Hi guys I’m new to this community but I love the content and I feel as if maybe the story of how my career was saved by the “Anti-Work” movement. I almost fell for the trap that every manager wants you to believe.
So I (23M) graduated from university 3 years ago with a degree in marketing. I worked an internship for a somewhat large branding agency almost immediately and quickly experienced many of the problems as others have had here. My boss (45 F) was very controlling and dominating of basically every function I had. It was basically the situation where any positives I’d contribute to the firm were “her” responsibilities and any bad ideas contributed were “mine”.
Anyways, more of the same type of typical BS you’d expect, until one day unfortunately my cousin died in an unexpected car crash. My manager wouldn’t give me time off as there were “deadlines to be met”. I was very heated at the time, so I told her that somethings were more important, and she was being a bitch for the sake of being a bitch.
She was obviously furious that I called her a bitch, and threatened to fire me. At that point I didn’t care and told her I quit because I’m more concerned about being with my family, then working a (minimum wage) internship that made me wanna die. She told me I’d have “no chance getting another job in advertising” because I’m giving up a great opportunity at a big agency.
Anyways it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment decision, and I really regretted doing it for a while. It was tough to find another job with the right “fit”, so I mostly worked on personal projects and commissioned work. For a month or so I started to believe what my manager told me as I left and had an apology on in my notes ready to go begging for my job back.
Long story short, 2 months after I quit one of my small commissioned works made it to a few business owners who liked my style. I quickly realized that if I position myself correctly I could simply freelance this B2B type operation.
I’ve never looked back from that point. I’ve regained the creativity and happiness work brings me without managers. It’s not easy by any means to run things yourself, but no job is too big worth doing.
I’ve been able to hire my friends and I’ve poached a few of my ex-coworkers to come work for me. I really want my coworkers to understand how my first priority as manager is my employees safety, well-being, and mental health. If there are no employees there’s no operation right?
Anyways just to conclude, I wrote this post because I do see a lot of the “Doesn’t matter how hard I work” mentality on this subreddit, and wanted to share a different story. In all honesty there is some truth to that. Some that work hard will never succeed.
I think it’s better to have hope for what hard work could one day bring, rather than hate it for not giving us our dreams already.
May all your bad managers go to hell, and hope you all have a great work free life!