How The Gig Economy Is Killing Millennials…

I put in 18-hour days. I work in the same room I sleep in. I never know when or if I’ll be paid. I go days without speaking to anyone.

- Alexander Jones

Wednesday. 3 AM.

I’m submerged in a steaming bath, my laptop balanced precariously on the side. I’m typing frantically. I look at the word count – halfway there. The article I’m writing is due in six hours’ time. I am deep-in-my-bones tired and fighting off a severe bout of cystitis. The bath is only just helping with the pain. I should take a day off, give my body the rest it so needs. But that’s not possible.

Once this piece is filed I have more work lined up. My schedule is coordinated with minute precision. I’m convinced if I miss just one deadline my whole career will come tumbling down around me like a poorly built domino chain.

My eyes itching with tiredness, I wrap a towel around myself and head back to my desk. I’ve not spoken to a human being in three days.

This is not how I expected it to be. Just three months earlier, still in a full-time job, I’d indulged in gingham-tinged fantasies of working from rooftop cafés (artisan coffee in hand), of midday yoga sessions and last-minute trips to the beach. I imagined “brand partnerships” with exciting clients and lazy evenings tapping away at my laptop as I sipped wine. I imagined calm. I imagined contentment. I imagined the sanitised version of the freelance dream that we’ve all come to fetishise, glorify, worship on Instagram. I was an idiot.