Almost every office job I’ve ever had has started with a fizz of excitement at learning new skills, working with interesting new people, and making progress in Climbing The Ladder. And almost without exception, I made it to a certain point before I realise the job wasn’t what I was expecting; like I felt catfished by these big corporations.
While my reasons for leaving each job was different, the constellation of emotions that preceded me giving in my notice was often similar: a sense of futility that sitting in an endless row of meetings rarely constituted productive work; frustration that the people leading projects often had zero managerial nous; and exhaustion from being expected to give it “110%”, while receiving very little care from the organisation in return.
For years, I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t just grin and bear it when asked to give up weekends to do work that ended up being unnecessary or irrelevant, dial into zoom calls on holiday with my family, or commute several hours a day. Then there was the workplace bullying, corruption, sexism and nepotism that I didn’t feel I could ignore and yet… everyone else seemed to be, so what was my problem?
It's only after a few years of being freelance again, when I can look back more objectively that I realise there’s actually nothing wrong the inability to withstand being staff within organisations that are not built to support the people who work in them. Instead, it’s the world of work that is more broken than ever.
Toxic workplaces
Let’s face it, commuting has never been anyone’s dream – who wants to smell something noxious and wonder whether the person next to you farted or just took their socks off? (both of which happened next to me on the London underground). But now that house prices in many cities around the world are soaring while salaries have stayed static or fallen, people are commuting longer distances than ever.
Then there is the toxicity of workplace culture. There have been so many reports on how to mitigate bullying and discrimination in offices, but as these policies are rarely ever implemented in a meaningful way, I can’t see how they are anything but a box-ticking exercise.
A few years ago, I worked in an organisation where I was the head writer on a technical scientific report. The project lead had zero scientific training and was unable to grasp the complexity of the science. As a result, he marched about in peak tall white man fashion, and rather than send edits via email to documents I had written, his preferred method was to summon me to his office, pace the room and dictate his changes, as if we were in a science version of Mad Men.
As a longtime journalist, this was a bizarre and inefficient way of working, and I told him so. This pissed him off so greatly that he then began to try and undermine me at every opportunity. Often, he would use our height difference (he was 6ft 5in to my much shorter 5ft 4in) to physicallty loom over me and try to intimidate me; other times, he would scream at me in big meeting rooms with several other colleagues, all of whom looked uncomfortable at his behaviour, but kept silent. He would even expect me to ignore guidance from other scientists in the organisation as it didn’t fit with his thinking. I filed a formal complaint, and he was eventually moved to another department – a win that surprised me – but during that year, I remember running to the bathroom at least once a week to sob in frustration.
That same year, I had a colleague who would push her hands up the side of her eyes in an impression of Chinese people, and when I looked horrified, she said “oh for god’s sake, can’t we make jokes anymore”. I witnessed at least three incredibly incompetent women be promoted to jobs with six figure salaries because of the men they were having affairs with.
Over my time in office jobs, I’ve seen first-hand how organisations charged with producing the best science and health information compromise the advice they give the world, because they weren’t rigorous in their process or hired managers who were incompetent. I’ve seen some of the best science publications skew what they published in order to hit digital targets of clicks and likes. I saw good science be buried, and bad science turned into headlines. I’ve seen politics utterly corrupt scientific information to serve political goals.
Perhaps the realisation that made me saddest was seeing how organisations that save lives can be just as toxic as ones whose mission is to make as much money as possible. The very nature of how organisations operate is that it doesn’t matter how many human beings get chewed up and spat out, as long as the mission of the organisation is intact.
All of this meant that no matter what the role, or how great my colleagues, my sense of purpose would evaporate eventually and I would dissolve with disillusionment. What was I doing this for? Who was it serving?
Making work life easier
If any of this is familiar to you, and you’re wondering how long you can stay in the organisation you’re in now, welcome to the club - a club that’s made up of all of us who’ve probably got workplace PTSD rather than a fun one where they play tacky music and tequila shots are half price.
The solution may not be to go freelance. Some professions are more suited to being freelance than others, for one thing. But also, while there’s so much about freelance life I love, to make a success of it you need to realise you’re starting a small business -one in which you will have to be tough about negotiating money, bold at pitching for work, fearless at chasing invoices. You’ll also need a strong enough stomach to weather financial recessions.
However, there are ways to recalibrate how you feel even when you stay in the same job. Setting clear boundaries is a major way to enact a shift.
A year or so before I left one of my office roles, when I knew I would be leaving, I had to come up with a way to cope. I wrote out on a piece of paper what would make me instantly happier. For me, it was uninterrupted time with my family once out of the office, which meant not looking at or answering emails after work or at weekends, and for the most part, setting those boundaries worked. Few things are ever the emergencies that middle managers can make you feel like they are. I immediately felt like I had more to give to my work on a Monday morning.
Another thing I did was to keep my mouth shut if I saw a project being run in a way that was clearly nuts or I knew people were doing less than rigorous work. This might sound like I was a real busybody, but it came from the intense scientific training I had during my undergraduate and masters degrees and from working on scientific journals. In science, the rigour you bring to your work is everything. And as a result, I would offer to help on other projects because I knew I could make them better. But what I was doing was doubling or tripling my workload, all without recognition from any higher ups. So I just stopped, and stayed in my lane. And that helped enormously too.
It made me realise that you can escape how bad you feel in a job without actually leaving the role at all.
Living la vida freelance
Now for me, the answer was going freelance, because I wanted to live in Barcelona and to be able to do a variety of work. Now, my week is a mixed bag of science writing, speechwriting, one to one coaching, strategizing and planning, consulting for media agencies, and launching a course next year on how to thrive as a freelancer.
My sense of purpose is sky-high because I only take on work I love, and work with clients I love. I know this might seem like too much of a dream, especially if you’re starting out as a freelancer, but it is possible to achieve. The key is having an unshakeable belief in your skills and deciding not just what you’re good at, but what you want to do.
It’s possible you are reading this and thinking “well that’s all very well for you” but freelance wouldn’t work for me/I need to earn as much as possible to buy a house or have a baby/I’m lucky to have a job in this economy. I hear you.
But remember that the world of work tries to grind down all individuality and creativity in service of the great god of capitalism. It can convince us that without giant corporations, we would have no life or way of earning a living.
And no matter how important you feel your job is, it isn’t normal to be crying on the way to work (or in the bathrooms, if you were like me), or to spend your weekends doing nonsense work for nonsense managers, or to have noxious colleagues that you wouldn’t want to save if they were on fire. None of that is normal.
Surely we want, we need, we deserve more from our working lives than that?
(ps: want to go freelance and not sure how? Let me know in the comments)