I can’t even with this
oh my god
Geez noooo!!
But.. that… that is employment. It’s self-employment. You are earning income straight from clients or organizations as opposed to relying on a business as a middleman.
Why do people think that self-employment means that people just laze around all day and shit out content at will? Because that’s not how it works.
Self-employment is an actual job. You’re not only your own boss, but you’re your own creative director, your own accountant, your own PR manager and your own… everything else under the damn sun.
Sure, you’ve got the choice of not working for an entire week and you could just play video games instead. But you’ll lose money off of that. You need to plan accordingly. It’s not like working for a company in the sense that you’ll get compensated time and a half, because that is not how self-employment works.
Then you’ve got taxes to worry about, which presents a far different beast than just filing a W2. You can’t afford to make a mistake lest you get audited, and if you don’t get audited, chances are you might owe taxes.
You also have to pay for your own insurance. General stuff on top of maybe dental and vision too. Even so, if you get into a situation where you’ll be unable to work for an extended period, guess what? You get no sick leave much less extended leave. You won’t get a consistent paycheck like you would if you were employed elsewhere. You lose money for each day you don’t work, and much much more if you can’t work due to injury or illness.
The great thing about it though, is that once you get a good grasp on how to handle being self-employed, it can be pretty damn rewarding. If you’re skilled enough, you can produce a lot more content in less time, or perform a service in less time than if you were employed elsewhere. Depending on the type of work you do, you can spread your work out to be done throughout the day, and you don’t have to completely sacrifice your social life to do what needs to be done.
If you know your friends want to hang out at a bar one evening, you can spend most of the time before then that day to work, then hang out with them and relax a bit. And depending on the type of job you do, you can also work while eating lunch somewhere, or eating dinner, or elsewhere that’s not even your house. If you’ve got the proper items to do your job with and you’re able to lug them around somewhere, you can work wherever you damn well want.
So I mean, as long as you know what you’re in for, know how to do your taxes, know how to keep a good budget, then for all I care you can stay self-employed.
All Patreon does is provide a very easy platform for artists to allow their clients and customers to pay them on a consistent basis. It allows for content creators to keep doing what they’re already doing regularly instead of having to take up an entirely unrelated job that would inevitably take more time away from the things that they want to do. And those that do pay the content creator monthly truly WANT them to keep doing what they’re doing because they like their content, and want to see them do shit more often.
So to all of you who think that they’re entitled to every single little thing an artist makes– fuck you. A good amount of artists produce enough stuff for everyone to indulge in, if they want to produce something special for the people that, you know, want to support them they’ve got every right to do so.
Go take your dumbass entitlement complex and shove it up your ass.
Wrekt
