Can you quiet quit when you are a business of one?
My creativity switches off in winter. Cold days and less natural light just kills it for me. I used to worry about it, but instead I've learned not to fight it. It's the way it is. I am not a productivity machine. I am here to impress no one. Now, I submit to it. I plan ahead, and ensure my shop is fully stocked with creations to get me through those quiet months.
This January, I've had a strange return to creativity. I'm not sure why. We haven't been enjoying particularly mild weather or sunny days. But I have made the most of it and made several new dresses. I've enjoyed the sudden yet short-lived change of pace.
Usually, in the colder months, I divert my attention towards other things like trying to improve my social media game, reviewing my finances and researching and planning new products I might launch in my Etsy shop. Luckily for me, I don't have to please anyone else at work, so my productivity levels are all my own. I don't have to tick any boxes or satisfy someone else's profit margins. And that's fine for winter (for me at least), but enthusiasm when you work alone can be hard to muster on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes you just need to give yourself some slack.
I have read a lot of articles about the post pandemic trend of quiet quitting, which seems to be the trend amongst the employed at the moment. The idea that you can become passive in your job when nothing changes, and it stops rewarding you, suddenly made sense within my own choice of work. Times are tough, and sometimes you question yourself. But of course this is not new, and I would have happily done this 20 years ago when I existed in souless jobs that gave me zero satisfaction, before I discovered that self-employment was something I could do for myself.
Now, instead of fighting it, I have created new areas within what I do to keep money coming in. I've taken on new side hustles which help deal with the financially difficult aspects of an inconsistent income. They are completely different from what I normally do and it takes me, briefly, out of that creative bubble and gets me into a different state of mind. This is, in itself, really helpful, especially when business is slow or I just need a creative recharge by taking a break.
The pandemic of 2020 and the restrictions that have followed in the last three years have made just staying in business a challenge, with few support networks or inspiration. Constant financial challenges mean that the battle is just being here, and the relentlessness of that alone can be overwhelming.
I wouldn't swap it for an office job, and I can completely understand people deciding to only do the minimum in their job. I've been there. I've done it. I've had those mind-numbingly thankless jobs, and I'm not very good at just getting on with it.
So to you, I say, pursue your goals and find work happiness. It's out there.
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