A while back, I scribbled some of my thoughts opined on how knowledge economy/white collar jobs can be harder on people than physical labor/blue collar jobs. And thus, how FIRE might be a goal even more appealing for people in the former group than in the latter.
Today, I’mma scribble some more thoughts about opine more on this. My impetus was the following passage in a recent blog post by Millennial Revolution titled “Are Millennials the New Boomers?”
“Before I quit my last job, I remember working for another company that lost 90% of the employees they hired from my university after only a year because they were making them work from 8-9pm most days, while being on call for tech issues at night. Many of my fellow alumni described the experience as “being under house arrest” because they never had a life outside of work. After the mass exodus, the company decided to fix the problem, not by providing a better work environment, but by blacklisting students from my university because they’re ‘not loyal’.”
The hours
Now, I never had a job that required me to work 13 hours a day. Nor was I otherwise forced to work that many hours a day regularly. But I did have a few jobs where working at least 10 hours/day in the office was, shall we say, implicitly encouraged. Not 13 hours, I grant you. But still a lot.
And for many years during my full-time-job career I basically was expected to be on call to respond to requests when I was out of the office. Thankfully, those requests were pretty rare. But they occasionally happened. In any event, the ever-present knowledge of such a possibility hung like a shroud over my ability to fully mentally disengage from work. The fact that I’d often work after hours or on weekends to catch up or get ahead on projects did me no favors in this regard either.
Sure, my situation wasn’t remotely as bad as that detailed in the Millennial Revolution post. But for a Type A personality like myself, it still exacted a mental and physiological toll.
Add in my scarcity mindset and prior financial trauma, which I detailed in my Money, Man! series of posts, and you might understand why, when I discovered FIRE, I glommed onto it like brown white on rice. Its allure was electric. As I’ve written, it’s one reason why I’m not reflexively opposed to an only slightly less than death marchy race to FIRE rather than instinctively in favor of a more reasonable pace.
I attribute all this to having felt as if I’d lost my sense of a loss of control of my life, both day-to-day and longer term. This sense would have been far more powerful had I been made (explicitly or implicitly) to work a 13-hour or longer work day and to otherwise be on call all the time, too. Put another way, it’d have been impossibly easy to have felt like I was my employer’s whipping mule captive. That I didn’t control my day and life. Rather, that my employer did. My sense is that many others feel as I did.
The self-employed are not exempt from this. I should know. Being dependent upon my clients for my income, I felt an ever-present need to satisfy them. Other self-employed people who share my work ethic might also have to work even harder than I did in that unlike me they may have to grow their customer/client base. The feeling for me amounted to the same as when I was employed: I don’t control my time.
To be sure, switching employers or work situations usually is a possible out. But it’s easy to feel, like I did, that that’s not ideal.
Why? Well, for one thing, for people like me, it’s seemed like—at least pre-pandemic—more and more white-collar employers became like the one detailed in the Millennial Revolution post. Employers gained more and more power over their employees over the years. Or at least that’s how it seemed to many employees, including me.
I recognized that employers’/clients’ mission is to get the most out of their employees/vendors and found that employers largely have thought that the terms of employment have been theirs to dictate, and employees largely that they have to submissively accept those terms, no matter what they are. One job/client might be slightly more or less onerous than the last. But just in degrees. Worse, you might leave a position in which you sorta kinda feel like control over your life is tenuous, to one where you feel a total and oppressive loss of control. I should know. One move I made resulted in just that.
Sure, some employers might reasonably conclude that having happy employees and vendors not only is good for the employer’s financial interests. But in my experience, that’s rare.
No, far more common I’ve found are employers like the one profiled in the Millennial Revolution post. Or, at least, further down the end of the spectrum of that type of employer than down the other end, where the most enlightened employers are situated.
FI = FU
These employers punch their employees/vendors in the mouth. Hard. The solution is to hit back. Hard.
FI—even the mere pursuit of it—is the fist with which do just that.
Knowing that you can walk away from an employer/client, or threaten to do so if work accommodations to your liking aren’t made, is of a value that cannot be underestimated.
As I noted, before I FIREd, I very rarely felt like I had full (or even majority) control of my time, during “work hours” or outside of them. At the same time, I also felt financially tied to my employer or clients. If I’m being honest, maybe even obligated to them.
Having now FIREd, a 180-degree change has happened. My default mindset now is almost always that I control my time. And while I’m highly annoyed by what’s been going on with our investments over the last 20 months, I feel financially beholden to no employer or client.
The employer highlighted in the Millennial Revolution post is probably an outlier on the jerk side of the good–bad employer spectrum. I’ll grant that. But it pains me that they even exist.
What they need is a come-uppance in the form of employees and vendors calling them on their garbage. By flexing their mighty FI muscles.
And in the end . . .
I’d have figured that at some point, employer demands on employees would reach a point at which employers would face a major backlash. Alas, that hasn’t happened. Admittedly, employer–employee relationship dynamics changes that have occurred during and after the pandemic have warmed my heart. But, I fear, the pendulum will swing back in due time. Hopefully not too far back tho.
