I quit content creation and went back to a 9-5 after 10 years
Here's what this experience taught me.
Here I am, once again going against the trend. While my feed is flooding with posts like “I quit my corporate job to become a content creator” I went ahead and did the complete opposite.
When I started 10 years ago, things were very different. TikTok didn’t exist, Instagram was just a place to share photos of your food, and people enjoyed reading blog posts. So I started with a website writing 5x a week and sharing one video on YouTube per week. Instagram was just a place to bring traffic to my website and videos.
Unfortunately, I never had the privilege to “do content creation” on its own. I always had to have something going on on the side to pay my bills. I also moved to a different country, went back to college and had to start over (career-wise) in the middle of this process. It was definitely not a linear journey.
Don’t get me wrong, I have ZERO regrets about this experience. I learned so much about myself and what I’m capable of. I learned how to shoot and edit videos, how to write and even code to create a website I liked. Branding, photography, videography, marketing myself, SEO—it was a great experience.
But at the end of the month, the math wasn’t mathing. And even though I was incredibly passionate about the content I created and proud of my ethics of not accepting just anything to make money as an influencer and content creator, I still needed to pay my bills.
Handling two jobs, dealing with the uncertainty of your future in another country, hoping for the day that your videos would finally go viral, plus having the pressure of ‘you have to post every day or you will disappear’ were just too much. My creativity was slowly dying and I reached a point that I call a tower moment.
I felt like everything around me was falling apart, like a tower crumbling in front of my eyes and there was nothing else I could do to prevent it. In a way, I felt pure relief of not having to try to hold everything in it’s place anymore. As you can imagine, holding a tower together can be quite a burden. On the other hand, I felt completely lost and went deep down into a grief process.
I was saying goodbye to a dream, to a version of myself that would no longer exist and to an identity I had created for the past 10 years. While grieving, I had to start looking for a new 9-5 job, something stable and completely different from what I had done in the past years. I couldn’t remember the last time I had updated my resume or done a job interview. My previous experiences were mostly freelancing with one client recommending me to another. I was just flowing to where life was taking me. But now I had to take matters into my own hands and actually go look for something.
I’m going to be completely honest with you. This process was PAINFUL! I hated every minute of it. I had no idea of what I wanted to do, which company I wanted to work for, and remember, I was grieving my old life and often times thinking that I was a failure for not being able to make content creation my “real job”.
I was applying to jobs I knew I didn’t want just because to play this game, I needed to apply to 100 jobs to get 10 interviews (if I was lucky). For a creative like me, applying for these jobs felt like such a waste of my time and energy. It was truly painful. But after two months, things slowly started to fall into place. I started coming across some job postings that would actually make me excited, and that was a game changer.
Here’s my first lesson — when you have no idea what to do, look for things that bring you joy, things that make you excited. Joy should be your guide in this phase and will bring you back to life.
I finally started seeing this process from a different perspective. Saying no to crazy freelancing hours and demanding clients, and saying yes to corporate benefits and a healthier work environment. Saying goodbye to using my weekends to shoot and edit for hours, and saying yes to a stable paycheque and saving for my retirement.
I personally always had many reasons against 9-5s, but man, how the Universe decided to humble me and show how wrong I was. When I think about my younger self driving around in my home town just to see the beautiful houses in the neighbourhood, or all the interior design magazines I used to devour every weekend at my grandma’s… and now I get paid to do the same. It blows my mind.
Here’s my second lesson — as a millennial, I somehow was wired to believe that there’s only one way to be happy in your career, and that is to follow your passion and do what you love. But let me tell you, there’s no perfect job, even when we’re doing what we love. We’re not a special generation that found a magic formula to finding love in every aspect of our work. We just have the privilege of having many options and being free to move around, experiment and try something new.
But no matter what you choose to do, no matter which direction you decide to follow — if it’s quitting the corporate job or quitting content creation — money is important. Paying your bills is important.
I cannot say how many times I felt grateful for having a 9-5, and how many times I complained about it in the last year. But there’s one thing I can’t complain—the peace of mind of not having to worry about money at the end of the month. Being able to support myself, especially as a woman, carries a freedom that is priceless. Plus, financial stability was like medicine to my creativity. I now have the free mental space to allow it to flourish again.
Finally, what this whole journey taught me was that our work should not become our entire identity. I am not my work, I am not my career. My worth is not connected to my job. My job is just one part of who I am, and as long as I’m having fun and things are keeping me excited, I’m keeping the job.
See you in the next one,
Luiza