Autonomy and Afternoon Naps

MY LATEST COLUMN for The Wall Street Journal—and also my last—is about how costly it is to be self-employed. You have to buy your own health and disability insurance, fund retirement with no help from an employer, and pay Social Security payroll taxes as both an employer and employee.

All this has been driven home for me over the past 15 months, since I left fulltime employment at Citigroup. But there is an upside to being self-employed: You have a wonderful sense of autonomy.

How do I use this autonomy? Yes, I’ve developed a fondness for afternoon naps. But I also find I’m working harder than ever. To economists, this would be no surprise: If you’re self-employed, you have a much greater financial incentive to put in long hours. But it’s more than that: Work is far more enjoyable when you know success is almost entirely within your control, with no risk that surly colleagues will drop the ball or an ornery boss will kill the project. Result: Greater happiness. A 2009 Pew Research Center study found that 39% of self-employed workers said they were “completely satisfied” with their jobs, versus 28% for salaried workers.