Why We All Become Freelancers

I was talking with my female friends the other day when we realized none of us is doing an office job anymore. At some point, we had given up on regular salaries and sustainable benefits to start our own companies, write books, go on retreat or bartend at a bar. We are in our late twenties, and everything that seemed to be a success five years ago, is now rather perceived as a new form of captivity.

Back in my childhood, it all started differently. My mother was dreaming of me working for an established company — Citibank, Louis Vuitton, or at least any Russian oil and gas company. Google and Facebook didn’t exist yet.

Same with my friends. We were born in Russian middle class families in the 80s and 90s — right after Soviet Union collapsed and the idea of the new capitalist future was on the rise. We were fans of Coke and Mars candy bars, started wearing jeans and sneakers, and we were keen on American culture.

The typical path of a middle-class Moscow family looks like this: you go to the university as your parents want you to. There’s free education in Russia so if you are not able to enroll into any program you are regarded as a dumbass. While studying, if you are smart enough, respectable companies start hunting you. It’s easy to start working for the first tier media in Russia when you are a freshman at a good university, and soon you already start writing for “Vedomosti” or “Secret of the Firm” — the best Russian publications on business.

So when you reach 27, you may already have over five years of experience working for top media outlets. Same with corporations. You get hired from the university, first for an internship, then for a full-time job, and by the time you are 27, you feel bored and exhausted. By the next stage, you are either inspired by the news about successful entrepreneurs and dream about fancy coworking spaces//your own unicorn (i.e. a company valued over $1 billion), or you don’t want to join that tech-savvy-fete. If the former, you know where it goes. If the latter, you would consider writing a book, shooting a movie, while earning some bucks as a carpenter, freelance journalist, bartender, or cook on the side.

Big companies, tech and non-tech, are giving away myriad of perks (a superb launch at the office, great health insurance, new iPhones and whatever) but nevertheless my friends are up to putting themselves into total obscurity. Sometimes they move out of Russia without any cash, and start a new life from scratch. Why? I think these points are essential:

— We are risky and that drives us forward. It’s easy to keep your place or position in a company for over five years. When you are closer to your 30s, you feel you should try more things.

— We are not afraid of taking risks. We got tempered with stories from grannies who had survived Stalin’s regime, WWII, the ‘90s recession.

— We think a career is overrated. You start it mostly because you feel you have to. But where will it lead you then? You could spend ten years on getting on a c-level position, or buy thirty bitcoins on time instead, sell them in five years, and earn a fortune.

— There are too many things undiscovered, so you can’t be obliged by strict commitments.

— Travelling is important for our generation. Millennials don’t want to stay at the office in one place, at least for long. Even though there are still visas for most countries for Russians, there are no borders in our heads any longer.

I live in New York, my best friends live in Moscow, Berlin, Prague and Amsterdam. Each of them speaks a few languages, they have master’s degrees, write books, work as bartenders or build their companies. We are all nearly 30s. And at this time we don’t want to belong to corporations.