I contemplate this often. I adore my own work-lifestyle, as demanding as it is. I think most people would agree that there is almost immeasurable value in a life where a person can simply decide, for example, "Monday, I am going to my daughter's cheer tryouts," and not have to make a request to her employer for the time off.
Self-employed people have, to some degree, been doing this for a while, although many I've met are the least willing to absent themselves from their business for fear of missing a business opportunity. But, I see many of them becoming more free to escape and to set their business lives up so they can perform needed tasks remotely. Technology adds to these freedoms, of course.
I personally know a number of people who are skilled in a number of areas, and they are not making their living in any one of those areas, but, instead, they are earning a portion of their income in each of several areas. And it's this phenomenon I particularly relish. Not because it's what I am doing, though, perhaps I am. I consider all my sources of income to be generated using similar skill sets. I work in real estate, and all of my income comes from real-estate related services.
Nope the people I have in mind are talented in many mostly unrelated ways that they tap into. For example, my friend Rhaina is an aestheticism, and a really good one. But, she also has begun house-sitting, and pet-sitting, too. She is finding it rewarding, and she has even been able to down-size her own lifestyle because she is often living at a house she's "sitting." My friend Shonna, who also has her cosmetology license, has been a hair stylist for some time, but lately juggles jobs stocking products for upstart companies such as vitamin water purveyors. Because she put herself through culinary school, she also takes one-off jobs demo-ing food and wine at grocery stores, and even occasionally works doing light catering and serving at weddings and other events.
My friend Jeff is a Jack-of-all-trades, and he does I-am-not-even-sure-what for a huge client list of people who call him when they need animatronics for events, or unusual lighting, or any other odd, quasi-engineering problem solved, again, generally as it pertains to an event somebody somewhere is pulling off. And, in between those gigs, he and his new bride are building a tiny house from scratch.
All this surge of free-to-be-me ingenuity seems to have gelled for the world, or, at least the world from my vantage point, in recent years. I love it. Even the youngest adults I know personally are doing a really wonderful job of being fairly lean and streamlined in their lifestyles while still making a living and not freeloading off family or friends.
As I recall my own decade of 20's. I can assuredly affirm that nobody then had any idea how to have a lifestyle, and really only talked about having a job, and a life outside their jobs. Yes, in my time, that was the 80's. In that era, "Lifestyle" referred politely to swingers, and thus wasn't a word often used.
I remember in 1989, Joanna, my sister, secured a temp job with a tiny upstart tech company. It was so small that the founders of the company and the board of directors interviewed her for her job. She was told that possibly, if they continued to grow, she may be hired permanently. She was, not long after that, and over the first couple of years she was there, I was often invited to meet her at her office when I visited her. I toured the huge rooms and thousands of square feet of empty office space they had under their control, unused at that early time in their history.
Even then, they had concluded that stockpiling large quantities of every sort of beverage and snack food was the way to keep their programmers happy and working well into the nights, often. I know that Joanna, who was there as a temp receptionist initially, and later, full time as their newsletter editor, was often there on odd hours and weekends. And, thus was born a culture of feeding creative genius. I feel certain that it was a self-propelling process; an organic discovery.
That little startup Joanna went to work for was Cisco Systems. Over the evolutionary trajectory that I observed with respect to how employees were treated; what their work environments looked and felt like; what freedoms they had; those job perks became a big component of the measure of the desirability of a workplace for many a tech worker.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the increasingly flexible style of those same things--the work and the workplace--have shown workers over those years that they can envision a completely different life for themselves, and even that they can create a business offering services and products in ways that are fresh and innovative.
And, I think we are already into the second or even third iteration, or perhaps generation, of those workers whose eyes have opened to the possibilities of not, simply, having more say in how their job and their workplace look, but in how they integrate their livelihood directly into their daily lives, so that the most important things are never placed on a back burner for the sake of the J-O-B.
I think that we have moved beyond solely the actual tech workers who learned directly from the large and out-of-the-box-thinking corporations for whom they worked, and we have moved to the people who see how the workers are enjoying this freedom of livelihood, and these next waves of people are enjoying the same freedoms. For one thing, all the children of those first two decades of workers are now grown and, presumably, are workers themselves, or, possibly, they are entrepreneurs.
I think entrepreneurialism is at the heart of this, but I hasten to say, I don't think most people living this way have the mindset that "I am an entrepreneur," or "I work for myself," or "I own a small business," in fact. But, if they stopped and took stock of their activities, many would realize they are, and they do.
Because, that is what my friends Shonna, and Rhaina, and Jeff, and people doing that sort of thing, are. They are the modern entrepreneur. As am I, come to think of it.
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