Defending the 9-to-5 grind
Like most self-proclaimed free spirits, I once vowed to never “work for the man.” From the age of 17 until my last year of college, my career plan if you could call it that involved moving to Prague or Paris to paint, eat strange food and get unapologetically wasted. On paper I may have been Richie Tenenbaum had he been raised by a Tiger Mom, but at the core I was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
I believed, and still do, that the fastest way to receive any kind of information is visually. So I lapped up art books and fashion magazines and familiarized myself with pop culture references via movies and music. I built a portfolio that got me into art school in Florence. After much trial and many errors, however, I dropped out and began to cross time zones haphazardly: Bogotá, Vancouver, London, Cubao. Getting lost in order to find one’s authentic self was indeed an interesting and somewhat pricey process.
art is hard work
Oddly enough it’s this pleasing back story that got me to where I am today: pulling seven-hour days five days a week yes, “working for the man.” For a real job, my current stint at a respectable global news organization has hardly been soul-destroying. While the business of information is precise and at times mechanical, it hasn’t been a death knell to my dreams or my creativity. I have stock options. A better-than-median-income wage streams in every two weeks. I get seven hours of sleep. I almost feel like I’m betraying my fellow mavericks when I say this, but I’m really enjoying the daily grind. That said, I hate being a grown-up.
I agree that it’s hardly an ode to entrepreneurship, but going freelance or self-employment, as I describe it to strangers to make it seem like I know what I’m doing wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. Art is damn hard work, because first and foremost, it is work. When I was inspired, it was glorious. I would crank up my iPod and churn out several mixed media collages in one sitting, stenciling, sculpting and assembling found junk as if I were on School of Saatchi, the 2009 BBC series in which the famous art collector selected an up-and-comer to join his next major exhibition. When I wasn’t, it was horrible. I went for months without producing a single piece and when I finally did, I realized it sucked.
Neither romantic nor sustainable
It was when my artsy-fartsy chakras were blocked that I discovered I could more or less string a few sentences together. Ditching the paintbrush for a laptop, I soon scored writing gigs, then editor-at-large positions. But again, being my own boss, managing my own time and living freestyle was neither romantic nor sustainable. I had trouble figuring out where my professional life ended and my personal one began. Not knowing the provenance of my next paycheck also made me terribly anxious. It eventually got to a point where I wished, over bottles of red wine, to have a job that wouldn’t follow me home, one that I could, well, leave at the office. I craved structure like I craved nachos.
“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out,” proclaimed Alfred Hitchcock. Living without a template may be thrilling, but being a hack doing routine stuff for money like Blake, Adam, and Anders do in Workaholics or Jim and Maggie in The Newsroom isn’t so bad either. I look at it this way: unless you are the offspring of Middle Eastern royalty or belong to a family of Russian oligarchs, you will need to find a way to bankroll your passions or whatever it is you deem fun. I’ve been extremely fortunate that both my day job and my side gig, penning this column, have not been too far from what I think is my true calling. The one-two punch has managed to keep me sane, secure and fulfilled.
There Is no balance
After fiddling with CNN’s work/life balance calculator, I found out that my existence is quite smooth and even. The only sensible response was to shrug. I guess the afternoon naps and zero commute really do help.
But whether I’ve truly hit the sweet spot or I’m merely a conformist masquerading as a ball of fire, one thing’s for sure: as far as maintaining your mental well-being goes, there is no formula. There is no balance. To repurpose what Lucy Kellaway, one of my favorite Financial Times columnists, once wrote, “Instead, it’s a continuous, fluid game of survival, the rules of which are unclear, shifting and different for everyone.”
Doing tiny, repetitive things from nine to five isn’t necessarily evil. A lot of it has to do with the job, your employer and how your career marches on over the years. From my experience, it is definitely possible to be an employee and not be miserable. After all, one version of me may sit in an office, but when the workday ends, another one is out there exploring the world like a ninja and expressing himself like Paul Gauguin.
* * *
