Idle Waters: Quaint Cottage Countryside Retreat
Why Solo Travel & Why Now? What Solo Trips Mean To *Us*
Unplugged Retreat: A ‘No Phones’ Countryside Break
New Home Tour
As I sat at my desk and watched the clock tick past 3pm, I remember thinking: “When I work for myself, I won’t bother stringing out these final two hours just for the sake of it. I’ll finish up and relax instead.” I was fresh out of university and working as a general marketing bod at a local firm, one peg in a small office of only three or four people. We all got on well and my boss was amazing, but as with any office job, there were days when the hours draaaagged on. Days when I sat down before 9am, and a lifetime passed before it was even time for the first round of hot drinks. Days when I woke up and thought ‘christ, I can’t be arsed today’, and then nominated myself for any odd jobs floating around the office ether just to pass the time (“Oh no, let ME take all 15 bags of recycling out to the bins. They’re quite heavy so I better make a few trips”).
This is normal office life. Some days you’re on top form, breezing through your 8 hours in a swirling sashay of well-articulated meeting pitches and inbox blitzes, and other days you’re the slug in the corner who didn’t even bother to properly brush their hair that morning (“just the ends will do today”). Some days you are motivated, and others you are not, but when it comes down to it, it doesn’t really matter. You’ve turned up for work, you’re sitting in your chair, and you’re going to get paid. Whether you’re making the most of your time or enjoying yourself is for the most part irrelevant; you’re there, you’re contributing, and you feel a sense of accomplishment for doing so.
So why is it so different when it comes to working from home?
I had such grand expectations of what self-employed life would be. I thought I’d be plunged into this ever-deepening well of freedom and happiness and motivation and what? it’s Friday 5pm? I’d barely even noticed because this barely feels like work lol!!! *butterflies ascend from my armpits and I arise from my desk a glossing glowing goddess with not one single pore and £50 notes where my very independent pubic hair used to be*
Except it’s not like that, obviously. Maybe for some people but not for me. I still get the Sunday dread. I still feel like the days are dragging. I still don’t always know what to write and I still feel like I’m running out of time and that this beautifully bodacious plan I constructed for myself is being frittered away by my indifference. I still feel tired. I still want time off. I still wonder if I’ve made the right choice when I’m sitting, alone, bored and disengaged in the dent of a Wednesday afternoon. The difference is that I now have no team members to distract me and a bundle of accumulated guilt and pressure for not appreciating ~ how lucky I am ~.
Hands up if you’re self-employed or work from home, and somebody has said this to you: “Oh, so you have the day off then?”. *insert upside down smiley here*. Nope, no day off, still working. Thanks though!
It’s this kind of comment which insidiously whips up a stigma in our own minds about the kind of work we do. It veers from the norm (although the norm is very much changing): you don’t have someone next to you checking that you’re working, you don’t have to be tied to your desk all day, you don’t have to wear a crisp shirt and polish your shoes and take a designated lunch hour. You do have more freedom, but I think it’s precisely this letting down of the traditional parameters of work that leads into the idea that it’s time off. It’s a happier, more relaxed environment, being at home, so since it’s supposedly not as stressful, it must be easier, right? It’s a treat. It’s a luxury. It’s not like proper work work.
When I asked on social which elements of working for yourself/working from home people most struggled with, the big G was a resounding unifier: guilt. Guilt for not working long enough. Guilt for working too long. Guilt for not working hard enough. Guilt for working too hard. Guilt for constantly comparing your work ethic. Guilt for not getting up early enough. Guilt for not finding it easier. Guilt for finding it easier. Guilt for not enjoying it. Guilt for enjoying it. Guilt for feeling guilty because you know you shouldn’t but you do anyway.
No matter which side of the pond and how full the motivation bar, it all comes back to our crooked incubation of guilt. We all end up feeling like we’re not doing it right, and that we must be missing a trick because surely this isn’t it. Surely there’s a top tip or trick that we can shotgun into our arsenal, ready to revive us when the Monday blues come creeping in. Surely we should be happier, or even be happy that we are happy?
Well, if there is a tip or trick, I haven’t found it. I’m coming to accept that I’m just not one of those people who is animated by their job. My career is a means to an end for me, but I can’t think of many things I’d give up my slow Sundays for, especially not work. I love being with Keiran. I love being with my family and friends. I love being alone and actually being alone, not alone but documenting my day via a myriad of social media channels. And one of the reasons that being my own boss was so appealing to me anyway was that I’d have more time for myself; I could achieve the amount of work in a shorter amount of time, and instead of forcing myself to sit at my desk just for the sake of sitting at my desk, I could go out and enjoy my life.
But the work guilt changes things. We get so used to this narrow understanding of what work is - white shirt, black trousers, 9-5 in an office with 30 mins to eat and browse Twitter on the bog - that any new version of work, however more healthy and beneficial they might be, feel like less.
They feel like unrealised versions of work, not real work. There are days when I really struggle and it gets to 5pm and I feel like I’ve achieved nothing, and I feel guilty that I’m not happier or more motivated. There are days when the hours pass by me in a blur, and I’m having bougie meetings in London and being introduced to amazing people and trying these fancy as fuck treatments or experiences, and I feel guilty that I’m enjoying myself too much. Either way - whether I’m run down and burned out or I’m elated and breezing through my tasks - I end up feeling guilty about it. Because this isn’t what I’ve learned. This isn’t what I’ve been brought up to see as a “real job”. If it's too easy then I'm making money doing nothing, and if it's too hard then I'm silly for forfeiting the structure and stability of a typical role (and side note: even though I’m more successful now than I ever was as a someone’s employee, I’m still asked ‘so what was your real job before you did this?’ THIS IS A REAL JOB, proven not least by the fact that it exists and I’m doing it).
As much as my job isn’t my identity, it still validates me. It’s still a big part of my life. And when I hear comments like “how do you even make money from that?”, “do you ever think you’ll get a normal job again?” and “so what do you do all day long?”, it infantilises me. It reverts me from 25 year old woman to 15 year old teenager, earning some extra cash on the side during the 6 weeks holidays. I feel like I have to prove that what I’m doing is legitimate, and usually - incorrectly - the only way to do so is by talking money. As if the monetary value is the only true authenticator that it’s a “good job”, rather than time, satisfaction, freedom, opportunity.
But it just comes back to this traditional framing of ‘work’, and what we understand to be the tiers of a good career. It’s a reshifting of the traditional boundaries; a reshaping to incorporate the surge in freelancing and solo business that Millenials seem to warrant disdain for regularly (because there’s nothing worse than a group of young people on laptops in a coffee shop, is there?). We’re a product of our environment and the guilt that accompanies our working situation is a result of that, but in order to feel more satisfied and fulfilled by the freedom that we actively seek, we need to first accept that our work is no less legitimate because it veers from the conventional. And actually, what we’re doing now is shaping the new conventional. This flexibility and advance towards a healthier, happier work/life balance is ushering in a new career mentality, and we should be proud of that, not guilty.
And at the end of the day, whether we’re working from home, working from Starbucks, working from the office or working from site, we all just want to have a beer and relax when it hits 5pm anyway. So let's do that.
Cheers, big ears.
{P.S. If you're thinking 'wtf, I asked this woman a question and instead she's just indulged her inner monologue for 10 minutes', worry not: the actual self-employment/working from home Q&A is coming, but I couldn't resist a little think piece first.}