The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-to-5

by Taylor Pearson

Dan Norris was back. He had spent nine months and nearly his entire savings trying to build Informly. Two weeks before he needed to get a job to support his family in Australia, he had launched WP Curve, an outsourced service for software development, on pace to do almost a million dollars in revenue in 2015. It’s hard to square these two-year stories with the stories of my friends from college over the same period. Back in Columbus, Max had graduated with me and was working at one of the bigger accounting firms in town. He was anxious in the wake of his two-year performance review. He’d placed third out of five in his department despite working fifty- and sixty-hour weeks in the months leading up to tax time in April. He felt grateful for the 3% cost of living raise he’d gotten each year. His girlfriend’s parents were proud. He was “putting in his time.”