Twenty years without a boss

Since 2005 I've been an independent freelancer, with occasional tours of duty in companies — contract here, staff position there. I never lasted long, and it wasn't the coffee. The 8-to-17 arrangement takes the best hours of your day, every day, and in exchange gives you the privilege of sitting still. Sitting still is the one workload I cannot process. I need action, or I need genuine rest — and by rest I mean sleep, sometimes two days of it. My burnout recovery procedure has a 100% success rate and zero subscription fees.

What the office taught me

I've worked in Lithuanian companies big and small. I won't name names — nobody's paying me for advertising. But I'll say this: from the inside, most of them run on the same inherited chaos, lovingly maintained like a legacy system nobody dares to reboot. Meanwhile, the individual clients I worked with from the Netherlands and Germany were a different experience entirely: clear heads, clear requirements, mutual respect, invoice paid. It turns out work can just be… work.

Corporate people will tell you about their values. Of course they will — how else do you keep people in the machine? You invent a mythology, print it on posters, and push the conveyor belt along. I understand the mechanism. I just decline to be a part in it.

The uncomfortable part

Here's what I won't romanticize: freedom is paid for in advance. There were genuinely hard years, and the lesson they taught me was brutally simple — the harder it gets, the harder you push, and every push buys you a little more independence from everyone. I ran that loop for two decades. Now I'm strong, I don't fear challenges, and I only move forward.

But the same honesty cuts the other way: I don't excuse laziness, especially the kind where people are irresponsible toward themselves. Every one of us can become a specialist, a builder, an investor — pick your word. What it requires is a goal and the refusal to imprison yourself for ten years in the same office chair while calling it a career.

Your time is the only non-renewable resource in the whole stack. Spend it like an owner, not like a tenant.