From side-hustlers to start-ups, freelancers to small business owners, Americans have a special affinity for people who make it on their own. But the dream has a dark side.
āOne day Iāll work for myself.ā Perhaps youāve heard some version of that phrase from friends, colleagues, family membersāperhaps youāve said it yourself. If so, youāre not alone. The spirit of entrepreneurship runs deep in American culture and history, in the films we watch and the books we read, in our political rhetoric, and in the music piping through our speakers.
What makes the dream of self-employment so alluring, so pervasive in todayās world? Benjamin C. Waterhouse offers a provocative argument: the modern cult of the hustle is a direct consequence of economic failuresābad jobs, stagnant wages, and inequalityāsince the 1970s. With original research, Waterhouse traces a new narrative history of business in America, populated with vivid charactersāfrom the activists, academics, and work-from-home gurus who hailed business ownership as our economic salvation to the upstarts who took the plunge. We meet, among others, a consultant who quits his job and launches a wildly popular beer company, a department store saleswoman who founds a plus-size bra business on the Internet, and an Indian immigrant in Texas who flees the corporate world to open a motel. Some flourish; some squeak by. Some fail.
As Waterhouse shows, the go-it-alone movement that began in the 1970s laid the political and cultural groundwork for todayās gig economy and its ethos: everyone should be their own boss. While some people find success in that world, countless others are left bouncing from gig to gigāexploited, underpaid, or conned by get-rich-quick scams. And our politics doesnāt know how to respond.
Accessible, fast-paced, and eye-opening, One Day Iāll Work for Myself offers a fresh, insightful cultural history of the U.S. economy from the perspective of the people within it, asking urgent questions about why weāre clinging to old strategies for progressāand at what cost.
