Freelancing as a form of resistance
As a freelancer, I always find it interesting to learn about the experiences of people working salaried jobs. I marvel at the people who already know today how much they will earn in five years if they stay with their current employer. I’m horrified when friends tell me they have to clock out if they need to use the restroom during working hours. Lately, I have eagerly been clicking on every article about quiet quitting with a similar level of amazement.
Here’s a recap for those of you who haven’t been following this discussion. Quiet quitting is a term used to refer to workers who do the bare minimum at work. Although they are physically at work from 9 to 5, they quietly clock out well before the end of their workday. They stare idly into space, scroll the Internet or play Wordle on their boss’s time. It would be reasonable to assume that people have been doing this for a long time, but since this year those people have also taken to TikTok to encourage others to stop being workaholics. Quiet quitting has been the subject of many articles, and the trend has been declared over just as many times.
You might think quiet quitters are being lazy or lacking in ambition, but the more interesting thinkpieces about this phenomenon tell a different story. Belgian journalist Katrin Swartenbroux for instance spoke to a few self-declared quiet quitters who offered up nearly existential reasons for no longer wanting to go above and beyond at work. They told her they wanted their lives to be about more than work and that it was their way of rejecting hustle culture. Others said they did not want to move up the career ladder and take on an executive role in which they would no longer be able to do the things they enjoyed doing. Some people discovered flexible work arrangements during the pandemic and were upset at having to return to the office and once again having to participate in endless meetings. I also read articles about quiet quitters who didn’t agree with the way in which we continue to work and produce, burning up our planet and ourselves in the process.
“At first glance there was no rhyme or reason to all the testimonies I gathered, but the unifying thread did immediately become clear – people still want to work. It’s just that the traditional way of working is no longer working for them,” Swartenbroux concludes in her article.
The thing is: it’s pretty damn difficult to change the system you are yourself a part of, especially if you are just a tiny wheel in a big system. It’s a bit like with the climate crisis. Ordinary people have few options available to them besides exchanging their halogen lamps for LED lamps and turning down the heating. Contrasted with the impact governments and companies could have, our contributions to the fight to curb global warming feel small. But we continue with them because at least it’s something.
You might see quiet quitting as the equivalent of putting in a LED bulb, only in a work context. It’s a small act of protest against our way of working.
“Taking long smoke breaks, printing out private documents at work – they’re small actions, with no involvement of a labour union, with no requests for more or better work. It’s a way to do less work. Writing a letter on your boss’s time. Using the boss’s means and the time you are on his clock for something that is not productive, at least not for the boss. It’s a way of stealing back time,” says the Dutch sociologist Marguerite van den Berg. In her book Werk is geen oplossing (Work is not a solution), she argues that we haven’t always worked the way we do today, which means that we can also move away from this model.
As freelancers, we are also a part of this system and we suffer from it in our own way, and often more so than salaried workers. At the same time, I think we have more opportunities to rebel against the system than employees who are stuck with more limited options like playing Wordle during working hours.
When you are your own boss, you don’t have a boss to rebel against. Instead, you can be a boss who leads her solo business according to her own values. If you think working for work’s sake is nonsense, you can call your day quits when there is nothing else useful for you to do. If you prefer to see other freelancers as partners in crime whom you’d like to help rather than as competitors, you can be transparent about your revenue and expenses. If you value your mental and physical health, you can schedule therapy sessions and visits to the gym during your workday as you would lunch breaks. If you have discovered what you like to do most, you can decide that you no longer have to ‘ascend’ the career ladder and instead specialise even more in what makes you happy. You can decide to scrap ‘hustle culture’, ‘girl boss’ and other words like it from your vocabulary, but continue to be ambitious about making work work for you.
Tell us about your acts of microrebellion against ways of working that don’t match your values. Maybe we can inspire each other.
Talk soon,
Selma