The Day Job Habit

"Day Job" is an expression traditionally used by actors, writers, musicians and other "creative" types to denote, with a degree of disdain, a job taken out of necessity, as a hopefully brief detour on the road to success on one's true path. While almost any job can be a day job, some have a long history of fitting into the day job niche. Restaurant jobs, especially waiting tables, have long been taken by such reluctant participants in the job market, partly for their flexible hours.

The problem with day jobs is that they can become a long-term habit. I know this from long experience. In the more than two decades that I have, theoretically, been in the job market, I've spent less than one full year employed at anything that could reasonably be called a real job. By real job, I mean a full time, non-temporary job, with benefits, where your salary is described in annual, as opposed to weekly or hourly terms. While I've never been a waiter, I have washed dishes, delivered lunches, sorted paperwork in mailrooms, been a messenger, sold falafel from a pushcart across the street from Rockefeller Center, worked cash registers in health food stores, painted a few houses and did house-sitting and errands for elderly folk. I've clocked the most hours of all doing temp data entry work for a financial institution. What have I done in my often frustrating attempts to secure a day job-free future? A little of almost everything day job haters have ever done -various one-person businesses (from selling jeans on Canal Street in New York to affiliate marketing online), trading stocks and commodities, buying and selling art and antiques, writing (articles, a couple of novels, scripts), promoting events and probably some other quixotic schemes that have temporarily slipped my ADD-inclined mind at the moment.