The world of work has been quite the journey for me. I like adventures. It started off right after varsity, newly married, 21, and newly relocated to the big city – Durban. I look back on those four years I spent in retail management and feel a bit shell-shocked. Six bosses, five stores, two provinces, three cities, countless CCMA cases, sleepless nights of alarm call-outs, and many, many tears. Adulting is hard. At a certain point, staying with it and getting the next promotion would have been harder than just jumping ship.
We decided to play our luck and go teach English overseas instead. Maybe that wouldn’t feel like selling souls to corporations who didn’t see or care. In a way, it didn’t. Then again, there were many moments in those next five years in the classroom that still felt like we were in some rat race we didn’t choose. It was a fantastic experience to go out of South Africa and jump in the deep end of a foreign, non-English speaking culture, earning some real money. The children and co-teachers were sweet a lot of the time. The rice cakes were much sweeter.
We didn’t anticipate being quite so isolated, I think, without our support system. Since it was only meant to be for a short time, it didn’t seem to matter. Maybe we only noticed the difference when we came back again to South Africa and reunited with people who really knew us and loved us.
Then, we started working online. It was convenient and seemed like it opened up a whole world of possibilities. We were thinking about kids, being flexible, and not wanting to be in an office or schoolroom that kept us out of the sunshine. Idealistic, maybe. Our dues are being paid currently, but we’re doing it in the sunshine most days.
The journey hasn’t stopped, though. Online work has changed – metamorphosed – since 2014, when I first dabbled in freelancing. Teaching online is now a viable career for many with a better internet connection than I currently possess. Freelancing in anything has become extremely competitive. And then, there’s AI.
I’m not sure what this work thing is going to look like in five to ten years. Working on Mars? On a floating office as icebergs melt? Let’s see, shall we?
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