Quitting your dayjob

On feedback in the isolation economy (written a few weeks ago)

The first set of jokes was about getting your dog to lick your balls. Drivel, not because the subject matter was too crass, but it was disastrously executed. Joke is a strong word, this guy’s set rested on the idea that a dog licking your balls is inherently funny and so it was more a description of the concept than it was a punchline delivered as a surprise. Even the supportive audience of arts students barely gave him anything. The next guy wasn’t much better. To his credit his material had the structure of jokes, but jokes about why men can’t multitask would have been considered hack had they been done on Mock the Week 20 years ago, so it was almost excruciating hearing them delivered in earnest in 2025.

I thought for a second that maybe standup in France was behind the UK, and maybe that because the material wasn’t overtly sexist, with no wives beaten and 0 mistresses involved at all, it was cutting edge post-#METOO stuff that marked some kind of vibe shift in French comedy. I was quickly informed otherwise by the people I was with, who also thought it was shit, though they reckoned it dated itself around 2010. Slightly behind then, but not so much that “what’s the deal with airplane food?” would fly.

These two had the air of amateurs, hobbyists who wished they weren’t, but whose palpable desperation betrayed their realisation that a cornered off portion of an arts centre in Reims, with a busy bar of indifferent punters operating by the side of the stage, was probably the best they could hope for in terms of an audience. The third guy however was different. He was confident, cocky even, showing none of the vulnerability of the first two who tripped a couple of times and pleaded with their eyes for an audience reaction. His gear was topical, it started well with some easy gear about the Trump re-inauguration earning him some laughs that extended into the bar where I was sat. Cheap stuff sure, but it was more than the others had got. He then stumbled through a joke about Macron whose premise had yet to be worked out and went dark a few times, taking up what I assume were ironically extreme positions, but lacking the verve to pull it off properly. The noise from the bar sometimes overwhelmed the sound of the speakers on the other side of the room, and while my French is fluent, it’s not so fluent that the nuances of comedy would always be obvious to me, but I got the sense that the audience was struggling with the material. There weren’t any walkouts or outraged looks, just a sense of bemusement as people failed to work out what he was trying to do.

Unlike the first two this lad did have something about him, or maybe I just narcissistically recognised myself in his unearned confidence and mistook it for charisma. Don’t quit your day job I thought, before filing away the thought for use in a Substack post about struggling to get a sense of my own abilities in order to prove that i can write well and thread things together in a rebuke to my critics, who I will establish later in the post don’t actually exist, forming the knot at the heart of the essay.

Don’t quit your day job. The phrase echoed in my head, the hypocrisy of it. I filed my tax return last week. I filed it on the 31st of January, the day of the deadline. Not that I was stressed about this, I earned just over £7000 last year, it was very simple to file. I’m not a comedian, to clarify. Though if you’re reading this you probably knew that already, my substack isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs.

I didn’t have a day job to quit technically. I had spent the time between 18 and 25 studying and working shitty jobs in retail and hospitality. Then on completing my journalism masters, I was offered a job editing Le Monde’s English edition, but they were unable to actually hire me because they hadn’t worked out how difficult it was to hire Brits after Brexit. So I ended up a freelance journalist/ sort-of-non-fiction-writer by default.

I get asked a lot by students about my work, I suppose because very young people see a byline in the Guardian and assume that means you’re successful and a real person, and not a fucking idiot painted into a corner by a combination halfthought principles and bad decisions, whose ability to even pursue freelancing as an option relies entirely on their parents generous willingness to put up with them living at home without paying rent or board.

I try and give these students the best possible advice. Namely that it’s a stupid idea to become a journalist, and an even stupider one to go freelance, but if they really want to I wish them the best will in the world and will try and help. The allure of trying to make a living writing is like drugs or sex, young people are going to do it anyway so you may as well furnish them with the right information so they know what they’re getting into when they inevitably make a go of it.

Aside from the poor pay, when it even arrives, and you being everyone’s last priority all the time, freelancing is difficult because of how isolated it is, especially if you don’t live in London or another major city. It’s impossible to tell if things aren’t going well because of you, or because global conditions make that inevitable. Am I unable to get a job because the UK is in the worst hiring drought since the peak of the financial crisis in 2009, and there are hundreds of people going for every job, lots, inevitably with wikipedia blue link parents, or is it because I’m actually just not very good? Are all my pitches failing to land because it’s a shit idea to try and write about trainrobbers and trainhoppers and documentation of these activities in experimental film, and because no one cares about attempts to examine French politics in depth? Are my scoops and stories actually just boring and unimportant? Or does Trump suck oxygen out from everything that isn’t him and editors get tunnel vision when he’s in office? I find it genuinely hard to tell. It’s probably a bit of both but because I spend most of my time sending emails to dead silence, or at best a reply saying “sorry this isn’t a good fit for us at this time”, I don’t know why my ideas were rejected. When they are accepted, I don’t get much insight into why either, I don’t know most of my editors in person and because I have no relationship with them beyond email I don't want to annoy them with beggy requests for feedback.

Huge numbers of people exist in this liminal isolation economy, around 5 million people in the UK are self employed, and presumably many also find it hard to know if they’re struggling because they’re no good at what they do for money or because the economy is in the toilet despite Rachel Reeves’ attempts to cast the magic growth incantation.

Working in bars, there was regular feedback on how we were doing, and a social environment, literally, in which to work. In this sense it was the opposite of freelance life. Of course I do get to go out into world for reporting, but I spend the bulk of my time, especially at the moment, working on a sofa, and engaging with the world through written journalism and social media. I got feedback when I was working in supermarkets too, usually of the negative kind. I didn’t care about that work, and it depressed me, but it didn’t feel so disorientating. If I was being told off it was because I’d not done things by the book or had been caught actively breaking a rule, if I wasn’t then it was all fine and I could carry on ignoring what I was supposed to be doing and hiding the fact that I was listening to a Kafka audiobook in an earpod concealed beneath my long hair.

Of course I do get feedback in the form of online readers, so I was being facetious when I said I don’t have critics. But I don’t count them. If you are commenting on a stranger’s piece of writing you are probably unwell. So although it’s nice to get good feedback I do tend to file it in a mental recycle bin alongside the catholic integralist think tank nitwits who called me a paedophile apologist because I wrote an article about Sargon of Akkad.

This piece of writing is a case in point, it’ll drop into your inbox and maybe you’ll read it but no one. Not I nor you, will ever think of it again. Why would we? Just another piece of digital flotsam joining the ever growing pile stored somewhere in a data centre.

I don’t really have a point to end on, just that it’s weird making your living like this. Given that this is my day job, I’m not going to quit it until someone tells me to do it in person. Though maybe if this piece caused everyone to unsub immediately, I’d give it a second thought.