Why Going Freelance Multiplies the Masters You Serve

Introduction: No Boss, and More People to Mind

On the morning after leaving the company, most people feel the same thing. No more hurrying to the station at a fixed hour. No waiting for anyone’s instructions, no permission needed to finish for the day. The hours of the day are entirely within my own discretion. Yet a few months later, that same person is rising earlier and working later than they did as an employee. The word “weekend” has quietly dropped out of the week. There is not one boss anywhere, and yet the number of people to mind keeps going up.

The pros and cons of freelancing are already well documented. What this article takes up sits one step earlier. When you feel that going independent multiplied your masters rather than reducing them, is that a shortfall in your preparation — or a structure that stays untouched however you change your employment status?

Here is the conclusion first. What happened at independence was not release from subordination. It was the dispersal of subordination. One source of dependence split into several; the single fact that your living comes from other people’s demands has not shifted in the slightest.

Leave One Master and the Hidden Masters Step Forward

As an employee you faced, in essence, one counterpart: your immediate manager. Beyond that stood the organisation, and beyond that the customers — but between you and the outside world a wall called the company always stood. Concluding contracts, collecting payment, remitting tax: the company handled nearly all of it.

Independence is removing that wall. What you obtain when the wall goes is the freedom to connect directly with the outside world. But at the same moment, the countless counterparts that were hidden behind it stand in front of you, every last one of them. Customers, trading partners, payment cycles, tax filings — every relationship the company once stood between and processed turns, in exchange for independence, into a counterpart you face directly and alone. What you obtain by leaving one master is not a state without masters but the several masters who had been standing behind the one.

This is not a matter of getting used to it. Build your systems, reach the point of being able to choose whom you work with, and the structure itself — that there are several parties to answer — does not change. If anything, the more the work starts turning, the more parties there are to answer. More customers, and tracking payments gets intricate; more trades, and invoicing swells; more earnings, and the tax burden grows heavier. The better things go, the more masters you are answering, and the more deeply — that is the paradox sitting here.

This Is Not Busyness; It Is Structure

What must not be missed is that these “several masters” are not merely a problem of busyness. Busyness eases if you reduce how much you carry. What is happening here is not a problem of volume.

As an employee, you obtained your living from a relationship with one counterpart, the company. Once independent, you obtain your living from relationships with several. The number of parties you are subordinate to went from one to many. But the single fact that your living is obtained from a relationship with others has not changed. Only the number of counterparts did.

This is exactly why prescriptions aimed at the symptom — more skill, more systems, better scheduling — all miss. Every one of them is a prescription for being subordinate more skilfully, from inside dispersed subordination.

▸ Why the state of “too much to do” never ends after going independent is taken up in having too much to do is not a problem of scheduling.

Why Dispersal Is Mistaken for Release

Why is this dispersal mistaken for release? Because we experience freedom as release from one particular counterpart.

You got out of a confining organisation. That experience of “getting away from one counterpart” carries an unmistakable sensation of release. So on the strength of that sensation you conclude that you have become free. But freedom, properly, is not leaving one specific counterpart; it is taking distance from the structure of entrusting your living, whole, to other people’s demands. Leave one counterpart while entrusting yourself whole to several others, and subordination as a structure has not grown any lighter.

Weight that had gathered in one place scattered into several. The total load has not changed; only the number of places bearing it has gone up. This is the structure of the pain the independent person tastes.

Staying at a Company and Going Independent Are the Same Posture

Having read this far, some may conclude it is wiser not to go independent and to stay put. That is not this article’s conclusion.

Someone who reasons I cannot eat if I leave, so however unreasonable it gets I have no option but to stay in this organisation has entrusted their living, whole, to that one counterpart. And on going independent? You do get out of subordination to that one counterpart called the company — but waiting beyond it is subordination to several: customers, the market, the systems that broker the work, the tax authorities. Whether what you entrust is entrusted to one party or to several, the posture is the same in this respect: the root of your living rests on decisions made by the other side.

The very axis of “employee (unfree) or independent (free),” then, is nothing more than the boundary of a small plot drawn inside the same territory. The real question is not which way to cross that boundary, but whether there is a road out of the territory.

Conclusion: Swap the Question from Form to Ownership

That your masters did not diminish on going independent is not a shortfall in your preparation, nor a softness in your resolve. Independence was, from the outset, the dispersal of subordination rather than release from it — that structure itself was the cause.

Leaving the territory means taking back some part of the decisions that make your living work, from the other side to your own. What you produce, how it is priced, when and how much it brings in. Rather than entrusting these decisions whole to the market and to customers, holding some proportion of them in your own hands. Here that is called ownership.

The question is not “employed or independent?” but “do I own?” The whole picture is gathered in why starting a business does not free you from masters. From looking at the same fatigue not as a defect of your own but as a structure in which subordination dispersed, the exit begins to come into view.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Marx, K. Das Kapital, Band I (1867) Verlag von Otto Meissner
• Coase, R. H. “The Nature of the Firm” Economica, 4(16) (1937)
• Standing, G. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) Bloomsbury Academic