CHAPTER 7

The Headlines—Survivalnomics

Okay, you’re all charged up and ready to make your dreams come true. Great! But first, a dose of harsh reality: The headlines will tell you that a thriving lifestyle is impossible. The media want you to believe that your only option is to survive—and lucky if you can, at that! Welcome to the Age of Survivalnomics, where all of those dog-eat-dog adages are ever present and you get a regular dose of doom each time you turn on the television, read the newspaper, or scroll through the feed on Twitter or Facebook.

The Age of Survivalnomics

Survival has been part of the human experience since prehistoric times. Surviving is a primitive, inborn desire to carry on, and modern man is hardwired to survive after eons of genetic code have favored the perpetuation of humans with this important trait. The adrenaline and cortisol our bodies release in preparation for a “fight or flight” experience serve us well if we, for example, find ourselves in a dangerous situation. But what if I told you that many people spend their work lives in “survival mode”? Would that surprise you? Sadly, I have a feeling it may not.

Surviving is a word commonly paired with work in modern-day conversation. Examples might include, “If I can only survive this work day,” or “If I can only survive at this job long enough to see retirement.” On a daily basis people work at jobs they do not enjoy for less pay than they are worth and with concerns about being fired, laid off, or downsized. They work for bosses who are unpleasant, ineffective, or even abusive in some cases, and yet they persist. Why do they choose to continue on this path? They do so because they must, or so they believe.

Survivalnomics is a term you may be unfamiliar with, but it’s a concept that you know all too well. It is a desperate economic reality that we all readily accept as the norm, whereby both employers and employees struggle to survive in a seemingly zero sum game of business. Both parties are in a perpetual state of fight or flight where both the boss and the employees struggle to survive in the business world. They believe they must fight, attack, and constantly prove themselves in the workplace if they are to survive.

This belief triggers an automatic response that causes our hardwired selves to leave rational thinking behind. We numb ourselves in preparation for the next attack and the possible pain associated with it. We work in survival mode on some level, whether we are keenly aware of it in our conscious mind or not. The experience is hard on our body, mind, and spirit, demonstrated by ailments such as high blood pressure, depression, and heart attacks—and yet we persist.

We persist in the workplace for thirty or more years because we believe we must. After all, we all have to “earn a living” in order to survive. Or do we? We earn at the expense of living. We survive the experience, or we try to. However, now more than ever before, the concept of “work” is changing. We are dissecting it, and so are employers; there are serious consequences that are only beginning to show themselves. The implications for the future of work are dire if you ask the average 9-to-5er. However, I believe it is actually a new opportunity to work on your own terms and reinvent your life. But before we get too far, let’s take a look at the changing face of work.

Taking Inventory of Our Work

As traditional thirty-year career positions are going the way of the dinosaur, the concept of career is rapidly transforming. Society is beginning to unpack the contents of traditional jobs and take a brutally honest look at them. What is a job, exactly? Is it a set of responsibilities we perform in a six-by-six-foot cubicle? Is it any set of tasks that provides us with health insurance and some paid time off? Do we need to reside stateside, or can we be location independent, commuting from a beach in Thailand this year and a mountainside in Switzerland the next? Which factors are the most meaningful to us? Which elements are the most important to employers?

We as a society are just beginning to dissect our jobs and take inventory of what those valuable pieces of the thirty-year career are to which we swear our loyalty to a company (or several) and surrender the best years of our lives. Employers are doing the same thing in many ways; company leaders are taking a look at our jobs and determining which responsibilities are the most valuable and relevant to the company’s bottom line. This evaluation and other factors have led to a spike in outsourcing (American companies farming work out to third parties such as contract workers in the United States or overseas), reverse outsourcing (companies overseas hiring Americans as contract workers), and other configurations that allow companies to pay only for what they use and move on. As a result, our modern-day economy is “characterized by...declining employee benefits and job insecurity for all categories of wage earners...”¹

As a result, this new trend has given rise to a growing workforce referred to by many different terms including contingent workers, giggers, temps, consultants, independent contractors, and freelancers. Whatever the label, these workers currently account for nearly one-third of the U.S. workforce, and that number is predicted to rise, due in part to the combination of a slow economic recovery and technological advances that make data sharing seamless and readily available to the masses.²

Crowdsourcing

Take for example the concept of crowdsourcing, which can be defined as “the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call [to work].”³ In simple terms it is an arrangement whereby employers assign even the smallest tasks to a large number of individuals who have absolutely no knowledge of the larger project. Workers work when and if they choose, doing narrowly defined tasks in exchange for per-piece payment.

One example is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or MTurk (http://aws.amazon.com/mturk), which pays workers (known as turkers) pennies for tagging photos, transcribing data, or doing simple research.⁴ Another example of crowdsourcing is Txteagle (www.txtagle.com), which is on track to become one of the largest employers in Africa.⁵ Txteagle utilizes the crowdsourced manpower of Africa. African companies utilize Txteagle workers to complete what are called micro tasks, such as image sorting and tagging via cell phone (referred to as mobile crowdsourcing) for large corporate clients. Workers receive compensation either in airtime known as mobile money or, in select countries, in credits that, once accumulated, are paid out in local currency by cell phone kiosks. Txteagle workers and those who work for other companies like Txteagle amount to electronic day laborers, where unskilled workers complete mundane tasks in exchange for extremely low wages.

Perhaps it is a new version of the assembly line in which each person contributes to the development of a larger product, only in this case the product may be unknown to the workers. Crowdsourcing turns each worker into a human cog. It’s not empowering or emotionally rewarding, but it pays the bills. Well, actually it likely doesn’t even do that unless you live in, say, Kenya where the Txteagle home page states that the average person survives on less than $5 per day.⁷

But what does any of this have to do with you and your career? Well, crowdsourcing is a form of employment just like any other mentioned under the guise of Survivalnomics. Crowdsourcing certainly is at one extreme of the freelancing spectrum, with the opposite end being one that presumably pays high wages for skilled labor—and I’m guessing that’s the end of the spectrum you are interested in. After all, you are looking for a reasonable amount of income and to apply skills that possibly took years of on-the-job training to acquire, not to mention the education you accumulated along the way. This brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum: gigging.

Gigonomics

Although the idea of freelancing is not a new concept to musicians, artists, journalists, and others across a wide array of occupations, what is new is that formerly well-positioned white-collar workers with impressive levels of education are entering the freelance world in droves. This increase caught the attention of the media in recent years and entered mainstream consciousness in early 2010 when a series of articles and television stories about the phenomenon hit the Internet and the airwaves.

This group of promising new upstarts who were in dire straits due to massive layoffs nationwide and stagnating unemployment defined a new economic movement referred to as Gigonomics, which is working an ongoing series of gigs defined as “a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces” that giggers “stitch together” in order to make ends meet.⁸ It’s the penny-ante slog of working three times as hard for the same amount of money (if you’re lucky) or a lot less (if you’re not). Gigging is a seemingly bleak portrait of what was once the upwardly mobile workforce that is now clawing at projects in order to survive. Can you see the parallels in the depiction of gigging in comparison to crowdsourcing?

So just how many of these giggers really exist? ABC News answered the question with a televised report by Diane Sawyer titled “Making Ends Meet.” This report estimated that 21 million Americans “cobble together an income from a number of employers.” In that same report, Betsy Stark said that instead of working one job, giggers work “one job after another.” The report drew a dreary picture of the new norm and interviewed seemingly poised, well-spoken professionals who attested to the challenges associated with gigging, including “not much security” or how they must “juggle seven or eight jobs a day.” Soon after the ABC News report aired, Newsweek joined the conversation citing reasons for the new Gig Economy. These reasons included the continued rise in unemployment numbers across all fifty states, lack of corporate loyalty from employees, and a willingness by corporate managers to outsource in order to “only pay for what they can use.”

During the weeks and months that followed these reports, bloggers grabbed hold of the concept, and magazines and newspapers both online and in print analyzed and conjectured about the desperation faced by these professionals who were freelancing for lack of other options. They all painted a picture of a career archetype that I thought would be more aptly labeled Survivalnomics than Gigonomics.

The Gigaverse

This picture was a startling revelation to me, someone who had happily been living and working in the then-unlabeled Gigaverse for many years. In fact, I had deliberately chosen a freelancer’s lifestyle many years prior in order to take charge of my time and escape the rat race of the 9-to-5 work world. And while the media feeds provided a steady diet of despair about the lifestyle, I was fully engaged and enjoying my life in a way better than I could have ever imagined.

For weeks I spent a great deal of time crawling the Internet for more information about my own Gigaverse and the people in it. I felt like this profession that I had dreamed up for myself many years ago suddenly had a name, and like a patient with an illness that is finally diagnosed, I found myself in a desperate search to learn more about Gigonomics.

After I completed an exhaustive search for new articles and blog entries available that first month that the buzzwords caught hold, I sat back. I began searching deep inside myself for answers. I began processing everything. I had been so happy with my career lifestyle for many years. Was I just in denial? Was I sugarcoating the experience in my mind? My heart and my bottom line told me otherwise. So why did I feel so happy with what countless articles equated to a career based on lack—lack of money, options, promotion, and more. What was wrong with me? Why was I so incredibly happy? Several weeks went by before I was able to answer that question.

One day a client called to offer me a new project. The assignment paid well and sounded interesting, but I needed to adjust the deadline in order to accommodate an upcoming family vacation. The client was pleased to make the necessary adjustments, and I verbally signed on. I hung up the phone, satisfied with the situation. My schedule was now officially filled to capacity once more, which always felt good. I was happy with the work I was doing and with the money I was making. I felt like the work I did was interesting and contributed to the lives of others in a meaningful way. Moreover, rare was the time when my work life interfered with my personal life. I felt happy.

And that’s when it hit me: I felt happy!

I was a so-called gigger, and yet I felt happy. But according to the media’s version of Gigonomics, the two didn’t go hand in hand. In that moment I came to the realization that I simply am not a gigger. I am not living in that Gigaverse predominated by lack. In fact, I am not living anywhere near it!

Instead, my career lifestyle is one that I chose deliberately because it brings happiness to my life, not one that I chose out of desperation. It is filled with an abundance of employment opportunities, not a desperate search for the next gig. I live life on my own terms, by choice. I own my time. I call the shots. I am home for my family when I want to be and for any special events that come along. I vacation often and enjoy long periods of leisure time. My life feels balanced. I feel whole. It is a career lifestyle that is none like I have ever heard of or known before. I love it, truly. At the very core of my being, I am happy.

I write this book because my greatest wish is to share the secret of this career lifestyle with you and the 21 million Americans who are currently “cobbling together” work. There is a better way, I promise you! The name for this counterculture employment strategy that throws misery out the window and gives happiness a front-row seat is what I call the Patchwork Principle. This principle is a proven strategy for finding work that you love in abundance, and it organically pairs with the lifestyle by design that you have in mind. Reject the premise of Survivalnomics and never look back.

Endnotes

¹ Mike Stathis, America’s Financial Apocalypse (Dallas: Apex Venture Advisors, 2006), 292.

² Drake Bennett, “The End of the Office... and the Future of Work,” The Boston Globe, January 17, 2010, www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/01/17/the_end_of_the_office_and_the_future_of_work (accessed August 22, 2010).

³ Wikipedia, s.v. “Crowdsourcing,” http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing?wasRedirected=true (accessed July 16, 2010).

⁴ Joel Ross and others, “Who Are the Turkers? Worker Demographics in Amazon Mechanical Turk,” ACM CHI Conference paper, 2010, www.ics.uci.edu/~jwross/pubs/SocialCode-2009-01.pdf (accessed September 1, 2010).

⁵ Txteagle, “About Txteagle,” http://txteagle.com/about.html (accessed July 16, 2010).

⁶ Joel Ross.

⁷ Txteagle.

⁸ Tina Brown, “The Gig Economy,” The Daily Beast, January 12, 2010, www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-12/the-gig-economy/full (accessed August 22, 2010).