On being broke
Life as an economic underachiever
To start with I’ve never had any - I’ve been broke my entire adult life. Not broke in the sense of true poverty, for there’s always been a parental home to go back to if I got into real trouble tho, having actually gone back once, it’s very much an option in theory.
Nonetheless, my own ability to earn money has always been comparatively meagre, and when I’ve actually had money I’ve always spent it on such luxuries as food and rent. Occasionally I buy clothes.
In 2023, I got the first decently-paying job of my adult life. Even more crucially, the first job I enjoyed doing; that was what above all felt like such a breakthrough. Not, as so many times before, a job where the whole afternoon is spent watching the clock down to precious hour of release. Having accepted, I worked remotely before moving to Belgium on September 30 2023. And now, eighteen months later, after turning up every day and committing myself fully to the work I find myself… still broke.
Indeed, being in full-time work has somehow made me worry about money more. Once you’ve made that decision to work five days a week – and to be clear I accepted all the other full-timers I was offered before too, they just never lasted – you immediately begin assessing the exact price you got for your time.
In the days when I was freelancing in London, doing all manner of things from running pub quizzes to market research to stay afloat, I worried much less about money. I was so short of what I needed that it seemed pointless to worry much about it, like a single man obsessing about his imaginary partner's taste in music. And in Berlin before that I could make fifty euros go a week.
How I struggled in the Smoke tho, living in London on circa 20k a year, doing all kinds of financial gymnastics to hit rent. How did I survive? It normally involved running up a good bit of credit card debt in the winter, then paying it off with two months of full-on work in the summer tour-guiding season. I’d max out my bonuses and tips then concentrate on the arts stuff in the winter.
The NHS helped, and a friend giving me a generous deal on rent, and eventually moving onto a shared mortgage with my ex-wife cut my rent costs. Also when I arrived in London aged 31, I was just younger, with my needs simpler and a desire for fame superseding any wish for material reward. I was, at the time, happy enough with what I was doing, and the fact that I had no savings seemed much less important than the friends I was accumulating. Besides, they were all broke too.
There were also many near misses in terms of good jobs. I got down to the candidate tests for a job as an in-house translator at the German embassy, where I finished my papers first out of all candidates and failed; an attractive job at a medical research company stumbled on my ability to carry out phone calls in French. And of course there were numerous rejected or ignored applications.
It was all kinds of heart-breaking, especially for my former spouse who hails from a culture where a greater economic contribution is not an optional in a man, an attitude I consider sounder than pretending such things don’t matter. At one point, she told me that the poor material quality of our lives had drained her of her attraction to me, that our living a ‘poor life’ had proved a turn-off.
Yet my whole adult life I’ve worked so bloody hard. With this newsletter, I’ve written the equivalent of a book on top of working full time for the last three years; I’ve written seven full-length unproduced scripts. I laboured for ten years over a novel which has brought in just over £200. It’s impossible to say that it was ‘worth’ it in every sense; in personal development, yes, in status, perhaps, in financial terms, of course not. I certainly think it’s more than a couple of hundred smackers of work, and probably should have brought in more than my lifetime earnings as a sperm donor. Tho I think my novel has recently overtaken my jism in terms of lifetime profitability.