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Over Employed

I can understand what drives people to be "over-employed" having done a simpler variant of it when J was growing up. I picked up contract work that jobs that I was way over-qualified for. While the money was far from great, it gave me the gift of time that I so badly needed as a single-mother. Work was not an overhang in my life - the job was simple, transactional and only took a small fraction of my billable hours. Given that it was so easy, I always exceeded expectations and built a good reputation for myself - known to be very reliable, delivers on time and with high bar. For me the hours in the day that the strategy freed up to do things for J was far more valuable than the money. 

Having done this for a decade and half until J was in high school, taught me a few important lessons that folks who are trying to maximize financial security instead of free time, will learn along the way. Over time, you become a lesser version of who could have been professionally and that bleeds into your personal life in a bad way. People who are working traditional jobs, making the moves needed for raises and promotions are living in a parallel universe. Someone like me would struggle a great deal to get into that lane and thrive. 

So if you ever grow tired of this way of living, you would find your options rather limited. You may find yourself never wanting to take on a big, challenging, and interesting problem which you can solve given your skills and experience. You would be concerned about having to work the hours that would require and the level of pre-occupation with the problem that would bring. It would no longer be possible to mentally check-out as soon as a thing was done. This means, you will never see yourself do things you believe you have innate potential to do. 

Instead, you will see others rise to the challenge and thrive. Some of them will do well enough to hire you for the kind of undemanding work that you like doing - they know you will knock it out of the park and will gladly pay you for it. You will find yourself working for any number of talent-less hacks and feel stifled by their lack of imagination. There is no such thing as a free lunch no matter how hard you work towards achieving autonomy while working for someone. You play by their rules and are limited by them. I never thought I was doing something particularly clever back in the day - it was about giving my kid the best shot within the constraints of my situation. In an another life, I would have done very different.
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