Every morning I get up at about 6:30, get the necessary caffeine fix, do a workout (so that there is at least one thing in the day that makes me feel good about myself) and get reacquainted with the chair I'm about to melt into for the following 8 hours. Sound familiar?
Being confined to a small space where you'd slave away staring at a screen for eight hours may have worked in the past, but that's no longer the case. What's even worse is perhaps sitting around aimlessly if you've finished your work, just because you have to "clock out" when someone else has determined that they've had enough of your presence. No, thanks. If you're one of the 3% of people I talk to daily, who actually like their jobs, congrats to you. For the rest of us, the day drags on like a long f*cking trek through the Sahara, but fear not—things are finally starting to shift.
We aren't the baby boomers who grew up fighting for the now quixotic American Dream, nor are we our parents, happily basking in the comfort of a stable career path, even if it meant puking their guts out at the office, just so that they could spare a few precious sick days and put together a seven-day long cruise in the Bahamas, where all they did was sleep and eat lukewarm buffet food with watered down Mojitos. Us, Millennials, are too creative and determined to be pouring all our energy into someone else's ideas. We hate "corporate America" and will not be told when to pee and went to eat lunch. We are confident and have a lot fewer f*cks to give them our parents did. We backpack through Southeast Asia and scuba dive in Australia. We are a generation of self-starters who blog, tweet, write and fundraise our startups from any point on the map. In a time of instantaneous communication and insatiable craving for attention, validation, and profit, we refuse to put our heart into someone else's projects. We'd rather be artists living out of a car in downtown LA than mindlessly typing our days away in cubicles eating stale bagels. We desperately chase freedom at all cost, looking up to entrepreneurs like Tim Ferriss and Ramit Sethi, who started from scratch and broke the shackles of conventional employment. We admire travel bloggers/hustlers who make their wanderlust a full-time lifestyle.
We stumble upon articles about people quitting their jobs and working from their new "offices"—tropical bars in Bali—every day. We are workers, who have the capacity of expanding extreme amounts of energy if needed, but we say hell no to being "employees" in the traditional sense. We don't want to waste our vital years working so that we could collapse into retirement 50 years later, our bodies laden with old age diseases and pains, just to realize that we made someone else rich. We want to experience everything and to be successful. And we want it right now.
The future of the world's workforce isn't dragged down by computers, offices and paid holiday; it's 100% remote, done from planes crossing the Atlantic or villas in Mallorca. And we aren't employees; we are creative business people marching to the beat of our own drum. There's no turning back. "Do or die" is our only choice, and be sure that we are on our way to absolutely erase corporate culture.