9 reasons not to be a freelancer

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

In the modern office environment, especially among IT people and creative people, the religious cult of the "free man" has emerged and is rapidly developing. As a rule, this is a person who gave up his usual life, began to work for himself and now absolutely does not depend on anyone and lives as he wants and where he wants. Examples of the life of such successful entrepreneurs, freelancers, and writers are usually accompanied by vivid pictures of tropical beaches, where our hero, with a glass in one hand and a laptop in the other, lazily nags another thousand dollars. Paradise, and more!

However, this, like any other popular print, contains too much gloss. You have to pay for every thing, but for a product such as freedom, you need to pay triple. We will tell you about the pitfalls and problems that you have to overcome on the way from office plankton to "free man".

1. Social protection

Now you can rely only on yourself: you do not get health insurance, paid sick leave, paid leave, retirement savings and many other widespread benefits and benefits of employees of large firms. When you are young, you don't really think about it, but over time it becomes more and more important.

2. Freedom is only an appearance

Your expectations can be cunningly deceived. You get rid of the need to rush to work by a certain time, but at the same time you get irregular working hours. You think that you will never see your stupid boss again, and in return you get dozens of finicky clients who behave even worse. It is likely that soon your old office life will seem to you a bastion of calm and comfort.

3. Separating work from personal life

Now you will not be able to close the office door and completely forget about work until the next day. You will not turn off your phone and stop checking your mail, because you may receive an important order or a call from a client. Forget about your personal life, now you don't have it.

4. You work for everyone

If you worked in a large office, where one department does not know what the other is doing, and for any action you need to write a bunch of papers, then you can relax - now you will work one for all. If you have an online store, then at first you will have to work as a loader, a courier, and an order acceptance department, translators will have to look for customers themselves, and if you are a writer, you will have to learn how to sell your masterpieces.

5. Unknown

Yes, working for a firm, you feel like a cog in a big machine. But this "big car" has its own recognizable name, authority, the ability to throw competitors and resources into a ditch in order to survive difficult times. Starting to work for yourself, you will more than once come across the fact that “you are no one and there is no way to call you”, and it may take your whole life to build your own all-terrain vehicle.

6. Forget vacation

That guy in the first photo looks good, right? The only problem is that he does not rest, he works. Perhaps he solves an important problem and does not even notice the sun, water and sand around. Do you need a vacation like this?

7. Loneliness

In articles about office life, they like to recall the tyrants of bosses and dumb employees. But it happens, and quite often, in a completely different way: an excellent friendly team, a wise boss, parties, corporate events. Now you are working alone and there is no one to have a word with, so be prepared for bouts of loneliness.

8. Attitude of others

For many, many people, the word "freelancer" is consonant with the word "unemployed." All normal people get up in the morning and go to work, and you drink coffee and sit down at your computer. Here you can run into a misunderstanding of even those close to you, especially at first, until you prove the importance of your work with numbers on your account.

9. Instability

You don’t know when you’ll go on vacation (it depends on the clients), you cannot plan your day, as there is no strict schedule of working hours, your income increases and then dries up. You have lost control of your life. Are you sure this is freedom?