Escaping the 9–5

Exploring paths to financial independence and personal freedom

Imagine a life where you dictate your own schedule, free from the confines of a traditional job.

That’s a thought experiment I’ve been playing with lately: what would it look like if this was my last ever job? How might I optimize my lifestyle for freedom?

By that I don’t mean that it would be the last time I needed to earn money. I work in non-profit news; nobody does this because they want to become rich beyond their wildest dreams. Even tech salaries feel distant from this vantage point. To be clear, I’m doing this work because it’s important, and I have no plans to leave.

Regardless, I think it’s an important thought experiment. What if this was the last time I worked a job with regular hours and a boss and a hierarchy? What would it look like to have a lifestyle that was less bound to working norms, so that I could choose how to spend my day, or my week, or my year?

This desire to seek a lifestyle less bound by traditional working norms is shaped by two big influences:

• My working life in startups, which was very much self-driven
• My own parents, who had their own publishing startup for a key part of my childhood.