Freelancing, social media and the tyranny of better horizons

Denzel Washington’s best line in American Gangster, ‘The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room,’ told as a warning to his ostentatiously dressed cousin, has always stuck with me.

For an introvert or anxious type, it’s an idea with an easy buy-in. Not reserved, but powerfully contemplative are we chosen few, the veritable people-watchers of the world. Loud is weak, tantamount to exposure and vulnerability, while taciturnity, reservation and corner-of-the-room seclusion is the stuff of giants.

But it doesn’t really work that way.

I thought it did. I mistook the noise of social media for a ravenous tornado which, if paid heed, would cut a tumultuous path through my sanctuary. I mean, I still don’t want to go near it – but I at least want to know why, and understand the role it continues to play in our lives.

Like many that occupy the fringes of the digital web – the forum lurkers and comment section voyeurs – I’m familiar with the recesses and cubby holes of social media. I write copy for a living, but there’s always that veil. I’m at the edge with a spyglass, surveying the landscape as its bearded with new topography and trends, living in a tent. 

I don’t hate these tools, but I don’t trust them as a way of life, either. I’m wary of distractions and dubious of a tool’s usefulness. We don’t need them as much as we think. We’ve living in a culture that values information, and lauds the tool that cultivates it. We get to thinking: what would we do without X? Email, news, Twitter, RSS. We scurry to alerts and notifications with an addict’s eagerness and tell ourselves the information is useful and pertinent, but we’re craving each time: being needed, wanted or having our attention bartered for.

But they're convenient 

Few conveniences are unconditionally so; for every tool, there’s distraction and noise. And as anybody that values focus will know, a single offbeat note can break a day’s rhythm. To preserve focus, we must build a dam around our thoughts (to learn about the power of uninterrupted focus, check out Cal Newport’s Deep Work).

This is the paradox of the freelancer lifestyle, particularly for those working in the high exposure industries. A marketer that bemoans social media and content delivery tools may seem at odds, but an objective awareness of a tool’s value is part of knowing how to use it effectively – to be the user and not the used.

My point is: we must work, we must be and we must be happy – and for many, they feel paradoxical. By be, I mean being whole and present, content within each moment and not harangued by the past or future. But that’s not easy when you’re in a grey-lit office and it’s still not easy when you’re working from a Thai beach. Temporarily it is. New surroundings are an injection of contentment, with a quick burn rate. It’s Instagram beauty, a more dangerous form of postcard beauty, through which we bask in another's admiration.

This is the millennial curse, but it’s not restricted to just one age group. We want to contribute and do something that matters, and our failure to do so is a self-generating source of angst and self-doubt.

I'd be happier in the sun

I’ve lived and freelanced in a few countries, but mostly Greece and Spain, so I've seen the shedding wallpaper behind these romanticisms – a lone freelancer ensconced in a garret window, with sun shadows sweeping the narrow streets below. But it’s an empty fiction. We perpetuate these fantasies that work is more fulfilling somewhere else – anywhere else – because we need to. It's instilled in us that to lose our destination is to lose our way. 

Work is easier with narrative – the idea that we're in the middle, and there's an end to reach. If you’re running or hiking, your focus and energy shifts when you see your destination, mirage or no. If the purpose of our lives is no more than to take the next step, and we’re not content with where we’re standing, then each step is instantly harder to take. Our brains are gits like that. 

This is the problem with happiness, too. Many of us, including myself, see it as a destination, an endpoint that contextualises our current state of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. That’s why the crystal beach is just a change in our desktop’s background – it’s ‘ah, cool, awesome’ then it’s ‘OK, back to work’. We don’t change just because our surroundings change; happiness doesn’t suddenly find us because we’re elsewhere. Yet many are willing to surrender to that idea – their dependence upon the narrative builds a resistance. It’s like I’m saying Santa isn’t real, and all the stories we tell ourselves are just that: stories. 

I see no end of advertisements of Internet businesses and bloggers advocating for an out-of-bounds life and selling you the chartered path to make it happen. They can work from a farm at the peak of a New Zealand mountain, so why can’t you? These aren’t deliberate deceits, but they’re pernicious fictions. By glossing over the reality of work, and the fact that it’s not fulfilling just because you’re elsewhere, these millennial cartographers are setting up an uncomfortable contrast with here and there. There is where the sun shines and the mundane activity is made effervescent by the setting. Here, however, in the West or whatever hotbed of capitalism we find ourselves, is a dank swamp of purposelessness and faltering direction, in which we’re digging for freedom through bedrock.

I want to write for freelancers and independent workers not operating from a coffee shop in Chang Mai. And even if you are, maybe you’re like me and you’ve hit the end of that rainbow and found yourself in the same country, figuratively speaking. You’ve discovered that the difference is puddle deep. Where you work will change little, only how you work.

I have so many conversations with people of every age that tell the same story: dissatisfaction. Ensnared by the millennial narrative of the intrepid worker, the interloping contractor or the industry-disrupting entrepreneur, their daily story becomes one of ‘am not’ and ‘do not have’. We want to be the ones the stories are about, the ones referenced in forums, namedropped at conferences or idolized in movies or books. We’re all our own protagonists, after all, and nobody willfully takes on an ancillary role.

So what can we do? 

It’s true in everything: if you can’t change the outside, change the inside. Dressing up your work in exotic trappings won’t make it any different. A rose by any other name, etc.

Anything that takes us away from our next step – be it a more satisfactory working environment or a more ‘purposeful’ life narrative – alters our thinking. It makes us fearful and anxious, gazing out over a canyon with little knowledge of how to traverse the gap, beset by innumerable what-ifs. Or for many, it leads to an early surrender – it means pitching at the foot of the climb and the lie to ourselves that we’re content with the view.

None should sell a destination other than where you are; destinations should be residually dreamt up from activity, and never purchased from another. The here and now is what matters – what needs to change is our perception of it, our thinking and how we engage with our work identities. They say you can have it all, but we only need enough. We need stories – right until they become intoxicating, until they substitute rather than supplement reality. Here is where creativity and innovation exists, not under distant sunsets and certainly not in low-value activities that provide shots of relief with long-term dependency.    

The step is the story, so it doesn’t matter if you get what you want in the end. We don’t need our stories to finalise in adaptation. We need them to be and have a next time, a sequence of mini-narratives that take us from our bedrooms to our jobs, and hopefully back again. 

So that’s why I’m sceptical – not of marketing, but of the effects of these tools on our mind-sets when unmitigated, of these Internet rabbit holes that lead us astray and beguile us with false realities.

I was wrong to mistake social media as something evil, but I’m right in recognising it as a destructive force when used unconsciously. It’s important for everyone – not just freelancers – to scratch away the gloss and dispense with self-curated fantasies, to see that there are no greater stories than your story. Your next step is everything. That’s what Denzel is telling me, I think: noise can echo emptiness, and we must sometimes filter it to pursue greater value. 

Fear and anxiety at work: is it a kind of dream?

My relationship with my rabbit – Rodger, who had a brother named Dodger – was never the same after Watership Down.

At the age of six, I was more accustomed to the playful, shallow dangers of Disney films and Pingu’s misadventures in watering holes. Never could I have anticipated this dystopian vision of rabbit society, with its crimson-eyed bunnies and tales of inexplicable loss, nor the feelings that would be stirred by the incongruously soft yet brutally melancholic soundtrack, Bright Eyes, and its Sunday-afternoon melody.   

For weeks after, my dreams turned to gnashing teeth, fluffy cadavers pancaked to tarmac and ruby eyes set in darkness. I discovered fear. And I didn’t know it back then, but I discovered the quavering shadow that falls in fear’s wake – anxiety.

How fear becomes anxiety  

If you didn’t have your childhood torn asunder by Watership Down, it’s likely fear was similarly discovered in film, TV or literature – like Stephen King’s It, which ruined clowns forever. 

When we’re young, our fears have a face, centred upon a particular symbol, thing or person, and anchored in experience or memory. But as we get older, fears grow more abstract, and the thing we’re afraid of is replaced by no-thing. This is the source of anxiety. We cannot run and we cannot stay, so we’re suspended in unease, a malaise tirelessly spun by shadows and unknowable futures. In other words, fear transitions from a foreground to a background process.

But I’m not afraid

If you’re thinking this has no bearing on me – that fear is the converse of bravery, and I am brave – then consider fear not just as a fight-or-flight response to an event, but the ebb of action into inaction. There are no wolves left; in all but death, we’re the predator.  

Fear is the chasm between two seemingly innocuous choices: the myriad of ‘what ifs’ and ‘shoulds’ superimposed onto our decisions, big and small. This is commonly known as decision paralysis. Any moment can be one of fear, and its solution lies beyond rationalisations of courage or coward, real or imaginary. If there’s anxiety, there’s fear. Anxiety is a sustained fight-or-flight response to innumerable stimuli, borne simultaneously from the past, present and future – though, for many, it’s anchored by a single experience. 

Aren’t we the lucky ones?

We’re no less entitled to our fears and anxieties than those living in war-torn countries. Few of us face physical threats. Our lives may be more materialistically comfortable, but our dangers and troubles are inverted: the storm has moved indoors, sealed within.  

We, the slovenly, comfortable office workers that risk only paper cuts and coffee-cup mishaps, are at a disadvantage. Our fear isn’t preceded by a howl, the maniacal laughter of a clown or the grated churning of a chainsaw; it’s sparked by invisible forces that exist on the periphery of form, in our minds, but which are no less real.

There are few who will not experience anxiety on a weekly, if not daily – if not hourly – basis. Perhaps it’s only in the morning, contained in momentary hesitations, or triggered by a deadline or a meeting, by criticism or by praise, or inexplicably, with no perceptible reason.

In each case, there’s nothing to run from. We’re compelled by our routines and the societal encouragement to ‘get on with it’, otherwise known as the stiff-upper-lip mentality. And this state – like clambering from phantasms in a sealed cage – locks us into cyclical patterns of anxiety.

I feel anxious at work

Many of us feel anxious at work. Work is a labyrinth of intangible dangers, nestled behind suits and smiles and fun-coloured furniture. There are few places stress is more acutely felt, largely due to the seminal role work plays in our lives. In our current exhibitionist society, in which we view ourselves not in isolation but across a collated spectrum of achievements and incomes, our career is how we determine our value.

We’re drip-fed self-worth by work, which, as with any dependency, means we fear to lose it. Work is what we are; the impetus of fear is self-preservation. The wolves are the believed outcomes of poor performance, miscommunications and, even, new opportunities. So ingrained are we in this work-life symbiosis that the loss of a job, income or reputation is tantamount to ill-health or severe loss. Consciously we may not recognise it, yet our subconscious and biological triggers are the same. We’re in peril, or believe ourselves to be, but cannot see the edge.

I also don’t like change

Yeah – I get that. Change, even positive change, is a leap into the unknown – a careen down a dim-lit esplanade, exposed and vulnerable. We cannot predict every variable, and so our initial instinct wavers and we default to inaction. We stay at jobs we do not enjoy and maintain relationships, work and otherwise, that do not help us. We’re sheltered by familiarity (yet this is seldom recognised, and usually reframed as an organic wish for comfort and stability).

There is no greater inhibitor of success than fear – which is ironic, as success-based obsession stirs fear. Success must be met with little resistance, unburdened by the lofty expectations of dramatised entrepreneurialism (fetishised by the millennial narrative). Fear is resistance – and anxiety is a state of resistance where each door, even those opened to us earnestly and with good intent, are dressed in danger signs and prophesies of untimely ends.  

The more we become our work identities, the more easily anxiety finds us. We become locked into a hamster-wheel pursuit, supposing the next pay rise or promotion will be our point of security and contentment. Rather than placating anxiety, success adds to it – that is, until the elastic band snaps and we realise that every time we reach a goal, the tree goes taller and sprouts new branches.

Anxiety is always concerned with tomorrow, but tomorrow never becomes today.

How to not feel anxious at work

Like many mental ensnares, anxiety's solution isn't simple. To think about thinking is thought, and to worry about worry creates worry. Simple doesn't mean easy, and that we should put on a front in public spaces – our identities formed of borrowed steel, grafted over our fears and insecurities like armour – is an absurd and toxic attitude perpetuated by those who are no less susceptible to anxiety, but fear its implication. It’s weakness to be afraid of weakness, and unnatural to be resistant to what is essentially human.

Humans have always feared: apprehension and anxiety are as natural to us as love. The only difference between then and now is our struggle to know what we’re afraid of or about, a paradoxical state in which the lack of physical threat has allowed the danger to seep into invisible spaces. We’ve not fighting for survival; we’re fighting for symbols and statuses, wealth, acclaim and envy, that are broadly outlined by Hollywood illustrations but their whereabouts unknown. That’s where we lose ourselves – in stories.     

Wrapped in fixations of what is not, we become more unsure, insecure and lost. It is natural to feel anxiety, but not perpetually so; every emotion requires a release valve, a way to finalise, be confronted and settle. As long as we’re suspended in fiction’s web, we will not be able to confront what is. Today has neither resistance nor pretensions. It is what it is, and hopes for nothing more than what is. Presence is the release.

The opening line of Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes asks: is it a kind of dream? When I consider my life with anxiety, it makes sense that this wistful, lugubrious melody chimed with me. Not just because I was afraid of murderous rabbits, twisted visions of my own beloved pet, but because it formed a prelude to something I’d felt awaken in my being, that as I grew older was more my shadow than my shadow and, as I grew wiser, saw etched into the eyes of others. It’s a mantra to the eerie dread of what is and what isn’t, the conflict between where we are today and where we could be tomorrow.  It’s a fog upon the horizon; a strange glow in the sky. Unease. Malaise. Disquiet. Everything other than today is a dream, veiled in impenetrable mists, as real (or not) as anything ever dreamt up and written into fiction.