Can You Escape Freelance Brain?

When you don't have a job, your work never stops.

By Luke Winkie

I can usually get about 20 minutes into a TV series before my brain self-destructs. It’s less of a shock, more of a soggy, doomed regression to the mean. The fleeting joy of detachment is whisked away, the plans for the evening go awry, and instead, all I can feel is the foreboding, all-encompassing truth that every second I spend not working is a second I spend not making money.

No healthy person should annotate their time that way, but then again, freelancers, under the working conditions we generally deal with, are generally not healthy people. It’s the same apprehension that sets in when I’m sick, or planning a vacation, or staring down a slow week of pitches. How can I ever clock out, in a business where you’re always clocked in? Personally, I’ve always felt like leisures like Netflix binges or offline weekends were reserved for the salaried majority; people who know exactly how they’re going to make their money Monday through Friday. If you’re reading this, I have a feeling you can relate.

I’ve been freelancing for almost a decade now, and full-time since I graduated college in 2014. Over the course of those years, I’ve never approached  anything resembling a healthy work/life split, and the more conversations I’ve had with my peers in the industry, the more I’ve begun to understand that Perpetual Work — a subconscious inability to let go of our duties, even for a moment — colors a lot of our existences.

“I have to constantly think about pitching. It’s really hard to not approach every recreational experience I have like it’s not a career opportunity,” says Tasbeeh Herwees, a culture and music reporter in Los Angeles who has written for Pitchfork, Complex, and Buzzfeed. “It feels like work, even when it’s not. I went to a show the other day and ran into someone from a publication, and I hit her up afterwards. It felt so craven and gross. Like, ‘Oh we’re here at this show for fun, and then it ends up being a lot of work as well.'” (Everything is copy, as Nora Ephron said.)

We all have our own version of Tasbeeh’s struggle. I write a lot about the internet and internet culture; it means that every time I log on Twitter or YouTube, I’m keen to discover a new bit of virality to plunder. Surely, there is an profiteering undercurrent in every newsroom — reporters are paid to report — but I think it’s particularly egregious and degenerative for freelancers. We pitch to eat.

I was curious to talk to some of my fellow freelancers and learn more about the things they do to make sure they’re not thinking about work, when they’d prefer to be focusing on other things. How do they settle into a Netflix season without the spectre of a deadline, or a follow-up, or a floated check rudely interrupting them? There’s no right answer, but for Molly Fitzpatrick, a career freelancer for publications like Vulture, Splinter, and The Guardian, the remedy begins with physical space.

“I have banned myself from using my computer in bed. For me, that usually results in a kind of quasi-working, quasi-relaxing state that is actually neither enjoyable nor productive. It’s also not great for sleep hygiene,” she says. “My hope is that making a point of sitting up at my desk or kitchen table helps my brain better differentiate between work mode and not-work mode.”

I’ve been doing something similar lately. I put on shoes now, whenever I settle into the morning email barrage. It’s funny to think how the supposed number one perk of freelancing — the idea that you can technically make all your money wearing a bathrobe — can be mind-melting after too long.

I’ve found that I simply can’t conduct your interviews in the same aesthetic manner that you’re later hoping to be relaxing in. My psyche can’t take it. There has to be some place in my apartment that feels like an office. Otherwise, it tends to follow me everywhere.

Frequent Study Hall poster (and newsletter proprietor) Luke O’Neil echoes the same sentiment: “I definitely do not work in the bedroom, that is crazy to me. I work in my living room basically laying on the floor in front of my laptop. But I do get up and get dressed and even put shoes on. I do not dress particularly professionally or well or even very hygienically, but it feels like at least something.”

Still, O’Neil considers the idea of actually being able to isolate working-from-home and home itself to be a bit of a myth. Like Tasbeeh, everything in his media consumption is filtered through a career-minded lens. There’s only so much you can do when career hours aren’t consolidated into a specific schedule. It’s impossible to switch it off.

“I am almost never fully clocked out in the sense that even if I am not actively working I am watching the news or reading or looking at takes on Twitter, all of which are necessary components of what most of us do for work, but I am unclear if they actually count as work in the sense of what people with real jobs do,” he says. “So, I guess I almost never clock out except for in a few instances: Unless I’m on some sort of impending deadline, I stop working at night after a certain hour. Maybe like 5 or 6. I’ll go to the gym, and yes, I will read and watch news and think about stories while at the gym, but I pretty much know at that hour I’m not going to be doing any writing or pitching.”

The other, slightly darker solution? Drinking. “If I start drinking that’s pretty much game over for the day,” continues O’Neil. “For better or worse that particular life-hack brain-switch happens more often than it should.” (Not an applicable solution for everyone, needless to say.)

He’s being glib, but the honest truth is that many people I interviewed for this story said the same thing. One of the most effective ways for freelancers to leave work somewhere else is by forcing the issue with a gin and tonic. “It’s one of the few ways I can actually feel mentally checked out,” says one friend, who I’ll leave anonymous for privacy reasons. “Sometimes I almost feel like being hungover, or too sick to work, are the only ways I can truly feel off the clock.”

I guess I shouldn’t be shocked by how uniform that response was. It is a sign of a defective industry when its workers turn to substances to escape from the stresses that pile up everyday. But unfortunately, I also completely relate. I’d never say that I have a drinking problem, but there is something therapeutic and reassuring about knowing how I can distance myself from the grind at any given moment. Occasionally, it feels like the only time I can forgive myself for not working is after I’ve had a drink or two.

That should be the moral, here. As freelancers, we must find a way to be kinder to ourselves when the heart asks for leisure. A mountain of guilt and anxiety over the week’s deadlines and pitches only compounds itself over and over again. There’s no way that this cycle — the one we’re all caught in — is the answer. Media outlets have built an entire cottage industry on making us feel like we’re about to lose our minds, and I’m too tired to keep letting them win. We’re all doing enough, and we need to do a better job of believing it.

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