Freedom Has an Invoice
While all the synchronized office workers suffer through their nine-to-five routines, waiting for retirement or an early death to put them out of their misery, you want to throw yourself into the infinite-seeming world of self-employment. A laptop, a phone, a favorite café—that’s all it takes. To which I can only say: don’t.
After three years at a Berlin web design agency, I launched this blog at the start of the decade and threw myself headlong into self-employment. The sun shone there. The music played. Real life ran at full volume. Work from anywhere, spend the early morning hours in the capital’s clubs, then settle into a café chair in the afternoon with the first coffee and a beer to smooth the edges and tap out a few hundred words. That was the actual meaning of life, as far as I could tell.
And for a while it ran beautifully. The articles poured out, readers showed up, advertising clients met us for brunch or lunch or, on one occasion, something I’ll describe only as an extremely productive working relationship. We ordered food delivery every day—sometimes twice—put away gin tonics at whatever demolition party happened to be in range, and fucked giggling aspiring models on dirty club bathroom floors while they tried not to sneeze the white powder across the stall. That could have continued indefinitely. It didn’t.
It started when the tax authority demanded a full year’s prepayment. In year two. Nobody had warned me about this, which was partly my own fault—I’d slept through roughly half of the free government entrepreneurship course I’d been offered. That blindside didn’t just crack the budget; it began a feedback loop that would quietly shape the next several years in ways I wasn’t yet equipped to understand.
Then came the recalibration phase: be careful, stop making stupid decisions, plan properly. That held for a few months, until my public health insurer looked at a stretch of genuinely good months and bumped me into the highest contribution tier—the bracket normally occupied by people like Michael Schumacher and Claudia Schiffer. The tax authority did exactly the same. Officially, I was now wealthy. In practice, I was eating instant noodles and toast and pretending it was a diet.
For a few years after that, this blog actually ran well. Eight posts a day, a handful of paid collaborations each week, occasional press trips to the other side of the world. It was exhausting and it was good. I felt not just like I could sustain this indefinitely—until some impatient bus ended my run—but like I’d cracked something fundamental about how life was supposed to be organized.
Because while everyone else trudged into their open-plan offices like zombies every morning, I was sitting with a cocktail on a rooftop in Los Angeles or Tokyo or Beijing, earning my living writing about Miley Cyrus’s tits. I was happy. And then the problems arrived.
The worst thing about depression is that it doesn’t announce itself with a cause. You dismiss it as a run of bad days. You confuse it with tiredness. And then somewhere in the middle of you not taking it seriously, it takes over your entire emotional range. After years of writing every single day, I ran dry. The news repeated itself. The music went flat. The drive seized. That was manageable at first, but it thickened over time into something gray and slow and uncreative—doubting yourself, doubting the whole project, beginning to suspect the world had moved on without asking your opinion.
It had, in a way. YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and Instagram personalities had arrived in force: a new generation who wanted success and got it, loudly and immediately. Suddenly this blog wasn’t the most outrageous or the most shameless voice in the room. Attention flows toward wherever there’s the most to see, and that was increasingly somewhere else.
Two options: go louder, brighter, harder—or do the exact opposite. I tried both, halfheartedly, and after enough failed experiments had to accept that I was what I was and couldn’t perform my way into being something different, no matter how much I wanted to. In a film this is the heartwarming moment of self-acceptance. In real life the tax authority doesn’t care about your authentic voice—the invoices kept arriving while the income slowed, and there was nothing to do but generate whatever I could to cover them.
What had felt like adventure at the beginning—the freedom, the self-determination, the sense of building something—became, after enough years, an act of maintenance. Keeping a structure upright that was threatening to collapse under its own weight. I started canceling on friends. Couldn’t make the vacation. No room for anything resembling a relationship because there was only one thing left to protect: this thing I’d spent a decade constructing.
The companions you end up with in that state are beer, cheeseburgers, and depressive thoughts that prefer to visit somewhere between midnight and four in the morning. Well-meaning advice you smile away at first—irrelevant, these people have no idea—but eventually you want to physically remove anyone who leans over to offer it, partly because they’re wrong and partly because they might be right and you already know it. You’re handling it. You have a plan.
Lying awake at 3 a.m., you wonder whether this is actually freedom or whether you’ve locked yourself into chains that a normal employee never has to wear. Your friends are at festivals and on three-week trips and at parties on a Tuesday, living their lives while also, incidentally, having a boss. You’re here. Alone with a spreadsheet and a deadline and an outstanding invoice from six weeks ago.
Self-employment is a kind of freedom you genuinely can’t get anywhere else. It’s also a trap built specifically for people like me—people who consider themselves too creative to deal with the earthly mechanics that come bundled with the independence. You probably have to be a little stupid, or at least more fearless than wise, to choose this life voluntarily. What I know for certain is that once you’re in, you stay in—because the one thing you cannot accept is becoming another synchronized office worker, suffering through their nine-to-five, waiting for retirement or an early death to set them free. Even if that life is, in all likelihood, the better one.