If Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek kickstarted the “first wave” of the post-industrial reimagination of work in 2007, 2022 was the year that a newer, and weirder, second wave began.
Unlike the first wave, which largely played out at the individual level, this one is happening at the societal level. While it is still early, this “great contemplation,” as I’ve been calling it, will likely shape the work stories that people use to orient their lives over the coming decade.
Ferriss offered a powerful alternative script that inspired millions around the world to escape the default path, travel the world, take mini-retirements, start businesses, and take breaks from work. However, these people embraced their new paths in direct opposition to the 20th-century industrial economy “organization man” paradigm that still had a strangle-hold over the popular imagination, well into the 2010s. Even if you followed Ferriss’s playbook and found a path you enjoyed, it was likely that many people in your life still thought you were a bit crazy (raises hand). This is what drew people to leave cities organized around big companies and full-time work to escape to nomadic communities around the world, like Bali; Chiang Mai, Thailand; Medellin, Colombia; and Las Palmas, Spain.
As the worst blows of the pandemic have receded, people who seemed committed to traditional employment and working for big companies have started to soften their attachment to traditional work scripts. This has encouraged many digital nomads, the early adopters of work norms, including myself, to return “home,” noticing that the vibe really has shifted. It was telling that in a visit to Lisbon earlier this year, most of the scrappy digital nomads had been replaced with well-paid full-time workers who were flexing their increased freedom and driving up the cost of rent.
As someone who quit my job and walked away from a promising and well-paid strategy consulting path more than five years ago, and has been making a living while self-employed, it is jolting to experience people shifting from mocking my lifestyle to asking how they might, too, claim a little more freedom. I’ve had a unique front-row seat to this shift, having been obsessed with our collective relationship to work soon after leaving my full-time job in 2017. I was fascinated by how different being self-employed felt compared to the first 32 years of my life, which had been oriented around school, employment, and a steady stream of goals and achievements.
I was so hungry to talk to anyone about what I was experiencing that I decided to put an open booking link on my website for “curiosity conversations” every Wednesday. Over the next couple of years, I talked to hundreds of people from dozens of countries, and they told me how they felt about work with raw honesty. I was surprised at how consistent issues were across countries, industries, and even socioeconomic status. People told me that they felt trapped, uninspired, stuck, and hopeless, and that they desired a better relationship to work but didn’t know what to do. The most shocking thing was how many people told me they hadn’t even told this to a single person in their life, not even their spouses. Just me—a stranger on the internet.
This “secret knowledge” fueled my writing, and in 2020, the world seemed to catch up. In April 2020, my calendar was full each week with seven or eight calls. Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk about work. Some of my friends made dramatic changes in their lives that I never would have predicted. Family members inquired about how I was working and living. The media tried to cover this shift but kept missing the mark by getting distracted by terms like “anti-work” and the “great resignation” rather than going deeper.
If they did go deeper, they would have seen what I was seeing: a more gradual, and harder to define, change bubbling under the surface. While some people made dramatic shifts in 2020, most of those were moves that were accelerated by a couple of years. The bigger impact of the pandemic was planting seeds of possibility in many more people that have yet to even sprout.
