my boss sucks
the lament of the self-employed.
It’s been 15 years since I entered the workforce. I’ve experienced quite a lot since, had highs and lows. It has all led me to one conclusion: my boss freakin’ sucks?!
It’s a tiny company. I’m my boss’s one and only precious employee. I’ve been loyal to a fault, sticking with the business through thick and thin; even when I do work for or with others, I do it on terms where I still get to stay with this mini enterprise. I’ve consistently held back from taking long leave because I don’t want to affect operations.
Is my boss grateful about this? Is she heck. She takes my lack of leave for granted and makes me work weekends. She’s also made me work plenty of nights, and I don’t get off-in-lieu. In fact, whenever I’m not at work, she hovers over me tutting and shaking her head, murmuring, “But shouldn’t you really be doing something productive with this time?” And I can’t even lodge a complaint with the Ministry of Manpower about her?!
In fairness, she’s allowed me to claim my therapy and ADHD medication costs as work expenses. But let’s be real: my work is a big reason why I need the first and I’m getting the second because it helps me work better. Also, at the end of the day, it all still comes out of my wages.
If anyone described such an employer to me I’d tell them to quit and run for the hills. I’d point out that their boss is clearly exploiting them, and that they deserve much better treatment and appreciation in the workplace. I’d probably agree to help collect petition signatures at the Labour Day Rally to name and shame such a shit company. But the problem here is that my boss is me.
I do love what I do. I’m very aware of what a privilege it is to be able to make what I love doing my career. But whoever came up with the saying “find what you love to do and you’ll never work a day in your life” forgot that another (likely) possibility is that, because you’re doing what you love, you become unable to clearly distinguish between what’s your work, what’s your hobby, what’s your entire way of life—and then you never stop working a single day in your life.
This is a subject that I keep coming back to, again and again, in this blog/newsletter, in therapy, in conversations with friends. I feel bad to subject people to it over and over again. Surely it’s boring. But I also know so many friends who seem to be going through very similar struggles, the pendulum swinging between overwork and feeling like we should be working harder. So many of us struggle with boundaries and learning not to take on more than we can realistically, sustainably handle. So many of us have more or less lost perspective of what we can realistically, sustainably handle. And it’s a hard pit to crawl out of, because the capitalist systems we live under keep us in there with our anxieties and an increasingly unreasonable and unsustainable way of life.
I have a Managernim alter ego, now represented by a little orange cat doll that I bring around with me in my bag. It started as a joke, when I said that one way to motivate myself to get shit done was to pretend that I’m a booked and busy K-pop idol with a “Managernim” who organises her schedule and hustles her from one engagement (eg. gym) to another (eg. Zoom call). I love it because it does work (somewhat) and is entertaining at the very least.
Now I’m starting to think that I might need a Boss character, and I don’t have to be so friendly with this one. I don’t need to be so sweet and obliging with the Boss all the time, and should recognise that the Boss’s interests aren’t always in my best interests. I’ve been a busy worker bee for 15 years. Maybe it’s time to stop feeling like I have to please the Boss all the time. Maybe it’s time to quite quit on myself a little bit. Because, frankly speaking, at this stage of workaholism my idea of quiet quitting is probably just a normal day’s work for the average person.