My Top 9 Best Things About Being Gainfully Unemployed

In August 2016, I left my full-time communications job for greener pastures. At the time, I wasn’t certain what those greener pastures might look like, only that they would be greener, whether by a better annual salary, a more fulfilling job, or literally access to a pasture that has been properly fertilized and irrigated, and therefore greener. (Don’t scoff at this. Browner pastures are no fun at all — ask any cow.)

It was the first time in some 13 years that I was not “gainfully employed” by some company or organization. As you might imagine, this took some getting used to, but I easily fell back into my longtime role as a “freelancer,” which is Latin for “doesn’t make money.”

Working from home is different, I admit. It’s not the same as climbing into a nice pair of khakis, driving into an office five days a week, reporting to a supervisor, receiving money on a consistent schedule, and so on. Sure, there are predictable stresses that come along with not having a steady job — annoying things like food, housing, and college tuitions — but since this isn’t a serious article, I will carefully ignore those.

Now more than four years since I was gainfully employed, I consider myself a veteran unemployed person. I’ve “settled in,” as people like to say, despite the fact that during these past four years, I’ve launched two home-based companies and have been busier than I ever was before.

Nevertheless, I now have some serious street cred in the world of not having a real job, so much that I’ve compiled my Top 9 Best Things About Being Gainfully Unemployed. I won’t organize them into any particular order (except for No. 1) because that would be too much like work. And what does “gainfully unemployed” even mean? Simple. These are the advantages or desirable things I’m gaining by my unemployment.

9. Living in comfortable clothes.

Let me start by dispelling the tired old cliche of the freelancer always working in his or her pajamas. Come on, people! This is an absurd falsehood.

Sometimes I wear sweatpants.

Honestly, for the past four years and counting, I have been dressed in clothing OTHER than some combination of gym shorts, t-shirts, pajama pants, and sweat pants like TWICE, not including church. Once was for a job interview (I didn’t really want it anyway) and once for a wedding, which was lovely and I only had to wear the tie for less than an hour.

You’ve read about those people who dress in formal attire every day to work in their home office, right?

I’m not one of those people.

However, much like a real office, I do require a dress code. It looks something like this:

• If it requires a belt, it’s too dressy.
• If the shirt has buttons and doesn’t depict Mickey Mouse, the logo of your child’s school, or some image related to Harry Potter or Bigfoot, it’s too dressy.
• Any shoes other than slippers? Take ‘em off — too dressy.

Sorry. Rules are rules.

8. Watching superhero, kickass hero, and war movies.

Any employed married man knows that superhero, kickass hero, and war movies may only be legally viewed on days when he’s home sick or when the wife is away at a conference. But when you’re unemployed, it’s open season because, um, who’s going to stop you? I watched “Taken 1, 2, and 3” all in one sitting — absolutely guilt-free. I now understand who the “Avengers” are, all except for the guy with the bow and arrows. (I’m still not sure if the “X-Men,” “Fantastic Four,” and “Avengers” are somehow related, though.) Fortunately, I stumbled across “Deadpool” before naively allowing my then 9-year-old to view it and therefore become warped for life.

(Author’s Note: “Kickass hero,” my own term, refers to guys like Liam Neeson or Matt Damon who dispatch approximately 86 head-shaven Eastern European bad guys during the movie and by the end of it, are only slightly winded, possibly with one arm in a sling.)

So, to retain the delicate balance of the cosmos, my wife watches “90-Day Fiancee” and “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” while I’m not around. (Correction: It’s “The Real Housewives of Orange County.” Holly wanted to make sure her smutty, guilty-pleasures show was listed accurately.)

7. Spying on wildlife when they mistakenly think I’m at work.

I’ve always suspected that indigenous wildlife behaves very differently on weekdays when they know all the humans are away at work, and now I know I was right. For example, we all learn in elementary school that “nocturnal” refers to animals that are active at night. But now I know that it really refers to animals that are active at night and between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, except for state and federal holidays. This includes all the deer, possums, raccoons, armadillos, and owls in my heavily wooded neighborhood.

I always assumed that they were either sleeping during the day or at least deep in the woods somewhere.

Wrong.

They behave much like the toys in the “Toy Story” movies, springing to life when people aren’t looking. Assuming that I’m still driving off to work at 7 a.m. and not spying on them out of my bedroom window, the wildlife often gathers behind our house at random times during the day to smoke clumsily rolled cigarettes and determine who’s going to eat my landscaping via a spirited game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. (Bigfoot was there one time, too, but suddenly became very grainy and out of focus when I tried to film him with my phone.) During the commonly accepted wildlife hours, they go back to grazing peacefully or flinging themselves in front of our vehicles.

6. Scheduling the Comcast repairman whenever I want.

All the cable guys, pest control technicians, and HVAC repairmen are frustrated now that I’m home all the time because it’s ruining their deal, which is trying to make the human race crazy by making us book a “3-hour block of time” during a weekday to show up at our house, and then showing up an hour later. This is their goal because they are all sadistic madmen and women (any present company excepted), but they didn’t count on me working from home. If I need something these days, I simply call the help desk and say, “Sure, sometime between 7:30 a.m. and 11 p.m. for the next six months will work just fine, because I’m here all day, plus one hour.” They hate that.

5. The absence of staff meetings.

I honestly believe that staff meetings are simply a way for a supervisor to justify his or her status as a boss. I know this because I’ve been a boss and have succumbed to this urge.

“At the appointed time, we must all sit around the same table with matching chairs, sip coffee, and look at each other. This will take roughly one hour. When we are finished, we will have successfully removed one hour from an otherwise productive day and possibly have scheduled another such meeting for next week.

But just to make sure, we will send around a calendar invitation to confirm the next meeting so that you can use another 3-5 minutes responding to that email and opening your cloud-based Google calendar to make sure it automatically saved itself there, which cancels out the ‘automatic’ part of the whole process. Good meeting, everyone. Dismissed.”

4. Becoming a skilled gourmet chef.

Becoming unemployed meant that I would immediately become employed as chef for my family.

Now, I wasn’t too shabby in the kitchen to begin with, truth be told (don’t try to verify that statement), but suddenly having my afternoons free has expanded my horizons as a culinary genius in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. No dish is off limits, no cookbook is safe. I’m deftly handling complicated things like “sautéing,” “simmering,” “browning,” and “heating up in the microwave.”

Word is spreading internationally among all the best gourmet restaurants: Johnson is available! The calls to hire me as Head Chef are pouring in. Strangely though, these are all restaurants that only serve what my kids call “white pasta” (fettuccini Alfredo using spaghetti noodles); crockpot chili; over-cooked hamburgers shaped like footballs and shriveled black hotdogs; and scrumptious tacos made from a “kit” — but served only on Tuesdays so everyone can gleefully proclaim “Taco Tuesday!”

3. Staying up late.

I used to do this when I was Gainfully Employed, too, but there was a difference; I felt bad about it. Now, not so much. Or at all.

When the rest of the family is crawling into bed, I’m just getting started. I can safely retrieve the Bad For You Snacks I Don’t Want to Share from their various hiding places, kick up my feet, and settle into a good History Channel documentary or jump into “Jaws,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” or one of the Jason Bourne movies two-thirds of the way through, which is fine because I’ve seen them all 32 times.

If I feel really productive, I’ll actually take the time to switch the TV over to Netflix and binge-watch “The Office” until, say, 12:34 a.m. This is roughly the point at which I suddenly realize what an idiot I am for insisting on staying up late and begin the never-ending process of turning off lights throughout the house, putting away the leftovers that have been sitting out on the kitchen counter for six hours and will probably give us all ptomaine poisoning tomorrow, and making sure neither of the cats is trapped in a closet.

And then, I do the same thing the next day because I can.

2. No problem with Sunday night.

My wife calls it the “Sunday Night Freak-Out.” It’s the inevitable anxiety that begins to creep in sometime Sunday afternoon and builds to a crescendo by bedtime, ruining all the fun stuff you’re trying to do by continually tapping on your subconscious shoulder. “Hey. Hey. Hey. You’ve got work tomorrow. Your two-day reprieve is almost over and you’re not ready. You didn’t do that thing you said you were going to do over the weekend to prepare. Hey. Hey. Hey.”

Don’t get me wrong. For the most part, I’ve had jobs that I really enjoyed and worked with people who became my friends. But none of that matters, and you know it. The Sunday Night Freak-Out always overshadows all of the positive feelings about work somehow, even when work is perfectly fine.

But now? Not a problem. I greet Sunday evenings with the good nature of encountering an old friend on the street, offering a warm hug and a pat on the back. The Freak-Out simply cowers before me and squeaks away, impotent against my superhuman powers of unemployment.

And now, I present the No. 1 Best Thing About Being Gainfully Unemployed…

1. Enjoying an uncertain future.

(Caution: Slightly Serious Stuff ahead.) For many people I know, the word “change” elicits fear and loathing. For them, to live a comfortable life is to have the same job, live in the same house, and socialize with the same people day in and day out, and I understand that; with familiarity comes security. It’s just not the way I’m wired, I guess because I enjoy the concept that I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’m a writer, which means I may be learning about or working in ANY given topic or industry tomorrow.

Uncertainty brings with it a world of possibilities!

I’m sure this makes some of you squirm with anxiety (not the least of whom, my wife), but that’s OK. After all, if we were all freelancers, the world would be thrown into anarchy. Imagine all the un-validated supervisors seated at empty conference tables, playing on their iPhones alone for an hour before slinking back to their offices, dejected. The Bunn Coffee Maker and Culligan Water factories would either shut down or be forced to retool their assembly lines to produce sweatpants, creating a boon in the cotton industry. Traffic in and out of major metropolitan areas during rush hours would grind to a free-flowing, uncongested, luxurious, no-brake-needing, 70-MPH Autobahn.

And, as this is an update to a post I wrote only months after beginning my gainful unemployment back in 2016, I can happily report that this dreaded change has, thus far, resulted in two new companies, an epic two-week trek to Mt. Everest Base Camp in Nepal, the publication of two books with more on the way, the creation and release of two weekly podcasts, and many, many wonderful and unexpected memories.

God bless change, and God bless America!