Tweeted "never been better thanks" yesterday. One line, read as performative. It wasn't.
The thing nobody tells you about quitting and going alone is that the bad days are bad in a specific way, but the average is much higher than a job's average.
In a job the baseline is fine and the peaks are small. You're never thrilled and never devastated. The whole distribution is narrow and slightly above zero. In self-employment the baseline is harder, sure. But the peaks are real. Net positive most weeks once you adjust for the fact that you're now allowed to be happy at work, which is a permission you forgot existed.
When somebody asks "how are you" and you've been heads-down for ten hours on something you care about, "never been better" is true. Not in the LinkedIn way. In the "I forgot to check my phone for six hours" way.
The corollary is that the language has shifted weight. When I said "fine" in a job, I meant fine. When I say "fine" now while building, something is wrong. Default-fine has moved up enough that the words underneath it carry different information.
This is the cleanest argument for self-employment I can make. Not money. Not freedom in the brochure sense. Just that most days you mean "never been better" when you say it, and the bad weeks still beat the okay weeks of the job version of you.
I don't expect this to be universal. Some weeks I'd say exhausted. Some weeks I'd say lost. But the average moved up enough that the default response had to change, and I'm not lying when I send the one-liner.
Eleven days in and the new default is real.
— Simon