What's Not So Great About the Gig Economy
Or how formatting a book sent me into a rant about healthcare
Last night, I was formatting my book (that I have finally decided to self-publish), and about halfway through the process, I thought:
This is cool, getting to see a manuscript start to take the form of a real book. It’s so satisfying. I kinda enjoy this. Maybe I could do it as a side gig — edit and format people’s books or teach them how to do it themselves.
I have, at this point, self-published a book exactly 0.5 times, and I am already considering how I can monetize that skill. When I noticed myself doing this, I thought:
What the hell, man? Can’t I just, for a little bit, be satisfied that I’m turning my own manuscript into a book? And be real; it’s not like you are an expert at this, at least not yet. Chill with your big plans.
We live in gig economy times. One can’t make a living self-publishing books, not a full one, so one must consider lending their expertise out via services or making YouTube how-to videos.
It’s a sign of the times that my brain went there so quickly.
There’s nothing wrong with a side hustle. We all cobble together a living the best we can, and many offer some real value. I watched a detailed YouTube video about how to upload a manuscript to KDP, and I am grateful to Mandi Lynn for making it. But even there, it’s not so simple; she didn’t make any money directly from my watching on YouTube. I don’t know her business model. Perhaps it’s providing valuable content, gratis, to build her credibility in hopes some viewers will eventually pay for services. Maybe it’s affiliate links.
My problem with the pervasiveness of the gig economy is this: It is often pushed on us as the ultimate be-your-own-boss freedom with the downsides (some pretty significant) ignored.
Yeah, it feels powerfully autonomous to run your own show.
You choose the clients and do things how and when you want to do them. And it’s also tiring, having to constantly hustle for the next client, the next job, to have to wear all of the hats, even when they involve math and taxes. A lot of people overcome, though. The benefits outweigh the hatred of math, or they eventually make enough money to outsource that part.
I recognize there are some day-job-quitting, successful “solopreneurs” (a term I’m not sure I want to acknowledge as necessary; what part of entrepreneur says “team?”), but they are the exception rather than the rule. Most people who work for themselves — I suspect; I have no data to back this up — are either A) single with no dependents and don’t use a lot of health/medical services or B) have a life partner who supplements the income and has health insurance. But here are some telling stats from a 2020 Forbes article and Gallup Survey:
Only 59.1 percent of the self-employed are satisfied with predictable pay, compared to 80.8 percent of those with traditional jobs; similarly, just 39.4 percent of the self-employed are happy with their benefits, compared to 60.4 percent of traditional workers.
The internet has made it easy for the average person to market themselves.
That is a double-edged sword. It’s an equalizer (sort of); you still do much better if you pay to boost your ads. But it’s also put a lot more noise out there and saturated the markets. In the middle of the “How to Self-Publish” video, an ad interrupted. It was an average, thin, white woman sitting in her average car. She started with, “I am going to tell you how to make money online, and I promise, you have NEVER heard this before…” I couldn’t hit “skip ad” fast enough. There are many things I’ve never heard before, but that doesn’t mean they’re of any value to me.
This is not what I expected.
When I was young, I didn’t know what kind of career I’d have in my 40s, but I did assume I would have one. And it didn’t involve patching together a living from multiple “hustle” sources, still not making a full-time salary, and spending a fair amount of energy worrying about health insurance. I thought I’d always be able to get a decent full-time job — something that would pay the bills. That does not seem to be the case now.
Am I owed this?
No. Just because it’s not how I thought things would turn out, doesn’t mean someone — the government, society, my parents — owes me. (Hint: I, you, we ARE society.) An expectation does not imply a promise…or perhaps, especially when you’re young and the adults are the ones promising, you could argue that it does. Philosophically, that might be an interesting path to wander down, but practically, it doesn’t matter. We are where we are, promises or no, and we have to deal with it because…
I’m far from the only person in this situation in our country, nor is mine anywhere near the most dire. And when I really look at what the problem is, it’s less how much money I don’t make and more how much everything costs. More than anything, it’s the risk of not having health insurance for a family of four because none of us — you, me, the vast majority of folks in this country — can afford medical care without insurance that itself is barely affordable.
I started with “the gig economy is overrated” and have followed a path to healthcare.
It’s the latest iteration of the fallacy we can all pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. That we all just need to work harder and spend less money. I’m all for hard work and frugality, but at what point in inflation and rising costs do we say everyone is working hard enough? At what point do we say the problem is that the things necessary to live in this country cost too damned much?
Healthcare should be affordable for the vast majority of U.S.eans. (I know that’s not a real word, but I feel like calling people living in the United States “Americans” is cultural overreach when there are a whole bunch of other countries on the two continents we call “America.”) I don’t mean health insurance should be affordable. I mean that most of us should be able to get by without anything but catastrophic health insurance — kind of like how you might have liability on a car. And yeah, that catastrophic insurance shouldn’t break the bank, either. I don’t have an exact, detailed solution, but I feel like, as a country full of people with a lot of brain power, we could work this out to function better than it does.
So there you go: That’s how the gig economy highlights untenable healthcare costs.
As for me, I’ll get it to work somehow. Unlike many people, I am lucky enough to have been born on a financial platform, which I delve into here:
We aren’t going to revolutionize the quagmire of healthcare and insurance overnight, so I will figure it out. But I will still grit my teeth over the sizable chunk that comes out of Jason’s paycheck for shitty-ass insurance that didn’t cover my hysterectomy or much of Jason’s routine healthcare. I can barely stomach that cost when we barely use our insurance. But there’s always the specter of what if. What if someone has an accident? What if someone gets really sick? The consequences of no insurance could be financially and emotionally disastrous. That’s what they hold over your head, and man, it is a doozy.
How much sense does it make to strain to pay for something (health insurance) that doesn’t really work for you? It just gives you an unstable, uneasy peace of mind that IF you have a horrible car accident or IF you get cancer that requires long-term treatment, you MAY not go bankrupt. And that is the only kind of healthcare a lot of gig workers have realistic access to. Doesn’t sound like such a great deal, does it?