Swimming (or walking) against the tide

Posted on | June 26, 2009 | 1 Comment

One of the things I like best about talking to microbusiness owners is that they teach me things and remind me of things I once knew and just generally make me think.

What’s particularly cool about that is that it usually happens not because of pontificating lectures but simply through conversation or even just from my observations of the ways in which microbusiness owners live.

One of the best things about being a microbusiness owner is the fact that, for the most part, these are folks who businesses tend to be very personal to them (hence the term “personal business,” used by many to refer to nonemployers). They don’t try to create barriers between their work and their play and the rest of their lives.

They live in a holistic fashion. I think that is good because it makes a lot more sense than the false and unnaturally rigid boundaries we modern humans have tried to create between work and life.

Here’s an interesting observation about 20th century attitudes toward work/jobs, made to me during my interview last week with Microbusiness Profile subject Gladys Strickland:

“You weren’t supposed to be happy [in your work] but you were supposed to be thankful that you had a job, so that you could be happy in your off hours when you weren’t working.”

It is certainly a modern conceit, this notion that happiness in one’s life work is not only a consummation devoutly to be wished but something that is worth pursuing as well.

There are even some people — plenty of people, in fact — stumbling upon the simple truth that, beyond the details of what you do for a living, in the perpetual trade-off between freedom and security, getting a job means there’s something else that you have to give up.

We Americans have become accustomed to institutional life, going from family to school to job. That’s why we don’t realize that we’re giving anything up at all. Living within institutions feels normal to us and living outside them feels both alienating and simply frightening.

But once we step outside the comfort zone and experience the rather thrilling joy of make-a-living flight without a net, where you bend your mind and your hand to the act of creation and you interact with your fellow humans and you bring them things they want or need and you do all that within a context that you create instead of having to play in somebody else’s sandbox,

then we realize what we’ve been missing. And it doesn’t seem to take very long for many people to get used to being self-directed, being free from the obligation to jump when somebody else says jump.

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In spite of what they say, your government does everything it can to discourage you from creating your own job by launching your own microbusiness. One of the most insidious ways in which they do it is by working really hard at the whole “job creation” thing at times like this and treating the ever-increasing number of self-employed like (as I have put it previously) some sort of labor market failure.

“You had to create your own job? Oh, that’s terrible! Don’t worry, we’ll talk to our friends in business and industry and get them to create a real job for you!”

Uh-huh. Yeah, thanks.

You are not as out-of-step with your fellow Americans as they would have you believe. And, as you’ll see next week when I get to tell you about the 2007 nonemployer numbers, you are part of something that is more than either fad or fashion.

It is, in fact, a tidal wave.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

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