Why do we have to work all the time
Unemployment for all, not just the rich 🤝
One person/many careers. I write about things you feel but can't explain. Big ideas about money & creative living, simply expressed.
At 22, I got my first real job—a position as a reporter at Estonia’s national newspaper.
About a month in, I asked my manager something that, at the time, felt entirely reasonable:
“Do we work full-time during the summer too?”
She looked at me blankly.
“Yes. That’s how work works.”
And there it was. The moment I realised that something I had believed in — was gone.
Up until then, I’d had every summer off — like a normal Northern European child raised on lakes, fresh berries, and the gentle hum of mosquitoes.
I was now being asked to spend the sunniest days of the year indoors, five days a week, eight hours a day, clacking away at news stories like they were margaritas on a beach.
In Estonia, like in most of Scandinavia, summer is sacred. Children don’t study. Teenagers and uni students abandon the cities for forests and freedom.
Even adults respect the season. My parents took the entire month of August off for as long as I can remember.
That’s what I grew up with. A world where rest was baked into the rhythm of life, not treated like an indulgence you sneak in with a sick day.
A gentler pace of life is one of the reasons Scandinavian countries consistently rank high on happiness indexes.
So when I found myself working through my first summer, it felt like a small death.
And, if I’m honest, I still haven’t recovered.
Every year, come June, it begins again.
That familiar itch. The urge to disappear. To quit whatever I’m doing and instead house-sit someone’s cat in Italy.
I’ve always had a low tolerance for a life that doesn’t sparkle.
I demand a life that I love.
So in my twenties and thirties, working in London, I changed jobs often—not because I was lost, but because I knew exactly what I wasn’t willing to tolerate.
When a job began to numb me, I left.
I could not ignore myself (I’m not very good at suffering).
Now, I work in real estate (read about my other income streams here, here, and here). And for the first three months, it was exciting. Novelty always is.
But the hours are brutal—8am to 6:30pm, six and five days a week. Even the most “fun” jobs go stale if you do them too much.
What remains is the money — and your ability to use it well.
I use all my jobs as stepping stones to something I want.
So this is how I reframed work for myself: it’s not a source of identity, but a tool (to increase my net worth/retrain/learn a skill/etc).
Each job I’ve taken has had a clear purpose beyond paying bills:
The first helped me save enough to take the entire 2015 summer off.
The second bought me an investment property.
The third helped me buy my first home in London.
This current one is helping me buy a bigger place in London (I have my eye on this one).
That’s how I make sense of the long hours.
Whatever you do for work, make sure it serves you beyond my next paycheck.
Milk the salary. Build skills. Build options/escape routes. Use the system to buy back your time.
PS
When I meditate and let myself dream, I never see myself working. Not in the traditional sense.
I see sunlight. Family. Australia. That beautiful home above. Slow mornings. Leisure. The kind of life that only the rich seem to have.
In those visions, work exists, but it is gentle. Seasonal. Project-based. Nothing that takes me away from the real thing.
My friends and I are nearing forty. And this idea of exponential wealth keeps coming up in our conversations …
The big leap.
The moment everything shifts.
Not just earning an extra £20K a year, but suddenly—unexpectedly—selling the screenplay. The book. The weird side project that started as a joke and paid off the mortgage. That’s what I want.
And it’s not a pipe dream. It’s happening. Creative people are already doing it.
I often think of the look on my manager’s face when I asked if we work through the summer.
She couldn’t imagine another way.
But I can.
I refuse to abandon my body, my seasons, my spirit in service of the status quo.
I refuse to sacrifice the sun for a job ☺️
Happy beginning of summer, my dearest readers. Don’t work too much…
Please recommend this page if this spoke to you ;)