Yer man Ganzeer, setting out his advice to young artists about the realities of the job:

Just know that it’ll involve something like 70% admin, 20% actual creative work, and 10% putting out fires and/or wanting to die.

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the founding of Magrathea Futures AB, and while the ratios don’t map exactly, Ganzeer’s lament describes a pattern I really recognise.

That said: from what I can tell from talking to people who have “real jobs” (whatever those are nowadays), a very similar distribution of effort seems to apply to their working lives, too. Yes, those people may have “stability” of employment, but that seems to be an increasingly relative metric for everyone. Meanwhile, yes, I have to do all my of my own admyn—but that does tend to mean the admyn gets done on time, and to my preferred standards. (There is something oddly cleansing about having no one else to blame, though I’ll concede it’s taken a while to get to the point of being able to appreciate that.)

The standard joke is that the freelance hates having a boss so much they they decide to have a new one every few weeks, and there’s some truth to that, too. But I look at all the places of employment where I might feasibly be able to do the sort of work I get to do, and I know that I’d almost certainly have to put up with more meetings, more petty rules, and more office politics than I do presently, as well as an equal amount of admyn, if not more.

All of which is not to say that I necessarily wouldn’t consider such a job, were one to be available. The “stability” may be relative but, as the world increasingly comes to resemble a casino—or, perhaps more accurately, an end-of-the-pier amusement arcade in a faded seaside resort—even relative stability has a sort of closing-time seductiveness to it: you know it’s not gonna last, but you’ve been sleeping alone a long time, and (if you’re honest with yourself) you look like even longer odds than they do.

But it is to say that I try to remind myself on the regular that I’m actually pretty lucky to get to do what I do, and to have survived three years doing so on my own terms, i.e. having almost entirely eschewed any structured approach to marketing or self-promotion.

Can I make it four years, five? Ten? Your guess is as good as mine. But it’s amazing what you can do once you find yourself playing the last game in town.