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Side Hustling and the Freelance Revolution

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| by | On life |
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There’s something about long bus and train rides that facilitates the act of doing nothing. Maybe it’s the hypnotizing tumble of the train car, the homes and lives that we zoom past, or the transient nature of all journeys, but whenever I sink into that train or bus seat, no matter how comfortable (or not), I know that I’m about to have a long and honest conversation with myself.

And I’ve had a lot of time to think and converse these past few weekends as I traveled to and from my temporary staffing gig at the JFK International Airport’s Duty Free Americas store. I was the Remy Martin girl, and my job was to look pretty while offering free tastings of fine French cognac and promoting the exclusive limited edition Cannes Film Festival VSOP.

Ads in the airport make a big deal about the “35 minute only commute!” from JFK to Manhattan on the Long Island Railroad (LIRR), but let me tell you, the commute tends to run much longer.

And on one of those characteristically long rides home yesterday, I started thinking about what was next after this gig. Because let’s be honest, I have no idea when I’m going to make enough to live on through my start-up alone. Maybe I could find a waittress-ing or hostess-ing job? Maybe I could finally take some bartending classes and be a bartender? (That’s something I’ve wanted to do since postponing college for a year to stay in Spain.)

And then I had an alarming thought – is this why I quit my steady consulting job? The reason that I stopped working for retired generals and ex-Navy SEALs? The result of my ridiculously expensive and somewhat elite / elitist private university education?

The answer, when it came, was surprisingly obvious -

HELL. YES. 

And here’s why – I have full ownership over everything that I do. I’m not shuffling papers just to fill up 8-hour days or performing menial tasks to help someone else check off boxes on his or her agenda. If I make a mistake, I know that it was my mistake, and I’m more than happy to deal with the consequences. Even if I end up bar-tending for the next six months or a year, it’s another life experience and another step for me to reach my goals and live the life that I want. That makes it worth it.

And I know that I’m not alone in this shift of priorities.

At PDF12, Sara Horowitz of the Freelancers’ Union spoke of the “freelance revolution” as the biggest change in workplace organization since the Industrial Revolution. She argued that ore and more people would give up the stability of “traditional” 9 to 5s and join the ranks of freelance and contract workers. Meanwhile, Tim Kreider writes in his beautifully argued op-ed, The Busy Trap that Americans force ourselves to be busy to pretend to lead a purposeful life, and that perhaps instead of this model, every American should just get paid regardless of what he/she actually does – or pretends to do.

It’s a revolutionary thought – and exactly how I feel of late.

But until that day comes, viva la revolución… y el side hustle.

On Twitter and in Real-Life, #PDF12

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It’s a grey morning in Manhattan, and I’m sitting in my still half-empty apartment, trying to process the whirlwind of the last two days at the Personal Democracy Forum’s 2012 Conference, “The Internet’s New Political Power”.

I gained almost 100 followers in the course of the two days. About every twenty seconds, I would receive a new @ mention, RT, or follower alert. (This might not be a big deal for some, but it was unprecedented for me.) This was in line with the bigger picture – #pdf12 became a trending topic in NYC and, some say, nationwide. By the end of the conference, I was toggling constantly between following the #pdf12 Twitter stream, checking my new @eileenguo interactions, taking notes by hand, and, of course, listening to the speakers.

As an anthropologist at heart, I’m really interested in the layer below those numbers. What does all of this mean for human connection? For event planning? For our attention spans? For what we learn and take away?

These are topics that I’m eager to continue exploring.

But this time, at least, it means that I learned not only about internet privacy, security, and awesome new initiatives (such as this one by MTV), I also learned which quotes would garner the most retweets and which tweets would provoke the most discussion.

It means that I partook in an amazing global conversation about everything from Lady Gaga to the Dept of Homeland Security with conference participants in the room as well as livestream watchers in 51 (@mitgc_cm correct me if I’m wrong) different countries.

It means that though I walked into the conference thinking that I didn’t know anyone, I soon found out via my Twitter feed that this was not the case. I found and tweeted up with several members of the StartingBloc tribe and had online – and offline – conversations with some of my favorite bloggers.

PDF12 was truly participatory in that sense, and Twitter helped make it so. Conferences are no longer made up of speakers behind a podium pitching to a bored audience, but an engaged public (the internet public we spoke of) commenting, questioning, and (often successfully) demanding real-time responses.

And so I left the conference inspired and exhilarated and much wiser, for sure, but also wondering, was that it? And if so, what’s next?

The constant conversation on Twitter has all but stopped, and despite the Twitter dialogue, overall the event left me feeling a little alienated. During several sessions, I sat next to people who were clearly just as active as I was online, but had no interest in conversing – live, in person – after shutting their laptops at sessions’ end.

And I guess I can kind of empathize.

After all, what single, spoken conversation can possibly replace the hum of hundreds of simultaneous tweets from worlds away?