayer serial-monogamy gig mode.
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Time-division multiplexing (TDM): Depending on circumstances and what constraints are tight or loose at any given time, pick a different 2/3. If you are flush from neglecting goal autonomy last quarter, ease off on the money-making and take a meaningful lower-priced or pro-bono gig (I recommend lower-priced/smaller over pro-bono; pro-bono work comes with its own baggage that needs careful handling).
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Activity-division multiplexing (ADM): Every gig is multiple strands of interwoven activity. You don’t have to make the same 2/3 choices in all strands. For example, you can compromise on integrity of methods on presentation and packaging while sticking rigorously to your methods in the backend analysis and thinking work for example. There will nearly always be ways to make such factorizations.
(These are roughly analogous to FDMA, TDMA, and CDMA multiplexing strategies in communications engineering).
So there you go. Make your choices. Accept the consequences in the short term, but resist them in the long term. Make new choices when and where you can in order to avoid degenerating.
That’s the price of freedom: you have to stay mindful of the consequences of your choices, and change them as necessary, across the duration and scope of your career, at varying resolutions.
Freedom is for live players. If you act dead, you will eventually die for real.