HealthyGamerGG - Work Culture Today Is Actually Unrealistic

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

This episode breaks down why freelancing has gotten harder (not easier) in the platform era—and what actually helps people stay stable without burning out. Dr. K frames the problem as structural (platform incentives, competition, surveillance, ratings power) and argues the “survival move” is shifting from hope labor (do good work and hope it turns into more work) to relational labor (actively managing client relationships, expectations, and repeat business), while building independence outside any single platform. Topics covered include: The “autonomy paradox”: why freelancers often end up working longer, more chaotic hours despite “freedom.” Platform-driven squeeze: competition, undercutting, quality being hard to judge, and why price + speed become the default filters. Ratings + reputational dependence: how reviews become leverage, pushing freelancers to over-accommodate and get trapped on one platform. What works better than “hope labor”: relational labor—communication, expectation-setting, and relationship-building as part of the job. Survival strategies: diversify into adjacent skills, build a “home base” off-platform, and gather better feedback directly from clients (plus “distributed mentorship” communities). HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3Szt HG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alokinoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist gamer and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. Today, we're going to talk about how to survive as a freelancer. Being a freelancer used to be a great gig.

I worked with so many people who sort of didn't fit the mold of a corporate. at 9 to 5. So enter freelance work where you don't have a particular boss, you don't have to show up at a particular place or a particular time. You have the freedom to do the kind of work that you want when you want with the kind of creative direction that you choose. But something happened over the last 10, 15 or 20 years where this sort of freelancer environment that was originally built by the internet has gradually gotten worse and worse and worse. So some of these major platforms have entered the picture. And they offer a very alluring promise that, hey, if you sign up for this platform within hours or days and definitely not weeks, you can start working. You can start working

right away because these platforms do something very, very, very important. They take millions of people who want work to be done and they connect them with millions of people who want work. So it's sort of this leveling of the playing field. But the way that things have evolved, freelancers are actually getting crushed. The first thing that a lot of freelancers have noticed is something called the autonomy paradox, which basically says that even if you're a freelancer, you sort of theoretically have a lot of autonomy. But in practice, you actually find yourself working longer hours, working more non-standard hours, working late into the night with tight deadlines. And so this idea of, oh, I'm like a freelancer, I can work whenever I want to, wherever I want to, has turned into

the practical image of being isolated at home. having a lot of clients who are incredibly demanding, asking you to work at all hours of the day because they need all of their stuff done right now. Now the question is how does this evolve? How is it that this sort of world of freedom ends up as highly demanding clients? This is because in the current nature of freelance work, there's a certain systemic or structural part that necessitates you making particular compromises. And unless you know how to adapt to this particular environment, which is evolving incredibly rapidly, you will absolutely get burnt out. So let's dive into one really simple example. So it's so insecure, unless you have 10 clients,

then you can breathe. But then with 10 clients, it means each client has an expectation of a certain workload for you to do. So you can say, I'll get 10 clients for security, but then can you satisfy all those 10 clients? You can have three clients, but then when they disappear, that's it. So if you're a freelancer, you're sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place. Because if you've got three clients, then when that work kind of dries up, you're not sure if you're going to get repeat work. So in order to maintain income security, you have to find more clients. And so most of the freelancers that I work with sort of have this idea that, okay, like this is the number of clients I need to feel safe. So then what they end up doing is finding something like 10 clients.

But then that creates another problem. So instead of having three clients today and then three clients tomorrow and then three clients the next day, you have to sort of load up on clients whenever you can. But then you're stuck with a really, really simple problem, which is that you've got 10 clients, none of whom care about the others and all want their work to be done in a timely fashion. This is the problem with being a freelancer. There are certain structural issues that make it very hard to succeed. And if you are willing to do what needs to be done in order to succeed, then you end up getting crushed in the process.

So how do you navigate these structural problems? So thankfully, there's a lot of research that's emerging that shows us some of the things that successful freelancers do that is different from things that the freelancers who are burnt out do. A really great example of this is something called hope labor versus relational labor. So if you're a freelancer, chances are you've been programmed in this mindset of something called hope labor. And hope labor is this idea that if I work for someone and I do a good job, if we have

particular tasks and they want me to do particular things, if I do those things and I do a good job, then I hope I will get additional work in the future, right? So if you hire me for task A, I complete task A, then you will hire me for task B. Turns out that that really doesn't work. This concept of hope labor, which is like, I'm going to show up and I'm going to be a good boy or girl, is something that comes from sort of this corporate nine to five world, this idea that if I go into this situation and I put in the time, I will be rewarded. So there's this sort of hope access of, if I do this, I hope something will happen. What successful freelancers do is a different kind of labor, which is something called relational labor. So this is where when you're

sort of working with a client, and some people sort of intuitively figure this out, there's a kind of work that is actually building the relationship. This is not something as simple as networking, but it's sort of certain practices that you do where a part of your job is not just doing the work to keep your clients happy. It is managing the relationship with the client. And when there are freelancers who do this kind of relational labor, they end up doing way better versus the ones who do hope labor, which is what's so devastating. We see this all the time in our career coaching program because we have a lot of people, and we develop this program to try to help, you know, this community with the modern problems that you all face. And at the top of

the list is how do you earn money in today's world? And we see so many of our clients doing this kind of hope labor and then getting burned. And then they sort of lose their motivation because now it's like, okay, like I'm doing all this work. What's going to happen? What's going to happen? What's going to happen? I don't know. Should I do it? Should I not do it? So they end up losing all their motivation. So we try to help people with things like this. It tends to work out pretty well. So how do you navigate these problems if you're a freelancer. So this is where we're going to dig into a lot of data. There's a great thing called the social, the world employment and social outlook flagship report from the International Labor Organization. This is 285 pages. So we dug through this,

and what we discovered was really scary. If you're a freelancer, you've probably seen the encrapification of the field in real time. So things used to be kind of like okay 10 or 15 years ago, but every year things seem to be getting worse and getting worse in like different scary ways. So the scariest thing that I read when I was researching this video comes from actually the international labor organizations report on freelancing. And what they found is that many clients are becoming increasingly invasive with freelancers. So the ILO survey shows that a substantial proportion of respondents are required by platforms or clients to install specific software or meet certain hardware and software requirements.

Their working hours are monitored by clients. They're requested to be available during specific times by clients, and they're required to use a monitoring system for submitting screenshots of the work done. I had to install the desktop app for time tracking. Pretty intrusive app. Take screenshots, photos from webcam, mouse clicks, and keyboard usage. And this kind of invasion of privacy goes way beyond the corporate world.

This is what's really crazy, this used to be a job that gave you more freedom and latitude. And what we're finding is that things are getting less free. You have less latitude and becoming more invasive. Now the question is, why would people put up with this? And this is where we get to another really core problem with being a freelancer, which is competition. These platforms give clients the opportunity to hire kind of anyone anywhere. And since there are so many different options for them to choose from, it becomes really hard to raise your rates if you need more money. There's another problem which is that a lot of new people are entering the platform.

And this is one of the big advertisements of working on these platforms. Like the ease of entry for new people to start claiming work from these platforms is incredibly low. Now, there's another big problem here because a lot of the people that are coming in and are new don't understand the value of their services. And so in order to get work, they will undercut more experienced people. This then gets further compounded by another like mind-blowing thing, which is that most clients, especially if you're working in a creative space or you're doing something like art, don't have a good way to gauge quality.

So if I'm like hiring a programmer on Fiverr, how do I know if the programmer is competent or incompetent? Part of the reason that clients are hiring you in the first place is because they're not familiar with the work. They can't do the work themselves. So we see this sort of like perfect storm of being unable to raise your rates because there's way too much competition. By the way, you also may be competing with people from countries where the standard of living is completely different from yours, right?

So the standard of living could be like 10% of where it is where you are. So someone from a developing country, maybe you're going to be. competing with a contract from someone with the developing country, which on the one hand is, like, great for them. And this is part of the promise of the internet, right? Like super cool that I can be living in India and doing like contract work for 20 bucks an hour, which is a ton of work over here. But if you're someone in a developed nation, now you're really in trouble because this person can do this work for $20 an hour. You normally charge $40 or $50 an hour. So then what are you supposed to do? So we see a lot of competition. We see a lot of entry from new people. We see a lot of

undercutting, and then we see a lot of difficulty for clients to select based on quality. So then what do they select on? They select based on price or rate. So then we enter another issue, which is that if you have a minimum amount of money that you want to make and you want to hit that target, that requires you to work more because you are working at a lower rate. So even though you should be charging $50 an hour, some noob entered the market in a charging 20. So now you're like, okay, let me get away with 25, and I've got good ratings.

Don't worry, we'll get to the ratings in a second. I've got good ratings. So then like, you know, everything will be okay. I'll work for 25. But now you have to work like way more because you're undercutting yourself in order to find work. And then people end up working a lot. They end up working a lot on tight deadlines. So now you have to like finish work faster. You have to have a higher level of service. And so you're kind of getting squeezed from all sides. And then we enter another issue, which is ratings. So if you want to get good work on this platform, then what you have to do is have a very good rating.

And if you want a very good rating, what that means is that you have to work a lot on that platform. But then you're open to another kind of vulnerability, which is if I'm spending all of my time on Fiverr instead of Upwork or something else, now I've got like 500, you know, 500 reviews, four and a half stars on Upwork. But then I'm in a lot of trouble because then clients have a very, very powerful lever over me, which is that they can give you a bad rating. And oftentimes the way that these rating adjudications happen are very, very client forward,

right? Because if you sort of think about it, who is paying the platform money? The client is paying the platform money. So platforms tend to be very, very client favored, especially when it comes to rating systems. So this creates a situation where there's a power dynamic, especially around rating. And this power dynamic is even more insidious because normally when you're like a freelancer

and you have a client and if the client is unhappy with you, you guys can like break from that, right? You can say, okay, I'm no longer going to work for you. You find somebody else to do the work. Now the problem is that the client has a way to badmouth you that is seen by the whole internet. So oftentimes what we see in our coaching programs and stuff is that a lot of our clients are faced with these situations.

where they're threatened with a negative review, they sort of can't afford a negative review, especially when they get started. So they end up acceding to a lot of the client's demands. There's another problem, though. We're not done. This is such a structural cluster. To be honest. The other problem is that since you're beholden to particular clients and ratings, that's a

problem. But things get even worse because now the issue is that if something happens on upwork, then all of your reputation is gone. Right? So you sort of have this choice where you're competing against. There are some people who are sort of spreading their work across platforms. And if you're spreading your work across platforms, let's say I'm doing 500 jobs, or I've done 500 jobs. If there are three platforms and I'm doing like 170 jobs on each platform, that means that I have 170 ratings on each platform.

So someone who focuses all of their effort on one platform will have 500 ratings on that platform. So then when a client is looking at the situation, what they'll sort of see is like, okay, this person has 500 ratings. this person has 170. Let me go with the 500. That's automatically what happens, right? So then you're forced into a position where, okay, now you have to invest all of your energy in one platform to compete on the ratings game. But this creates another vulnerability because if you ever have a problem on that platform, if your account gets terminated, or if the platform shows up to you and says, hey, now I want you to install a web camera. I want to install this invasive software. These are the terms of agreement that we're doing. By the way, we used to give you 80% of what clients give you. Now we're going to give you 72%.

So this is the problem is as you invest all of your energy in one platform, you become trapped on that platform. So this is a huge problem because these issues are structural. What we're seeing is an evolution of the way that freelance work is being done. And as things get optimized, freelancers are the ones that are getting crushed. And if this picture seems bleak, that's because it is. So freelancing or being a gig worker was like way better 10 or 15 years ago, but as things have been optimized, freelancers are getting squeezed. So this is the time to adapt. And we've seen that a lot of these adaptations do work really well because a lot of people are making it as freelancers. They're sort of moving into the solopreneur space, which sounds really scary. But once you really learn how to do it, and this is what we see in career coaching all the time, is like once people make these transitions, once they learn these skills, they end up being way happier and they end up being way more. more financially successful. So the first thing that you've got to do is recognize that your work

is patchwork. Oftentimes the reason that we become a freelancer is because we like a particular thing. I just like making art. So if there's a job where I just have to make art, great, that's what I want to do. If you want to do that, you can absolutely go down that route. But unless you do a lot of other stuff like manage relationships, develop particular skills, things like that, then you will be at the mercy of the platform. So even doing some of this emotional work, right? This is like kind of what we do at HG, right? We help you deal with like coming to terms with, oh crap, I have to do all this stuff. And like most things in life, once you get the knack of it, it actually becomes quite manageable, okay? So first thing is like it's not just making art. You got to learn a bunch of other stuff.

I know it sounds exhausting, but we're going to walk you through it. Okay. Second thing is the most successful freelancers develop skills adjacent to their core skill. So Huang et all found relationships between performance, income, and different skill set combinations on these two online labor platforms. A skill related to a worker's existing skill set correlates with better performance of the new skill. And we found that workers with diverse skills earn higher wages than more with specialized skills. So this may be a little bit counterintuitive, but if y'all are fans of Ghost in the Shell, remember, over-specialization breeds and weakness. So one of the key things that you can do is a lot of times, like if I'm on a platform and let's say, say I make art. I'm competing with other artists. The way to really set myself apart, and this is where

the competition has some natural things, can I get better art? Can I get better than everybody else? But this is a problem because people don't recognize the difference between excellent art and decent art, right? So the client doesn't understand that. We're competing. So maybe I can get the business by lowering my rate. Maybe I can get the business by turning it around way faster. All of these solutions for you to succeed on the platform come at the cost of yourself. Instead, what we want to do is learn an adjacent skill. Now, why does this correlate with better performance and higher wages? So I want you'll to put yourself in the mind of a client for a moment. What is a client looking for? Oh, you're a, you're someone who does art? Fantastic. Oh, and you do a little

bit of animation. So now instead of having this one dude do the art and this other dude, the animation, can you actually do both? Even if you're not as great at animation as another guy who specializes in animation, this is what clients are really looking for. Why do clients hire freelancers? Because they want someone to take care of the job. So what we tend to see is that the more diverse your skill set is, the better off you will be with clients. So the second problem with being a freelancer is that there's a lot of instability in your work. And so what people will often experience is like they have these cycles of like, okay, I'm going to pitch, I have to secure some work, I have to go through contracts, deliver the work, and then I have to pitch again. You're always looking for new work. And on these platforms, it's really easy to dehumanize you as a person and dehumanize the client. So this is where we have to transition from hope labor to relational labor. So think about your client as a personal relationship, not a faceless kind of person, like not like a faceless entity.

And this is where oftentimes like this may sound really annoying because a lot of people who are freelancers are like, oh, like I don't want to deal with people. That's why I became a freelancer. But I think there's sort of a frame shift you can do here, right? if I'm thinking about being, if I'm a physician, you know, why did I get into medicine? I got into medicine to try to help people with their health. And so a lot of my relational labor, and this is what's really interesting, is the doctors who get sued the most are not the ones who make the most mistakes. They're the ones who are disliked by their patients the most. So a big part of getting sued

or not getting sued as a doctor is actually relational labor. It's sort of thinking about the client asking them, hey, are you happy with the work that I provided? I'm doing this work. This is sort of the frame shift that I encourage you adopt. I'm doing this work because I love this work. I love to create things. I love to program. I love to design. How is this working out for you? Are you happy with what I've given you? The client may have all kinds of demands around time and things like that, but that's also where you can sort of like push back against those things. I know it sounds absolutely insane, but there's absolutely ways to do this. You can push back against some of those things because you are an artist, right? Because you love the work. The client says, oh, I need this done. And then you can say,

look, I'm here to try to do what you ask, but you've got a choice, right? So either I make it good or I make it fast. You can pick. And there may be people who say that they can do both. You're welcome to go find them. But oftentimes when you are straight with people like this, one of two things will happen. One is that they'll ditch you and move on, which is totally fine. That's part of relational labor as well. but then there are other people who will operate on that level. They'll acknowledge that. They'll say, okay, this time I want it fast. As you build up those relationships, the relationship, not the quality of the work, is what gets you repeat business.

That's how you get stability. The next thing about stability is this platform dependence. So if you're a freelancer who has entered the market and now you're using all these platforms, one of the most important things that you can do to maintain your mental health and your professional trajectory is to have your own independent thing outside of a platform. So you can get started on a platform. That's totally fine. I even went down that road.

So when I was, you know, finishing my training as a psychiatrist, there are all these platforms like BetterHelp or Doctor on Demand or whatever, right, Teledoc, where like MDs can basically sign up. It's basically gig work. They pay you X number of dollars per hour. But then I fall into all of those kinds of things as well. Like I can't really negotiate a higher salary. because they have an army of doctors that are willing to work at that level.

So parallel with starting, you know, work with some of these platforms is I started my own private practice. So I have like, it's really easy for me to fill up appointments over here with 10 patients, 15 patients. I have one patient after a month in my private practice. But then I get two and then I get three. And that's the place where I get to deliver the quality of care that I really want to. I'm not restricted to, you know, these 15-minute med visit appointments because I'm working for this, like, mega, you know, virtual health company.

I'm not saying they're good or bad. They just sort of set certain terms, and it's take it or leave it as a freelancer. So the thing that you really have to focus on if you're a freelancer is developing your own home for the quality of your work and your own business relationships. That's when you start to really negotiate with people, build relationships with people, and it gives you platform independence. The last challenge for freelancers is finding the right kind of information. So I'm going to use an analogy here. Let's take something like a platform like Twitch or YouTube. So if I want to be a successful creator on these platforms, right?

Basically, everyone on Twitch or YouTube is essentially a freelancer. They don't necessarily have work contracts and specified hours, things like that. We're all freelancers. So what kind of information do we get from these platforms? So one really good example is live viewership. Live viewership is something that the platform gives me, but how useful is it? Does it help me develop good content? Not really, right?

So live viewership is a really good example of a piece of information that is really important to the platform. They want to know which streamers are the people most watching. That's a piece of information that helps them stratify streamers. It's not something that helps an individual streamer necessarily improve their content. So this is what you'll have to understand about the platforms. the data collection systems that they develop are not to benefit you. They're to benefit them, right?

They want to collect the data that's important to them. They want reviews because they want to know this person has a thousand five-star reviews. That's great. They're willing to do anything. At any time, for a low rate, wonderful. They're willing to accommodate the client in whatever the client wants. This is the person that we're going to send to clients because we want clients to be happy. Right?

They're not interested in certain parameters that are relevant. relevant to you as a freelancer. So one of the biggest challenges is learning how to collect the right information. So this is where there are a couple of important things to do. The first is recognize that if you're a freelancer, if you can find a mentor, that's great. But what we're really seeing is that there's this sort of emergent property of what's something called distributed mentorship. So this is where freelancers and other people, like experts, are forming communities on the internet where they learn from each other. So try to join one of those communities so that you can level up your skills and or discuss problems with each other.

So I saw a great example of this on the psychiatry subreddit where someone was like, here's how I started a private practice. That is the kind of like absolute gold information for a new psychiatrist who wants to hang up a shingle and start their own private practice. So seek out distributed mentorship in online communities if that's where you want to find it. Okay. second thing is the way that you need to collect information is directly from clients in order to solve your problems. So what kind of problems do you have? What will get this person to come back

to you? Don't just ask for a five-star review. Ask them, hey, you know, are you interested in working with me again? What are the reasons for yay and what are the reasons for nay? If you're not interested in working with me again, you know, what are you looking for? So this is where you have to collect a lot of information about the quality of your work directly from your clients. This is what some of that relational labor is. The main thing here is don't assume that the platform provides you with information and that if you target that information, then you will necessarily get business. It's not that the information is useless. It's just not like a one-to-one. And that's how we sort of fall into this hope labor stuff. The last dimension of information involves self-upgrading.

So you're living in a world that is highly competitive. So if you have a particular skill set and you want to grind things out as a gig worker, that's totally fine, but then you will be vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the platform. On the other hand, if you can develop some of these skills of being a solopreneur, this is really when people start to do better financially, and their mental stays way more intact. Last thing is, if y'all are interested in getting some more support, there's actually studies that show that developing the right kinds of systems to support freelancers can help them succeed. So that's sort of why we design career coaching. I think it's one of our best products to date. You can absolutely give that a shot. And then the last thing is feel free

to ask additional questions and let me know if there's like further stuff that you all have questions on that we can provide y'all with research or information on. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other. other. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence? Get pre-qualified with no impact on your credit score and shop within your budget. From luxury to family rides. CarMax has options for almost every price range, including over 25,000 cars under $25,000. Want to get started? Head to CarMax.com for details and get pre-qualified

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