Web Worker Daily

By Joshua Levy

Three years ago I left my comfortable life working in the offices of a publishing company for the life of a student and freelancer. I was, in part, lured away by a fantasy of independent freelance life that was equal parts an escape from office life and a way to take my career into my own hands. Three years on, I’m surprised to find I’m missing the creature comforts of my old professional life. I have even — gasp! — found myself fantasizing about that old office.

When I first left office work, I looked forward to a life unattached to the same space and people every day, instead working from home, coffee shops, or wherever my newly-found freedom took me. I could start work at 8am or 10am and finish at 4pm or 8pm and have lunches with friends without having to worry about getting back to the office. I would develop myself as an information worker, a member of a new breed of workers valued for their expertise and knowledge, not their ability to punch a clock twice a day.

Now I have what I wanted. And yet I sometimes find myself wanting more.

My working life now reflect changing times. I work from home and other remote locations as an editor and writer for a couple of websites, attending conferences a few times a year to get that “in-the-flesh” feeling. Most of my colleagues are in fact part a loosely-bound network of acquaintances spread out across the country, all connected to each other by shared interests and their shared residence in my IM address book. This network does a passable job at imitating the collection of ready-made colleagues found in my old office. And they don’t only exist as IM friends; many of us use Twitter and Facebook too, so I can use those tools to post my work, ask for advice, and engage in 21st-century water-cooler discussions.

I’m in charge of my time, and work hard at creating structure where no external structures exist. You often hear from office workers that they could never work from home; they’d be too distracted. My problem is the opposite. As the readers of this site can attest, the side effects of working at home include the inability to completely shut off, the need to check emails late into the night, or to exist in a kind of half-work/half-relaxation state that is actually neither work nor relaxation.

My laptop, notebook, and cell phone serve as my mobile office. I can tote them along to any location and be surprisingly efficient (except for when I’m unsurprisingly distracted). But it’s also MY laptop, so when it breaks, I’m the one who pays. Ditto the cell phone. I pay for electricity and gas. And rent. Sure, these things are tax-deductable, but that doesn’t mean they’re free. Then there’s health-insurance, which takes a huge bite out of my earnings. Oh, and I’m supposed to be saving money for retirement, right?

And what about the benefit of having physical interactions with other human beings? I’ve begun to long for mundane chores like buying a few groceries in the middle of the day, or conducting some business at the bank at lunch; anything that allows me to get out of the house and have a real-live conversation with another human being. Working in an office, we can forget how essential human interaction is to keeping us on our mental toes. When I go too long — more than a day, really — without significant human contact during the workday, I feel like I’m wilting. It’s as if human interaction is the sun, and without it I can’t grow. I get less and less sharp the longer I go without it.

For these reasons and more, I sometimes find myself missing the perks of my pre-freelance life. Sure, the work wasn’t as satisfying, and I didn’t get that confident feeling (or is it anxiety?) of knowing that I’m in control of my own destiny, but there were certain external factors that sometimes make that side of the fence appear so much greener. An office to go to every day. Real, physical water-cooler chats with colleagues. Lunch breaks. Office managers who worry about electric bills, air temperature, and hiring cleaners. Health insurance and 401k plans. Well-defined hours. Looked at it from the distance a few independent years, some aspects of office life can look downright appealing.

On the other hand, the work I’m doing — editing and writing for a website that discusses what other people are doing on their websites — is particular to our economic and cultural moment. There’s no office space for what I do because I only work with a handful of other people, who are also operating from home. And most days, I love that I’m this independent, that I have control over my life in a way I never imagined back when the office key fob swung from my key chain.

So is all of this freedom actually liberating us? Does web work actually represent an evolution in the working conditions of the masses? Or are we fooling ourselves, blind to the reality that we can’t have it two ways — you can’t have the freedom AND have someone else, er, pay the bills.

Joshua Levy is associate editor of Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident, two websites that cover how technology is changing politics, and has been quoted widely on the use of the web in the 2008 election. He is a writer, editor, and filmmaker whose work covers the intersections of political activism and technology.