10 ms·

I’ve been a self-employed independent creator for 10 years

156 points by imartin2k 9y ago

cryoshon 9y ago
>“I just want to read about things that interest me, have conversations, use it all to inform my understanding of the world, and share what I’ve learned.” yep, this sums up my wants as well. the thing is, people don't pay for that unless you're already established or the thing you want to learn and talk about is hot. and hot things cool, so you'll need to find new interests that people find hot to learn about. etc. but there's a huge upshot to self employment as i see it that the author didn't mention: you don't have to hide. you don't have to hide your time from your bosses. you don't have to hide your interviewing with other places. you don't have to hide your sense of humor to avoid offending coworkers. you don't have to hide your wisdom or knowledge for fear of messing up the office political situation. you don't have to hide your true values anymore; you don't have to pretend to care about the company. sure, you lose some stability, but who cares. stability is too often another word for stagnation.
- rhizome 9y ago
  I just want to read about things that interest me, have conversations, use it all to inform my understanding of the world, and share what I’ve learned Isn't this essentially a definition of leisure time? It's at least salon culture[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering)
- rubidium 9y ago
  Sounds like you've only worked for bad managers and companies, which admittedly isn't too hard to do in one's career. There are employers that give the best of both worlds.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    I've had 2 really great jobs and both were acquired by bad companies.
  - cryoshon 9y ago
    >There are employers that give the best of both worlds. sure, i believe it. i may have even worked for one at some point. but (straying from the original discussion substantially) that just trips other red flags for me, like selling your labor for a pittance while the company gets a disproportionate share of the value from your time spent with them.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    Not many, I spent a long period freelancing on short jobs, more than 250 customers and I could count on one hand the number I would want to work for full time.
- tobyjsullivan 9y ago
  I discovered the same concept when being self-driven for an extended period. I would sum it up as saying freelance allowed me to be "my most authentic self" and it was phenomenal. There's something about employment - sometimes it's the employers, sometimes the culture, mostly ourselves - that leads to a certain form of inauthenticity. Maybe this is what's know as "professionalism"? However, I did find after this realization that I was able to shape my next career choices around maintaining that authenticity with a high level of success (albeit, not perfectly).
  - Clubber 9y ago
    >There's something about employment ... that leads to a certain form of inauthenticity. It starts with the first damn question of the first damn interaction: "Why do you want to work here?"
    - ashark 9y ago
      Yeah. "I'm hoping you will give me more money for less work/irritation than other options I have, and/or will let me gain experience to land a job somewhere else that asks even less of me while paying me even more money" doesn't go over well, but everyone involved knows that's the honest answer for 9/10 or more of applicants, unless you're one of the rare employers doing something actually interesting or fulfilling on a macro level. The degree of dishonesty surrounding all business and employment, even in the best cases, makes me really uncomfortable, being so totally at odds with the way I was raised. Some of it's so pervasive that people don't seem to notice until you point it out, then usually try to come up with excuses for it. Coming to terms with all the lying has taken years, and I still don't like it.
      - Clubber 9y ago
        It makes me feel nauseous just thinking about it, just the fakeness of it all. And we have to do it to survive. Holden Caulfield irritation of "phoneys" comes to mind.
    - Alacart 9y ago
dood 9y ago
Interesting read but the title is unnecessarily clickbaity since the conclusion is, "If you are looking for security or reassurance, I do not recommend this line of work" - which everybody knew already. In fact, contrary to the title, he does recommend it so long as you aren't looking for security and reassurance.
- swalsh 9y ago
  Part of working for yourself is you usually learn a bit of marketing along the way out of necessity.
- kadavy 9y ago
  Oh boy, HN.
  - dood 9y ago
    I enjoyed the post, but think I would've gotten more out of it if the title was more congruent with the content. I was expecting a lament or postmortem (which hooked me in), but the story was more like an exultation. Congrats on your success, I hope your upcoming book will help more people fruitfully pursue their dreams.
    - kadavy 9y ago
      Glad to hear you enjoyed it. I guess I figured admitting I was scared on a regular basis, and wondering whether doing this might kill me would be considered somewhat a lament. But of course I think I'm doing the right thing – after all, I've put everything I have into it. If I felt like I had a choice, I'd probably do something differently.
Aloha 9y ago
It takes a certain kind of person to be a freelance anything. If you're not that kind of person, you're likely not to be a success.
Sorry_Rum_Ham 9y ago
His thesis statement is entirely misleading. He absolutely recommends it. The entire article reiterates several times how happy he was and continues to be that he passed up more secure opportunities again and again over the years. Not sure why the clickbaity title was necessary.
- kadavy 9y ago
  How is it that you think I recommend it? It's a pretty genuine warning that it's a hard way to make a living.
  - quilliellis 9y ago
    I expected it to be about how you regret your choice and you would recommend this path to almost no one. This seemed to be what other readers expected too. But, instead, you talked about how happy you were with the choice. Also, you hedged your anti-recommendation quite a bit: > "If you are looking for security or reassurance, I do not recommend this line of work." I don't think people proudly believe they want "reassurance", in many cases. > "However, if you are burning with curiosity — if your heart and intuition lead you to do things that don’t make sense—well, then you don’t really have a choice in the matter, do you?" I think people would much rather think of themselves as "burning with curiosity". (Isn't curiosity cooler than reassurance/security? At least in the HN audience?) I interpreted your closing statements, very roughly, as ~"Careful, don't do what I did if you're normal. Only do what I did if you're cool." So it was actually a recommendation, in my mind.
    - kadavy 9y ago
      Ah, thanks for the explanation. I found the "clickbait" bit to be a leap (though you weren't the only person to say so). This is how I really feel about it. I wish I felt like I had enough of a choice in the matter to say "oh well, that was a mistake." If I felt like I did have a choice, no, I wouldn't recommend it.
vinceguidry 9y ago
I've never understood the irrational desire to quit your job. Jobs are wonderful, magical things and I've been thankful to have every single one of them, even the ones that sucked, like that time I worked 12 hour shifts in a warehouse doing product assembly. Or when I had to deal with father as an electrical apprentice. Or when I was on the shit list in the military. I guess it's because every job I've had, I've subjected to an intense inquiry on exactly what I'm getting out of the job. I'm very intentional about my work. For the warehouse job, I was saving up for a move. I knew exactly what I was doing and why. When I see people with these crazy flights of fancy throwing away perfectly good opportunities to work and build incrementally to their dream lives, it makes me a little sad. The very irrationality of his thought processes caused him to utterly fail to learn how to market his services, making him piss away a decade of what could have been fortunate prosperity. Sure, he never starved. There was always some money coming in the pike. But he purposefully did not shoot for any more. It's almost like these people hate money for some reason. He finally comes to his big life realization and then sees his path. And when I read his big life realization, I was immensely struck by the fact that I want exactly what he wants. A nice, comfy lifestyle where I can have conversations, share what I know, and learn. My job is the perfect tool to allow me to do that. I get all my money from one place. And I can have conversations, share what I know, and learn at work.
- pdonis 9y ago
  > A nice, comfy lifestyle where I can have conversations, share what I know, and learn. Yes, and you, unlike the author of this piece, appear to grasp the basic fact that nobody will pay you for this. So you have to make a living some other way, and use the leisure you earn to do this nice thing that you want to do.
  - dv_dt 9y ago
    Aren't there a whole range of media jobs that do just this, from blogger, to journalists, youtube hosts, or documentary makers, etc. It may be very difficult/risky to get to an independent financially sustaining position doing this, but it's not an impossible aspiration. I do think the author is downplaying the difficulty to even himself though.
dejv 9y ago
I am in my 11th year as a fulltime freelancer. It is nice ride, interestingly I haven't had problem with things all wannabe freelancers expecting: all of my invoices get paid (with 99,9% of them on time), I was always able to cover my monthly costs with money coming from last month billing and I always found good clients. During last decade I was able to do all the stereotypical things people imagine to do when they don't have to go to the office: waking late, spending year wasting time in SE Asia, traveling around the world, working from coffee shops, coworking places and even in my bed, I also started a startup (or five), had numerous side projects and whatnot. So far so good, that digital nomad-remote freelancing thingy actually exists and it is actually quite easy to get into this lifestyle. The dark side of freelancing is that you usually get into quite boring and not that interesting kind of work: writing CRUD apps, maintaining old software and basically doing stuff that don't require a tons of deep expertise and continuous effort of highly skilled team of people. For some people it doesn't matter, but if you ever want to work on some high tech stuff be worry, it is very hard to get back into game after years of freelancing, you might be destined to sling some basic apps for the rest of your life (which is actually what majority of devs do in their jobs anyway).
- nightski 9y ago
  I've had a very similar experience. While I do agree that you end up with a lot of boring work, it really isn't tough to keep skills sharp either. It's probably worth setting time a specific amount of time for this very purpose. Establishing a 20% time concept is much easier when you are in control of your own hours. I've found that as a freelancer while I haven't been working on cutting edge tech as much my social, project management, and business skills have all improved by leaps and bounds. This may be even more important than being familiar with the cutting edge js frameworks or slinging around some deep neural network models.
  - dejv 9y ago
    Well it depends on what you consider being interesting: finding work that let you use latest javascript framework or architecting micro services? Easy. Finding work that will let you spend years and years perfecting the way how to make query engine of specialised embedded database run faster? (my old job) Less likely. It depends on your ambitions, lot of people would be happy to work on regular apps for rest of their professional life, some not. People just have to think about it as coming back into that "hardcore" sector is not easy after years of writing crud apps.
swayvil 9y ago
Does the "making things" thing ever get you down? Getting intimate and sensitive with a dead dead medium, dead stuff that you try to arrange into something pretty. Obsession as lifestyle, deforming your soul. Pandering to moneyed children to pay your bills. I have some experience with this and I gotta say it gets me down. Do you relate?
- taway_1212 9y ago
  I share this sentiment as well - when I work for a bank, at least I get a sense that I'm working towards something meaningful (matching investors with opportunities). On the other hand, working on another video game or novel that no one wants or needs sounds depressing.
nickjj 9y ago
I've been creating content for a few years, but I've been self employed for a really long time. The author's comments on Louis CK was very relatable. I've had the same exact thought processes and conclusions. I haven't hit that point where things start to grow exponentially but I really feel like that's how it goes. Unfortunately it's ultra dangerous in the tech field because creating a course on XYZ will be outdated by the time you "make it" (and to create content like that might be 3-4 months of ~80 hour weeks). My plan is to keep creating content until something sticks.
nnd 9y ago
My main issue with freelancing is the quality of the most of the gigs. Sure, you can land a gig which would allow you to use your most favorite trendy JS framework, but in the end you’d likely end up building some variation of a CRUD app. It’s extremely hard to land a project which would allow you to work in cutting-edge technological problems. An issue which I commonly see in these threads is the black-and-white antogonization of “working for the man” and being a “free man”. It’s almost like you are either a mindless 9-to-5 drone or you “escaped the system”, and working for yourself, even though you might be scraping bahts eating ramen in Chiang Mai.
barsonme 9y ago
I have to say I'm a bit surprised he moved to Colombia. My aunt lived through her teenage years in Colombia, and even though she has family there she absolutely refuses to go visit because of how horrible it was. I'm sure it's changed since she lived there, but it's not like she's been isolated from the country's happenings the last 30-some years. (I mean, she has family and friends she can call or message.)
- etiene 9y ago
  The healthcare situation in the US is horrible enough for this. Mind, I'm from Brazil and even though we're a shitty third world piece of crap sometimes, we still got free universal health care and great 100% free public universities. It baffles me that a country as wealthy as the US does not provide such basic things to its citizens. I guess it's a matter of the mindset on priorities? War > Health? I went to Cuba once, where people are objectively very poor, and still I had no issues being seen by a doctor at a local clinic for free when I had an eye emergency even though I was just a tourist. I live in Europe now, where general quality of life is much better than where I lived in Brazil and it terrifies me that other Brazilians often look to the US as something to strive for rather than Europe in our next developments. I've heard of multiple cases before of people with bad health who simply had to flee the US and move somewhere else more social so they wouldn't die or because they had already gone bankrupt paying for health services. It's a shame, really, the US definitely has enough money and would be able to provide their citizens more humane care, but this is not an unsurprising story. :(
tonyedgecombe 9y ago
I sometimes wonder if a better solution to this is to accept a less demanding job and fill your free time with your creative endeavors.
anotheryou 9y ago
I'm sure it's easier for me to find a part-time job than living from my art/curiosity. Better 1/2 the week lost to work, than all the art lost to comercial compromises with little pay. I will do full time for a year or so to get some credability and save some money. I'm just not sure yet how to find an ok 2-day job that pays ok. Maybe consulting would be worth an attempt, but I guess I'd need to network a lot for that.
tcbawo 9y ago
This sentiment may be unpopular here, but I think it is probably difficult to pull this off and have a family simultaneously. Having the luxury of following your interests comes from someone putting a roof over your head and food on your plate during your formative years. Quite likely, your parents made it possible (through their sacrifice) for you to receive an education and give you access to the social network that put you where you are today. If you do follow your dreams while having children, I hope you are able to provide them with a foundation for their future success.

156 points by imartin2k 9y ago

>“I just want to read about things that interest me, have conversations, use it all to inform my understanding of the world, and share what I’ve learned.” yep, this sums up my wants as well. the thing is, people don't pay for that unless you're already established or the thing you want to learn and talk about is hot. and hot things cool, so you'll need to find new interests that people find hot to learn about. etc. but there's a huge upshot to self employment as i see it that the author didn't mention: you don't have to hide. you don't have to hide your time from your bosses. you don't have to hide your interviewing with other places. you don't have to hide your sense of humor to avoid offending coworkers. you don't have to hide your wisdom or knowledge for fear of messing up the office political situation. you don't have to hide your true values anymore; you don't have to pretend to care about the company. sure, you lose some stability, but who cares. stability is too often another word for stagnation.

rhizome 9y ago
I just want to read about things that interest me, have conversations, use it all to inform my understanding of the world, and share what I’ve learned Isn't this essentially a definition of leisure time? It's at least salon culture[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering)
rubidium 9y ago
Sounds like you've only worked for bad managers and companies, which admittedly isn't too hard to do in one's career. There are employers that give the best of both worlds.
- Clubber 9y ago
  I've had 2 really great jobs and both were acquired by bad companies.
- cryoshon 9y ago
  >There are employers that give the best of both worlds. sure, i believe it. i may have even worked for one at some point. but (straying from the original discussion substantially) that just trips other red flags for me, like selling your labor for a pittance while the company gets a disproportionate share of the value from your time spent with them.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  Not many, I spent a long period freelancing on short jobs, more than 250 customers and I could count on one hand the number I would want to work for full time.
tobyjsullivan 9y ago
I discovered the same concept when being self-driven for an extended period. I would sum it up as saying freelance allowed me to be "my most authentic self" and it was phenomenal. There's something about employment - sometimes it's the employers, sometimes the culture, mostly ourselves - that leads to a certain form of inauthenticity. Maybe this is what's know as "professionalism"? However, I did find after this realization that I was able to shape my next career choices around maintaining that authenticity with a high level of success (albeit, not perfectly).
- Clubber 9y ago
  >There's something about employment ... that leads to a certain form of inauthenticity. It starts with the first damn question of the first damn interaction: "Why do you want to work here?"
  - ashark 9y ago
    Yeah. "I'm hoping you will give me more money for less work/irritation than other options I have, and/or will let me gain experience to land a job somewhere else that asks even less of me while paying me even more money" doesn't go over well, but everyone involved knows that's the honest answer for 9/10 or more of applicants, unless you're one of the rare employers doing something actually interesting or fulfilling on a macro level. The degree of dishonesty surrounding all business and employment, even in the best cases, makes me really uncomfortable, being so totally at odds with the way I was raised. Some of it's so pervasive that people don't seem to notice until you point it out, then usually try to come up with excuses for it. Coming to terms with all the lying has taken years, and I still don't like it.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      It makes me feel nauseous just thinking about it, just the fakeness of it all. And we have to do it to survive. Holden Caulfield irritation of "phoneys" comes to mind.
  - Alacart 9y ago

dood 9y ago

Interesting read but the title is unnecessarily clickbaity since the conclusion is, "If you are looking for security or reassurance, I do not recommend this line of work" - which everybody knew already. In fact, contrary to the title, he does recommend it so long as you aren't looking for security and reassurance.

swalsh 9y ago
Part of working for yourself is you usually learn a bit of marketing along the way out of necessity.
kadavy 9y ago
Oh boy, HN.
- dood 9y ago
  I enjoyed the post, but think I would've gotten more out of it if the title was more congruent with the content. I was expecting a lament or postmortem (which hooked me in), but the story was more like an exultation. Congrats on your success, I hope your upcoming book will help more people fruitfully pursue their dreams.
  - kadavy 9y ago
    Glad to hear you enjoyed it. I guess I figured admitting I was scared on a regular basis, and wondering whether doing this might kill me would be considered somewhat a lament. But of course I think I'm doing the right thing – after all, I've put everything I have into it. If I felt like I had a choice, I'd probably do something differently.

Aloha 9y ago

It takes a certain kind of person to be a freelance anything. If you're not that kind of person, you're likely not to be a success.

Sorry_Rum_Ham 9y ago

His thesis statement is entirely misleading. He absolutely recommends it. The entire article reiterates several times how happy he was and continues to be that he passed up more secure opportunities again and again over the years. Not sure why the clickbaity title was necessary.

kadavy 9y ago
How is it that you think I recommend it? It's a pretty genuine warning that it's a hard way to make a living.
- quilliellis 9y ago
  I expected it to be about how you regret your choice and you would recommend this path to almost no one. This seemed to be what other readers expected too. But, instead, you talked about how happy you were with the choice. Also, you hedged your anti-recommendation quite a bit: > "If you are looking for security or reassurance, I do not recommend this line of work." I don't think people proudly believe they want "reassurance", in many cases. > "However, if you are burning with curiosity — if your heart and intuition lead you to do things that don’t make sense—well, then you don’t really have a choice in the matter, do you?" I think people would much rather think of themselves as "burning with curiosity". (Isn't curiosity cooler than reassurance/security? At least in the HN audience?) I interpreted your closing statements, very roughly, as ~"Careful, don't do what I did if you're normal. Only do what I did if you're cool." So it was actually a recommendation, in my mind.
  - kadavy 9y ago
    Ah, thanks for the explanation. I found the "clickbait" bit to be a leap (though you weren't the only person to say so). This is how I really feel about it. I wish I felt like I had enough of a choice in the matter to say "oh well, that was a mistake." If I felt like I did have a choice, no, I wouldn't recommend it.

vinceguidry 9y ago

I've never understood the irrational desire to quit your job. Jobs are wonderful, magical things and I've been thankful to have every single one of them, even the ones that sucked, like that time I worked 12 hour shifts in a warehouse doing product assembly. Or when I had to deal with father as an electrical apprentice. Or when I was on the shit list in the military. I guess it's because every job I've had, I've subjected to an intense inquiry on exactly what I'm getting out of the job. I'm very intentional about my work. For the warehouse job, I was saving up for a move. I knew exactly what I was doing and why. When I see people with these crazy flights of fancy throwing away perfectly good opportunities to work and build incrementally to their dream lives, it makes me a little sad. The very irrationality of his thought processes caused him to utterly fail to learn how to market his services, making him piss away a decade of what could have been fortunate prosperity. Sure, he never starved. There was always some money coming in the pike. But he purposefully did not shoot for any more. It's almost like these people hate money for some reason. He finally comes to his big life realization and then sees his path. And when I read his big life realization, I was immensely struck by the fact that I want exactly what he wants. A nice, comfy lifestyle where I can have conversations, share what I know, and learn. My job is the perfect tool to allow me to do that. I get all my money from one place. And I can have conversations, share what I know, and learn at work.

pdonis 9y ago
> A nice, comfy lifestyle where I can have conversations, share what I know, and learn. Yes, and you, unlike the author of this piece, appear to grasp the basic fact that nobody will pay you for this. So you have to make a living some other way, and use the leisure you earn to do this nice thing that you want to do.
- dv_dt 9y ago
  Aren't there a whole range of media jobs that do just this, from blogger, to journalists, youtube hosts, or documentary makers, etc. It may be very difficult/risky to get to an independent financially sustaining position doing this, but it's not an impossible aspiration. I do think the author is downplaying the difficulty to even himself though.

dejv 9y ago

I am in my 11th year as a fulltime freelancer. It is nice ride, interestingly I haven't had problem with things all wannabe freelancers expecting: all of my invoices get paid (with 99,9% of them on time), I was always able to cover my monthly costs with money coming from last month billing and I always found good clients. During last decade I was able to do all the stereotypical things people imagine to do when they don't have to go to the office: waking late, spending year wasting time in SE Asia, traveling around the world, working from coffee shops, coworking places and even in my bed, I also started a startup (or five), had numerous side projects and whatnot. So far so good, that digital nomad-remote freelancing thingy actually exists and it is actually quite easy to get into this lifestyle. The dark side of freelancing is that you usually get into quite boring and not that interesting kind of work: writing CRUD apps, maintaining old software and basically doing stuff that don't require a tons of deep expertise and continuous effort of highly skilled team of people. For some people it doesn't matter, but if you ever want to work on some high tech stuff be worry, it is very hard to get back into game after years of freelancing, you might be destined to sling some basic apps for the rest of your life (which is actually what majority of devs do in their jobs anyway).

nightski 9y ago
I've had a very similar experience. While I do agree that you end up with a lot of boring work, it really isn't tough to keep skills sharp either. It's probably worth setting time a specific amount of time for this very purpose. Establishing a 20% time concept is much easier when you are in control of your own hours. I've found that as a freelancer while I haven't been working on cutting edge tech as much my social, project management, and business skills have all improved by leaps and bounds. This may be even more important than being familiar with the cutting edge js frameworks or slinging around some deep neural network models.
- dejv 9y ago
  Well it depends on what you consider being interesting: finding work that let you use latest javascript framework or architecting micro services? Easy. Finding work that will let you spend years and years perfecting the way how to make query engine of specialised embedded database run faster? (my old job) Less likely. It depends on your ambitions, lot of people would be happy to work on regular apps for rest of their professional life, some not. People just have to think about it as coming back into that "hardcore" sector is not easy after years of writing crud apps.

swayvil 9y ago

Does the "making things" thing ever get you down? Getting intimate and sensitive with a dead dead medium, dead stuff that you try to arrange into something pretty. Obsession as lifestyle, deforming your soul. Pandering to moneyed children to pay your bills. I have some experience with this and I gotta say it gets me down. Do you relate?

taway_1212 9y ago
I share this sentiment as well - when I work for a bank, at least I get a sense that I'm working towards something meaningful (matching investors with opportunities). On the other hand, working on another video game or novel that no one wants or needs sounds depressing.

nickjj 9y ago

I've been creating content for a few years, but I've been self employed for a really long time. The author's comments on Louis CK was very relatable. I've had the same exact thought processes and conclusions. I haven't hit that point where things start to grow exponentially but I really feel like that's how it goes. Unfortunately it's ultra dangerous in the tech field because creating a course on XYZ will be outdated by the time you "make it" (and to create content like that might be 3-4 months of ~80 hour weeks). My plan is to keep creating content until something sticks.

nnd 9y ago

My main issue with freelancing is the quality of the most of the gigs. Sure, you can land a gig which would allow you to use your most favorite trendy JS framework, but in the end you’d likely end up building some variation of a CRUD app. It’s extremely hard to land a project which would allow you to work in cutting-edge technological problems. An issue which I commonly see in these threads is the black-and-white antogonization of “working for the man” and being a “free man”. It’s almost like you are either a mindless 9-to-5 drone or you “escaped the system”, and working for yourself, even though you might be scraping bahts eating ramen in Chiang Mai.

barsonme 9y ago

I have to say I'm a bit surprised he moved to Colombia. My aunt lived through her teenage years in Colombia, and even though she has family there she absolutely refuses to go visit because of how horrible it was. I'm sure it's changed since she lived there, but it's not like she's been isolated from the country's happenings the last 30-some years. (I mean, she has family and friends she can call or message.)

etiene 9y ago
The healthcare situation in the US is horrible enough for this. Mind, I'm from Brazil and even though we're a shitty third world piece of crap sometimes, we still got free universal health care and great 100% free public universities. It baffles me that a country as wealthy as the US does not provide such basic things to its citizens. I guess it's a matter of the mindset on priorities? War > Health? I went to Cuba once, where people are objectively very poor, and still I had no issues being seen by a doctor at a local clinic for free when I had an eye emergency even though I was just a tourist. I live in Europe now, where general quality of life is much better than where I lived in Brazil and it terrifies me that other Brazilians often look to the US as something to strive for rather than Europe in our next developments. I've heard of multiple cases before of people with bad health who simply had to flee the US and move somewhere else more social so they wouldn't die or because they had already gone bankrupt paying for health services. It's a shame, really, the US definitely has enough money and would be able to provide their citizens more humane care, but this is not an unsurprising story. :(

tonyedgecombe 9y ago

I sometimes wonder if a better solution to this is to accept a less demanding job and fill your free time with your creative endeavors.

anotheryou 9y ago

I'm sure it's easier for me to find a part-time job than living from my art/curiosity. Better 1/2 the week lost to work, than all the art lost to comercial compromises with little pay. I will do full time for a year or so to get some credability and save some money. I'm just not sure yet how to find an ok 2-day job that pays ok. Maybe consulting would be worth an attempt, but I guess I'd need to network a lot for that.

tcbawo 9y ago

This sentiment may be unpopular here, but I think it is probably difficult to pull this off and have a family simultaneously. Having the luxury of following your interests comes from someone putting a roof over your head and food on your plate during your formative years. Quite likely, your parents made it possible (through their sacrifice) for you to receive an education and give you access to the social network that put you where you are today. If you do follow your dreams while having children, I hope you are able to provide them with a foundation for their future success.