A quiet argument for the people getting fired this week.
I haven’t had a job in five years and I hope I’m never in the situation to need one again. Stepping out of the regular 9 to 5 workforce was one of the best things I did for my life, happiness, and mental well-being.
Especially now, when people are getting fired left and right.
Yet one more friend got laid off this past Friday — Carla. She found out on Slack. There was no meeting, no warning, no severance conversation with a real person — just a message from HR saying her role had been eliminated, effective immediately, and someone would be in touch about her laptop.
Her first thought was: ‘The laptop? The damn laptop, that’s what they care about?! It’s slower than waiting in line at Disneyland— I call it ‘the sloth’!’
She’d been there four years. She was good at her job, despite the sloth. She’d just finished a project her manager had called “phenomenal” in writing, three weeks earlier.
None of that mattered on Friday.
She called me crying, came over, and somewhere between the second and third glass of wine she said the thing everyone says: “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I need to find another job.”
And I said, gently, because she was already fragile: maybe you don’t.
The Job Is the Risky Option
It’s hard to see through all the gaslighting, but jobs are a trick they pulled on us. They convinced an entire generation that a job is the safe choice and everything else is a gamble.
It’s the other way around though, and these late-capitalism days show us just how unsafe jobs truly are.
A job means you have exactly one buyer for your time. One client, one source of income. That client can fire you on a Friday over Slack for reasons that have nothing to do with you — a bad quarter, a merger, a new VP who wants to bring in their own people, an AI tool that costs less than you do.
Your upside is capped at whatever number is on your offer letter. Your downside is zero income tomorrow.
If a freelancer told you they had one client and no backup, you’d tell them that’s insane. You’d tell them to diversify, fast, because they’re one bad email away from broke.
But when it’s called a job, it’s suddenly stability? Maybe it was at some point in history. But it’s definitely not stability now.
Who Benefits From You Believing This
Nobody who tells you to get a job is neutral about it.
- Your parents want you to have one because it makes them feel like they raised you right.
- Banks want you to have one because pay stubs are easier to underwrite than royalty statements.
- Governments want you to have one because withholding tax at the source is cheaper than chasing self-employed people around.
- HR wants you to have one because HR only exists if jobs do.
Nobody is telling you to get a job because they’ve run the numbers on your specific situation and concluded it’s the highest-earning, lowest-risk path for you personally.
They’re telling you because it’s the assumption they were handed, and passing it along is easier than examining it. Like most things in life that keep us trapped in situations that are bad for us.
But there are some people who do examine it and they’re usually the ones you follow on the internet wondering how they pulled it off.
The Four Ways Money Actually Arrives
Money comes from four places. Just four. Everyone I know who makes real money makes it from at least two of them.
Wages. You trade time for money at a fixed rate. Every hour you don’t work, you don’t earn. This is a job, this is freelance hourly, this is Uber. It’s the most common one and the most capped. There are only twenty-four hours in a day and you need to sleep some of them. Unfortunately.
Royalties. You make something once and get paid for it many times. Here are some examples:
- A software tool you built on a weekend that now charges $9 a month to two thousand people.
- A vending machine you stocked in January still taking quarters in July.
- An affiliate link in an old forum post that pays a commission every time someone clicks it three years later.
- A book someone still buys ten years after it came out.
- A song playing in a coffee shop right now, earning the writer a fraction of a cent.
- A photo licensed to a stock site that sells eighty times a year without you touching it.
- A licensing deal, a course, a template, a pattern, a font.
- Even a savings account, in a boring way — you did the work of earning the money once, and now it pays you interest while you sleep.
In my case, it’s Medium articles and YouTube videos. I make them once and they can keep earning years after I uploaded. A YouTube video that pays $40 in month one and $180 (or $1,800) in month eight because it finally found its audience.
The work happens once. The money keeps arriving.
Rent. You own a thing and charge people to use it. An apartment. A car on Turo. A parking spot. A domain name. Storage space in your garage. You did the work of acquiring the thing once, and now the thing works for you.
I rent my garage for storage and the space in front of it as a parking spot to a neighbor. I park in the street — there are always spots available, and there’s always shade from the massive trees in front of my building. I’ll never know why he’s not doing the same, but whatever. I’m curious, but I don’t ask — I’m sure he’s also wondering why I don’t park in my spot.
Arbitrage. You buy something at one price and sell it at a higher one. Vintage clothes on Vinted — my new favorite hobby that unexpectedly also makes money. A couch on Facebook Marketplace that you flip for triple. Stocks. Sneakers. A car you fix up. The work is in knowing what’s underpriced.
A job is one of these. One. And you were told it was your only option.
The One-Skill Pipeline
You don’t need to do all four. You need to pick one thing you’re better at than average and route it into one of the categories above.
You’re a decent writer? That’s royalties. Medium, Substack, ghostwriting a book for someone who has ideas but hates typing, or for CEOs who want their ideas translated to the public in less offensive terms than their mind produces.
You’re comfortable on camera? Royalties again. YouTube pays you for uploads you made two years ago.
In my experience, YouTube is the most difficult one, but hey, just because it’s my experience it doesn’t need to be yours. You might be naturally much better at it than I ever was. I’m not exactly made for the camera. I’m an awkward introvert who’s determined to succeed anyway, but if you’re an extrovert who loves the spotlight, you’re probably going to do so much better. Go for it.
You have good taste? Arbitrage. Thrift stores are full of things that cost eight dollars and sell for eighty to someone with worse taste and more money.
You own something? Rent it. Your second bedroom, your driveway, your camera gear on weekends, your apartment when you travel. I want to travel to Valencia this year and stay there for about 2 weeks, maybe a month.
I’m in some Valencian Facebook groups and plenty of people going on vacation rent their homes while they’re gone. Much better prices than an AirBnB and they’re selling like ice cream on a hot summer day.
You’re good with numbers, or dogs, or hair, or houses, or old cars, or dying houseplants? Someone will pay you for that, and once you find them, you’ll find more of them, and eventually you’re not looking for clients — they’re looking for you.
The pipeline is: one skill, one category, one first customer. Then repeat. That’s the whole thing. It’s not exactly sexy but it’s what actually works, and it’s what people who don’t have jobs are doing while people who do have jobs are watching them on YouTube during their lunch break.
A Real Caveat, Because I’m Not a Liar
Some people should absolutely have a job.
If you like structure, if you like coworkers, if you like knowing exactly what’s going to hit your account on the fifteenth and the thirtieth, if the idea of chasing invoices makes you want to lie down forever — a job is probably the right answer for you.
Some jobs are genuinely good. Some pay very well. Some come with benefits that would cost you a fortune to replicate on your own.
I’m not anti-job. I’m anti-panic.
The point isn’t that everyone should quit tomorrow. The point is that if the Friday-Slack-message ever happens to you, you shouldn’t feel like your life just ended.
You have four categories. You have skills. You have things you own, time you were going to spend cying on LinkedIn that you can now spend on something else instead.
The job was one option. It was never the only one. It was never even the best one for a lot of people who have one — they just haven’t done the math.
We’re not all meant for jobs, just like we’re not all meant for freelancing, or business, or piloting planes.
What we’re all made for is having money while also enjoying a good life. And we don’t need a job for that.
