On the creative life, the side hustle, and work that is not quite work
Writing for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine, I want to consider, from my Shoreditch vantage, the neighbourhood’s peculiar relationship with work, in which everyone has a project and no one, quite, has a job. My other columns at my page are themselves, I suppose, a project of exactly this kind.
The Project
Ask anyone in Shoreditch what they do, and you will rarely receive the name of a job. Instead you will hear about a project, a venture, a thing they are working on, a creative endeavour that is not quite employment but is not quite not employment either. They are developing an app, or starting a label, or building a brand, or creating a platform, or working on something they will describe at length without ever quite explaining how it pays the rent. The job is gauche; the project is everything.
This is the creative economy in its purest form, a neighbourhood of people pursuing projects rather than holding jobs, building ventures rather than earning salaries, working on things rather than working at jobs. The project is the unit of Shoreditch labour, the thing one does, the answer to what one does, the focus of one’s creative energy, whether or not it produces any income at all.
The Question of Income
The question that hovers over the project, politely unasked, is how it pays. For the project, by definition, is not a job, does not come with a salary, does not reliably produce income. And yet the people pursuing projects must somehow live, must somehow pay the famously high rents, must somehow afford the flat whites and the vintage clothing. The mystery of Shoreditch is how the project economy sustains itself, how a neighbourhood of people with projects rather than jobs manages to survive.
The answers, when one investigates, are various and often unspoken. Some projects are funded by other, hidden work, the freelance gig, the part-time job, the consulting on the side, the unglamorous labour that funds the glamorous project. Some are funded by savings, or by family, or by the credit that allows the project to continue while the income does not materialise. And some, the data on freelance and creative work compiled by bodies like the Office for National Statistics would suggest, are simply not sustainable, projects pursued at a loss until the loss becomes unbearable.
The Dignity and the Precarity
The project economy has genuine dignity, the dignity of pursuing one’s creative vision, of working on what one believes in, of building something of one’s own rather than serving someone else’s ends. There is real value in this, real fulfilment, real meaning, the satisfaction of the self-directed creative life that the project represents. The people of Shoreditch are, many of them, genuinely pursuing their passions, building genuine creative ventures, and this is admirable.
But the project economy has genuine precarity too, the precarity of work without security, of income without reliability, of a creative life pursued without the safety net that a job provides. The project may fail, the income may not come, the rent may not be paid, and the creative dream may collide with the economic reality. Behind the glamour of the project lies often a genuine financial anxiety, a precarity that the talk of ventures and platforms does not quite conceal.
The Performance of Success
This precarity is hidden behind a performance of success, for in Shoreditch one does not admit that the project is struggling, that the income is not coming, that the rent is a worry. One speaks of the project with confidence, describes its prospects with optimism, performs the success that the precarity belies. This performance is itself a kind of labour, the maintenance of the appearance of a thriving creative life, the concealment of the anxiety beneath the confidence.
I am, I confess, a performer of this kind, describing my own projects with a confidence that conceals the precarity, performing a success that the economic reality complicates. We are all, in Shoreditch, performing the thriving creative life, concealing the anxiety, projecting the confidence, maintaining the appearance of projects that are going well, whether or not they are.
The Life We Have Chosen
For all its precarity, the project life is one we have, mostly, chosen, preferring the insecure pursuit of our own ventures to the secure service of someone else’s, the precarious creative life to the stable conventional job. This choice is a genuine one, a real preference for meaning over security, for self-direction over stability, for the project over the job. We have chosen the precarity, mostly, as the price of the creative life we want.
The Project That Becomes a Job
The rare and celebrated event in the project economy is the moment a project becomes a job, when the venture pursued at a loss begins, against the odds, to pay, when the creative dream becomes a sustainable income, when the project graduates from precarious passion to actual livelihood. This is the dream that sustains the project economy, the hope that animates the precarity, the possibility that the project will succeed, will pay, will become the job one wanted, the creative life made sustainable. When it happens, when a Shoreditch project succeeds, it is celebrated, held up as proof that the dream is possible, that the precarity can pay off, that the project can become a livelihood. But it happens rarely, and the rarity is part of what makes it precious, the long odds part of what makes the success meaningful. Most projects do not become jobs; most ventures do not pay; most creative dreams collide, eventually, with economic reality. But some succeed, and the some sustains the many, the rare success animating the common precarity, the dream of the project that becomes a job keeping the whole project economy in motion, everyone pursuing their venture in the hope of being the one whose project pays.
So I will continue to pursue my projects, to describe them with performed confidence, to conceal the precarity beneath the creative dream, to live the project life that everyone in Shoreditch lives, with its genuine dignity and its genuine anxiety, its real fulfilment and its real precarity. Everyone here has a project, and no one has a job, and we are all, in our way, both fulfilled and afraid, pursuing the creative life we chose and worrying, quietly, behind the confidence, about how, exactly, the project pays the rent.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
