Still Can’t Quit
I quit the agency thinking I’d figured out the secret. Write from anywhere, set your own hours, no boss. I was making money writing about celebrity bodies, fucking models in bathroom stalls, traveling on someone else’s dime. I thought I’d beaten the system.
For a few years it actually worked. The articles came easily, readers came back, money came in. I’d be in Tokyo or LA with a drink in my hand while my friends back home sat in gray offices watching themselves disappear. I felt like I’d escaped something real.
Then the tax office sent a bill demanding advance payments for the whole year ahead. Nobody mentioned that in the free entrepreneurship course I mostly slept through. It hit hard and never stopped. The insurance company did the same thing—one good year and they bumped me into the highest tier, classifying me with Michael Schumacher and supermodels. I was officially rich, which meant I was eating instant soup.
For eight years I kept it running. Eight articles a day, paid collaborations, press trips around the world. It was exhausting but it felt like living. My friends had normal jobs and I had this. I felt smarter than them, freer. I actually believed I’d figured something out that they were too scared to try.
Then I realized I’d written myself dry. The angles stopped surprising me. The music went hollow. The depression didn’t come with a reason—it just moved in. I kept working, kept writing, but something inside had switched off.
By then YouTube had happened, Instagram had happened. Everyone wanted the same thing now: momentum and eyeballs and attention. We weren’t the loudest voice anymore. We tried being louder, then the opposite, then gave up trying to be anything other than what we’d always been. It didn’t matter. The readers moved on. The money got strange.
But you can’t quit. Not after ten years. You can’t explain yourself to an employer or start at the bottom of someone else’s ladder. So you keep going, keep trying to make it work, watching the equation get worse every year.
The freedom turns into a trap without you noticing. Your friends stop asking you out because you’re broke and exhausted. The person you might have loved got tired of waiting while you worked at 2 AM on problems that wouldn’t fix. Now it’s just you and the panic, the beer, the weight from not caring what you eat anymore. When people give you advice, you know some of it’s right but you hate them for saying it because you’re too deep in.
Lying awake at night—which happens a lot—you wonder if this is freedom or just a prison you built yourself. At least people with jobs can quit and walk away. I burned that bridge ten years ago and there’s nobody to blame but me. My friends are getting promoted, taking vacations, building lives that don’t circle around whether the money shows up next month. They have benefits. They have peace.
What gets me is I did find something real in all of this. There’s an autonomy, a refusal to participate in the standard arrangement, you don’t get anywhere else. But it requires things—money, relationships, your health—and once you’re in, you can’t leave. I’d still refuse to go back to corporate, but I’m not sure anymore if that’s conviction or just what you tell yourself when you’ve already made a choice you can’t take back.