Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

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There's more hidden costs for being an employee, though.

- You usually have to commute to an office every day. This requires transport and time. Freelancers usually work from home at least part of the time. Transport and time both cost money.

- You usually have social obligations around lunch with your colleagues, and can't just graze from the fridge. For my last permanent job, I worked out this cost me around $50 a week. Not including beers with colleagues after work (which is a perk rather than a cost).

- Putting up with work shit causes mental stress. One of the ways of dealing with this stress is buying stuff. I always spend more on random stuff when employed rather than freelancing. Also, the income insecurity when freelancing triggers my "must be frugal" instincts and I just spend less money.

Depending on a particular situation all of these can be upsides.

- If you can commute in a bike, you get some regular exercise. Overall I am more physically active when I work from the office. If the self-employed gig goes well, you may need to scale to more than one person and get an office anyway.

- Lunch break and small talk with your colleagues can be a positive experience, but if you eat what you brought from home, or want to skip meal, or read a book in silence, the truth is nobody really cares.

- Some stress is unavoidable, and as you noted income insecurity stress can be minimized when you are employed, and you can focus on few things you can do well. Also, you can leave work at work, and dedicate free time to family, sport, hobbies, there's more than one way to deal with stress. Overall I think employment is less stressful unless it's a shitty underpaid job.

This is all true too :)

I generally find the stresses different from employment. Income insecurity is bad when freelancing (though that's illusory - I have to annoy one person to lose my job, as opposed to annoying all my clients when freelancing). But dealing with bad management decisions is infuriating and creates a sense of powerlessness and outrage that I find really stressful to deal with. For some reason, retail therapy works to defuse some of this stress, whereas buying things only increases my freelancing income insecurity.

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