Accidentally in Code

Tag: freedom

  • Working for Free

    Working for Free

    Tax Time
    Credit: Flickr / Images Money

    My strategy for painlessly saving a year of living costs:

    1. Have a well-paying corporate job.
    2. Live in a series of socialist countries.
    3. Neglect to file tax returns.
    4. File them all in a rush in the couple of months as you finalise your plans for leaving aforementioned corporate job.
    5. Cash the cheques as they arrive from various governments.

    OK, this strategy won’t work for everyone. Or even many people. But for me, it bought me a year of no-pressure, time to make things, and space to see what evolves. Living costs covered by money paid to the government I’d never expected to see again.

    When I had a corporate job, my limiting factor was time. People would ask me for things, or there would be things I wanted to do, but I would be limited by hours in the day. I felt like only about 4 hours of good mental time remained after ~50 hours of work-work. I started to make choices about using that time effectively.

    Now, in theory, I have so much more time. But still the same 168 hours in the week. And one of the things I’ve had to navigate is the idea of working for free. In many ways, it’s actually the time question in a different format. If my finally-filed tax returns have bought me X weeks of freedom, then devoting some portion of time to projects eats into that time of freedom, and I have to evaluate whether it will be worthwhile.

    I look for: risks worth taking, things I want to build, things I want to learn.

    There are plenty of reasons why I might be happy to get a job when this time is over: working with other developers, the lure of a bigger project that needs a team, something to tie me to a place because frankly it’s very hard for me to decide where to live.

    But a short while into this experiment, I realised that there was one reason that I didn’t want to be the case. It’s spending too much time working for free on other people’s projects to make my own a success.

    This reframing really helped me set my priorities, and boundaries. Helped me start drawing lines between favours and “this is how I can help you, but I’ll have to charge you this much”.

    Maybe as a result some people think I’m unobliging. But others have respected this response.

    I tweeted recently, “In 2015 lets do more to pay people for their work. Especially women and marginalized people. It’s a feminist act.”

    So here it is: in 2015 I’m not giving away the freedom I worked so hard to buy. And I’m paying it forward – I don’t expect anyone else to, either.

  • How *are* You?

    How *are* You?

    kitty peeking
    Credit: Flickr / evapro

    Sometimes, since I ditched my job, and apartment, and conventional aspects of life, really, people ask me “how are you”, in a head tilted way that asks, really, “how can you possibly be okay”.

    And I say “I’m GREAT” which maybe seems like I’m overstating things, putting a brave face on terrible regret.

    But really… I am doing great. I feel very happy. Very free.

    I’m going to have to make some tough decisions, but that’s cool, I’ve demonstrated to myself that I have options.

    And meanwhile, I get out of bed every morning excited about what I’m going to do today. I go to bed feeling like I’ve achieved things, even if not always the most important things (I’m working on that). The worse I feel is overwhelm, and the good kind that says, I can’t do everything so I’m going to have to pick some things and how will I decide.

    It is at once liberating and terrifying to feel in control of my own life. To have stopped listening to what I’m told I should want, and what should make me happy and to listen instead to what actually does.

  • Exhale

    Exhale

    Credit: DeviantArt / mqRina
    Credit: DeviantArt / mqRina

    I think most of us, at some point, have been in a situation – bad relationship, bad boss, toxic friendship, that made us feel less than.

    Time goes by, and somehow you’ve come to expect less. Become less confident. Being afraid to say or do anything for fear of crossing these boundaries that might be invisible, but are still very real. Got smaller.

    And then, we escape, and slowly we remind ourselves who we are. We can speak up for what we want, ask that question, surprise ourselves with what we’re capable of.

    It’s scary, when it looks like you might be happy again. It feels tenuous, delicate.

    Like a mirage. Not quite real. Don’t poke it, it might all fall apart. Don’t move, in case everything changes.

    Not quite real, because is this how easy it is? Did I deserve it all along? Were those people who told me I could go looking for more, and find it, right? Why did it take me so long to listen to them?

    Slowly, exhale. And gradually, expand to fill the space that is there. No longer smaller. No longer so afraid. Breathe.

  • Google vs. Censored Internet

    Can't see, can't speak, can't hear
    Credit: flickr / kirikiri

    Of course, I’ve been following the debate about Google leaving China and the fallout. There’s a good summary in the NYT, as well as a piece on Sergey Brin and his childhood in the Soviet Union. I really love the evil meter.

    I was in China in 2007 for about 3 months. I’d braced myself for a different internet experience, but mostly it was OK. I couldn’t get the BBC news, but I think I could get The Times. I kept track of my journeys and experiences on Blogger, and my email worked just fine.

    Of course, I was in China temporarily and knew I could search for Tiananmen Square when I got home. I wasn’t concerned about finding information, I was concerned about going about my day to day internet activities, which were mostly fine. I was in Yantai, but later on I went to Beijing and Shanghai, where the internet was more open. Towards the end of my trip, I found myself in Yangshao where it seemed like every site I tried to access redirected me to Baidu (the Chinese search engine). It made sense to me that in a place where there was such extreme poverty coupled with a large number of wealthy tourists the internet would be restricted, although a friend said it might not be censorship, but more a question of paying for access.

    I was back in China last summer, and so I was there as the internet shut down. As Facebook was restricted, and Twitter became inaccessible. At one point, the wiki that contained our teaching materials was unavailable as well.

    2 years – and the situation hadn’t got better. In fact, it was worse. And we ignore this, in the West, the fact that people’s internet freedoms have been taken away. This seems a little wrong to me. When I was there, we all thought, oh it’ll be back soon. But more than 6 months later, it hasn’t come back.

    So I admire Google’s stance. Censorship is not okay. Things are not getting better. And maybe Google pulling out of China won’t help, but acknowledging the problem is a start.