IT WENT LIKE THIS:

Some time ago now, I was hired by a company based in Austria, the land of my forebears. It was a writing gig. The work itself looked boring as hell, but I didn’t mind so much on account of I have for years wanted an EU job, what with their generous PTO and sick days, and shorter work weeks, and on and on. In Germany, the government guarantees all full-time workers at least 20 days of vacation a year, but most places bump it up to 30. This place offered me 25. They said I could work from my apartment in Berlin and choose my own working hours. Thought I: “Wow!”

I am, after all, a Leisure Enthusiast. I am a man who enjoys being free and lazy on my own terms. I don’t want anyone standing around telling me what to do or dictating how I spend my time. Sorry! Forfeiting this sort of freedom is often an inexorable fact of life when it comes to the godforsaken matter of making money in order to survive . . . and I thought, well: if I’m going to have to work for someone else so I can pay the rent, I may as well get as many free days out of them as I can.

Come early March, I had resigned from my previous job, which was a fully remote and breathtakingly easy job at an American company based in Miami. I had been there for over a year and a half and basically no one in my life actually knew what I did. But the freedom this job afforded me . . . lord, was it beautiful. This unmoored existence is how I was able to travel around North America twice, first for six months from August 2023 to February 2024, and again from August 2024 to February 2025. I worked from airport terminals, trains, city buses, rental cars, hotel rooms, coffeeshops in the middle of nowhere, countless friends’ living rooms and spare bedrooms . . .

At one point I siphoned free wifi from the parking lot of a McDonald’s along a desolate stretch of highway in Ontario which God had all but forgotten about. And later that very same day, I worked from a three-car ferry while crossing Lake St. Clair to get from Canada back into the United States on my way to Detroit. As a salaried man, I stood upon the bow of the ship with my stupid little Tim Hortons coffee as fog engulfed both my weary body and mind!

This sort of freedom was difficult to give up. It pained me! But the reality is that I live in Europe and I figured I ought to find a job here to make it stick. Otherwise I would be tempted to continue living an itinerant lifestyle indefinitely . . . to haunt God’s green earth till Judgment Day! And I would have, too. See, fun though it often was, I do not know how you can truly sustain such a thing. Often you have very little privacy, your body is always recovering from some uncomfortable nap you took on a bus three days prior, you’re not in total control of your diet, and it’s difficult to have any sort of real and stable life when you’re living like a cockroach curled up on people’s couches and floors. When I think back on this time in my life, it is as if time stopped for me while I continued to watch it roll on by for everyone else. I was always just dropping by on my way to some other place. The goal was to keep moving. There wasn’t time for anything other than little episodic adventures and brief romances, which of course I love and miss now . . . but I have difficulty categorizing these memories. In my head they are an endless series of dream fragments punctuated by hundreds and then thousands of miles of rough road . . .

Well: As I had once convinced myself the antidote to my pain was nonstop travel, so too did I now decide I should inject something resembling reality into my life. I took the Austrian job. They bought me a plane ticket and sent me to Vienna to meet everyone. On a Monday morning last month, I boarded a plane and flew over snowy Czechia to get to snowy Vienna. From the airport I took a train to the central station there, then a tram to the hotel address they had given me. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but they put me in the dumpiest hotel I have ever seen in my life in the ugliest part of what is otherwise an extremely beautiful city. My pillow was about as thick as graham cracker and the mattress may as well have been made out of cardboard. The walls certainly were.

This is the only photo I took the entire time I was there:

Yeah. This was the view from my hotel room at sunrise. The only reason I was awake then was because the hotel room was so creepy and uncomfortable that I got about four hours of sleep the two nights I was there.

Anyway: The actual office was next door, and so all told I spent about two and a half days there. Nice though everyone seemed to be, I could not help but feel as though something were off. I felt it immediately. It felt off in that way where you know you don’t belong somewhere, and are different from everyone else there in some fundamental sense. Even and especially around the Americans, I felt an uneasiness I could not place. There was a subtle condescending air to them . . . and their sense of humor, or even lack thereof, was such that they came off like Type A bullies who only cared about work. I am very much the opposite of this. In all things, I choose peace and brotherly love. Though I am for all eternity a court jester who weeps on the inside, I like to think also that I can be, perhaps at night, also a sort of stoner-sage. I didn’t sit around hating anyone and I certainly don’t think work is the nucleus around which the rest of my life revolves. Get real.

By the second day, I had a sinking suspicion I had chosen poorly and that the job was going to be a total bust. I had made the wrong decision. This darkness I now bore witness to was not present at all when I was going through the interview process . . . the people whom I spoke to were cheerful and funny in their own way. And yet now in person they gave me the “seat’s taken” treatment, like I was the new kid in school and no one wanted to sit next to me on the bus ride to school. I felt very much like I was cast out into the cold periphery and not particularly included in anything. I was Rudolph the fucking red-nosed reindeer.

And then it got worse: the actual workload was insane, especially for that salary. I’d taken a fairly significant pay cut to work at this place because I’d rather be freer than make more money . . . but now it was clear I would be working triple or even quadruple as much as I had been before, indeed more so than any other job I’d ever had in my entire life. What had been sold to me as a bona fide writing gig was in reality a total hack job, the worst kind, and utterly godless . . . I was essentially a glorified ghostwriter for a content mill, churning out hateful nonsense to appease the SEO robots and dark algorithms which have all but destroyed the last remnants of the beautiful world we once knew and loved. In other words, I was working for the Enemy. Thought I: “Uh oh!”

Not only was I tricked into entering into every writer’s worst nightmare, I was also the only one of my kind at the company, which is to say I was in charge of ALL the writing, and ALL of it was so miserably soulless I wanted to throw myself upon the sword, so to speak. They seriously gave me AI-generated prompts and outlines to work with, if they gave me any direction at all, and then shrugged and left me to it. I feel a sort of nauseousness just thinking about it now!

During the few days I was at the Vienna office, my bosses, whom I was older than by seven and ten years, tossed me into the deep end with very little explanation as to what I was even supposed to do, and were borderline harsh when I slipped up on account of I had no fucking clue what was even expected of me. After several awkward lunches and dinners with both them and some of my other coworkers (the nicest of whom were the Russians and Austrians), I flew back to Berlin with a ten-ton dread in my heart. On the walk back to my apartment from my U-bahn stop, I started looking around for plots of grass where they could bury me after I inevitably jumped off my balcony, likely within the next few days.

The next two weeks were a bad dream . . . I sometimes worked ten-hour days, skipping lunch and working well past quitting time just to keep up. This is highly illegal in Germany, whose laws my employers were beholden to on account of that’s where I live and work. Even in Austria, my rights as a worker would have protected me from working over seven hours and forty-two minutes a day. And yet if I did not betray my own protections, I would be setting myself up for failure the rest of the week. Anything I did not complete that day, for one reason or another, would spill over to the next day. And on and on until soon I would be drowning in it, which is precisely what happened.

See: They had me writing at least one 1,200-word article a day, all of which I had to research, brainstorm, outline, write, edit, rewrite, re-edit, SEO-optimize, and then format for WordPress. And there was plenty of other work piled on top of this . . . I was also writing newsletters and social media posts and copy for the website, and so on, all of which would later have someone else’s name stamped on top of it, being the owner of the company, who was an American. And by the way, she didn’t like pretty much anything I wrote for her, so I ended up rewriting everything at least twice. And she wasn’t nice about it either!

At two in the morning I would receive chat notifications for additional work I would have to start and complete the next day on top of everything else I had to do. And on Saturdays and Sundays I would wake up to similar such messages: “Ryan, make sure you prioritize [some new godawful assignment] tomorrow morning.” There is nothing worse than being blissfully stoned on the couch watching a movie in your cozy apartment, and being rudely interrupted by the reminder of work. This is also unlawful in Germany. I groaned . . . the chill EU-ness of the job was completely poisoned by the fact that I worked for a bunch of Americans who had brought their bullshit hustle mentality to Europe.

. . . here I had originally written several paragraphs about The Last Straw—the moment I realized the job was turds all the way down, and that I had no choice but to resign in order to preserve my sanity and maintain the personal tranquility I have fostered for myself after many years of utter darkness. But then I remembered a line even my closest friends have said to me for almost a decade now:

“I have no idea what your job is.”

To which I invariably reply: “You wanna know what I do for a living . . . ?” and then:

I can’t help it: I love that nobody knows what I do. In fact I love being completely unaccounted for, and my whereabouts a mystery, and on and on. And so in the tradition of being as vague as possible regarding how I make money, which in my opinion is often the least-interesting thing about a person, I will summarize my departure thusly: I believe they set me up to fail in order to get me to resign. Essentially they put me in a position where, had I cared at all about keeping the job (which must have been their assumption), I would have felt completely humiliated.

And yet I did not feel this way because I had a contingency plan that would keep me solvent without them: on my final day at the company I had just left, they had offered to rehire me as a part-time contractor. The work was so easy I had to say yes.

So after one of the most mean-spirited setups I’ve ever experience at a job, one in which the spotlight was cast upon me in front of all my coworkers in order to amplify the shame they assumed I would feel, not unlike that dream sequence in WILD STRAWBERRIES where a classroom full a students stare emptily and with a sort of contempt at the Dreamer for merely existing:

. . . I messaged my boss and told her I was resigning from my job and would finish out the week. She said: “Thanks for being honest!” and that was that. And finish out the week I did in the sense that I was simply online (and mostly napping), but you better believe I did absolutely nothing outside that. On my Final Day, my boss asked me to send her an email of what I had finished up since putting in my resignation, and what I did instead was wipe my laptop and put it in a shipping box and walk to my nearest späti to ship it back to Vienna. Auf nimmerwiedersehen! . . . which is to say:

GOODBYE FOREVER!

My rent and living expenses are so cheap in Berlin that I can live without fear on a smaller salary. Were I still in California, I would be destitute within 24 hours, and would be staring down the barrel of moving into a cardboard box. But here I can live freely in my modest studio apartment in Schöneberg, the best neighborhood in the whole city, don’t you know.

Listen: As I said before, I got to be free. And now, BY GOD, I’ve finally got my hands on it, the freedom I have always sought. The work I’m doing now takes about 12 to 15 hours a month, if that . . . usually I just bang it out in a weekend, and then the rest of the month is mine. It has been about five and a half weeks now of living this way, living freely, and all the residual stress which had manifested itself in me and created psychosomatic symptoms are gone like the morning mist. All that is left is me: a free man living in harmony in the final days of Western civilization. My only master now is Time. Fortunately I have plenty of it.

And what will I do now with this ocean of time which is all mine? After something like 15 years of wanting to do so, I am finally going to treat Making Stuff as a full-time job. So sayeth the old prophet:

I have two novels I’m working on. I have been working on them for some time now. If I think about how long, I will cry tears which scald like molten lead. And so saying, it is time to fucking finish them or else I might never finish them. Heaven help me, I cannot abide such a thing . . .

IS A DREAM A LIE IF IT DON’T COME TRUE, OR IS IT SOMETHING WORSE . . . ?

Because I am treating this like a Real Job Upon Which My Life Depends (which is true), I have made the necessary decision to create a sort of schedule for myself so I can write for seven or eight hours a day five days a week with plenty of time left over to do whatever it is I do at night—all those nice things that make life worth living to me.

BEHOLD:

10:30: wake up
10:30 to noon: make breakfast, read, do pull-ups, walk around the block
noon to 16:00: write!
16:00 to 17:00: lunch
17:00 to 20:00: write!
20:00: night walk
21:00: dinner
21:00 to midnight: chill, take a bath, write letters, gaze into the forest below from my balcony
midnight to 02:00/03:00: eat a gummy / drink coffee / watch a movie
04:00 to ???: whatever

. . . and then I shall sleep the sleep of a perfect little angel, which is what I am!

The other thing is that I plan to update this website at least once a day, however small the post may be. This is something I have wanted to do since I first made this place, and though I’ve had unbroken streaks in the past, I never got past two or three weeks. And so I will endeavor now to do that thing. On top of that, there are tons of little changes and new pages I want to finally finish . . . ones I have been meaning to do something about for years. NOW IS THE TIME.

I mentioned last week I have a Sony FX30, a nice cinema camera I bought when I was still making decent money, and now I will finally start writing and filming things with it here in Berlin. I got this text file on my computer with a hundred ideas, if not more. I’m going to start going through the list and do something with all this stuff. As with writing, or perhaps any creative endeavor, the most important part of the whole process is to just make things, whatever they may be, as often as possible. You can always chisel it down into a masterpiece later . . .

AND WHAT ABOUT THE WEEKENDS?

In addition to resuming my role as a beloved local celebrity and Man-About-Town, I plan to do plenty of this:

. . . and this:

Well! There is more to say, but I will say it when I am fully submerged in what Lynch called THE ART LIFE. For now I am wading slowly into those cosmic waters, though I reckon a month from now I will be up to my neck in it, and will know it better. I was delayed, you see, having just spent nearly two weeks in Spain and England and Scotland writing and shooting video, a small luxury I am afforded now that I do not live beneath the tyrannical shadow of full-time employment . . . and so I have not yet fully surrendered to the schedule which I have told you of. But this week I cast myself into that friendly abyss of my own making. At the end of all things, what will be left behind is The Work, which begins now. I am creating foolish things because I am a fool. After all . . .