After nearly six months traveling, I'm returning to Chicago to do something I spent much of the past year trying to avoid: figure out how to make a living within an economic system I've become increasingly disillusioned with.

I've spent the better part of the year moving between countries, discovering how much of what I'd accepted as necessary was actually a product of where I lived and the expectations surrounding me. People organize their lives around different priorities, tolerate different compromises, and sometimes appear considerably less concerned with the things I've spent years pursuing. Travel offered the freedom to reconsider those arrangements, but it did little to change my dependence on them. I could leave the United States, move between countries, and imagine a different life. Eventually, however, I would still need to earn an income.

For most of my professional life, I worked in technical recruiting, helping companies compete for the people they believed were essential to their growth. I earned a good living, developed expertise, and eventually worked inside Meta, where the contradictions of modern corporate employment became difficult to ignore. By conventional measures, I had built a successful career. Yet my experience offered remarkably little control over the conditions determining whether that career would remain economically viable.

My experience at Meta brought that imbalance into particularly sharp focus. I was working inside one of the most valuable technology companies in the world, an organization capable of investing extraordinary resources into attracting talent while simultaneously developing sophisticated systems to make the process of acquiring that talent more efficient and less dependent on human judgment. Recruiters were measured against narrowing performance targets, even as the processes governing their work were standardized, automated, and reorganized. The company could continually redefine what constituted valuable work, while the people performing it were expected to adapt without any corresponding influence over those decisions. When the organization no longer required their contributions, the responsibility for finding another opportunity belonged entirely to them.

The prevailing advice in these circumstances is familiar. Develop new skills, expand your network, remain adaptable, and take responsibility for your career. I've followed much of that advice myself. What becomes difficult to reconcile is the expectation that individuals should remain responsible for their economic outcomes while possessing so little influence over the conditions determining them.

C. Wright Mills distinguished between personal troubles and public issues in The Sociological Imagination. When one person struggles to find employment, their individual circumstances may offer part of the explanation. When large numbers of qualified people struggle to find work, the problem extends beyond the decisions of those individuals. Their experiences are connected to the organization of the economy itself. Mills understood that biography cannot be separated from history, and that the difficulties people experience privately are often produced by arrangements over which they possess little control.

The distinction becomes politically consequential when we consider who benefits from treating public issues as personal troubles. Employers have an interest in workers negotiating compensation individually rather than exercising collective bargaining power. Property owners benefit from arrangements that allow housing scarcity to support higher rents and asset values. Businesses benefit when increases in productivity can be retained as profits rather than distributed through higher wages or reduced working hours. These interests are not always perfectly aligned, and none of them requires a coordinated conspiracy. They arise from the ordinary incentives attached to ownership and economic power.

The ideology of individual responsibility helps preserve these arrangements by making their consequences appear to be the result of personal choices. The worker who accepts inadequate compensation has failed to negotiate effectively. The renter who cannot afford their neighborhood should move somewhere cheaper. The graduate struggling with debt should have selected a more lucrative field of study. Economic outcomes become evidence of individual judgment, while the distribution of bargaining power that shapes those outcomes receives considerably less attention.

This is one reason I find the contemporary obsession with entrepreneurship and independence so interesting. Everywhere you look, people are being encouraged to escape conventional employment, develop additional income streams, establish personal brands, and build businesses that will eventually allow them to reclaim control over their lives. The appeal is understandable, particularly when professional employment no longer offers the security it once promised. But the proposed solution almost always involves finding a more advantageous position within the existing economic arrangement. The possibility of changing that arrangement rarely enters the discussion.

I've spent much of the past year pursuing precisely this kind of independence. After leaving conventional employment, I began exploring businesses I could build and products I might sell, hoping to establish an income that would allow me to live with greater geographic freedom. There is something telling about the fact that my response to losing confidence in conventional employment has been to attempt to become an owner myself. I spent years working inside organizations where decisions about my livelihood were ultimately made by people with considerably more authority than I possessed. Now I'm trying to establish a business in which I would have greater control over those decisions. From an individual perspective, the logic is sound. Ownership offers possibilities that employment often does not. But the broader economic hierarchy remains intact. I'm attempting to improve my position within it.

I also have to consider what happens if I succeed. Accumulating assets and establishing a profitable business could give me the independence I'm seeking, but it would also change my relationship to the arrangements I've spent years criticizing. My interests might become increasingly aligned with those of other owners, particularly if maintaining my independence came to depend on preserving the advantages ownership provides. I could find myself defending decisions I once resented when they were made by someone else. That possibility doesn't make entrepreneurship inherently exploitative, but it does suggest that the pursuit of personal freedom can gradually transform the interests of the person pursuing it.

The same pattern appears in other forms of withdrawal from conventional expectations. People leave expensive cities for places where their income stretches further. Professionals abandon prestigious careers for work that demands less of their time and attention. Others pursue geographic mobility, reduce their consumption, or attempt to establish lives that require less participation in the institutions they've grown dissatisfied with.

Years ago, I worked as a tour guide in Italy, an experience that offered a different relationship with work than the professional career I eventually pursued. It offered what I'd now call fractional freedom. I still needed income, still depended on circumstances outside my control, and still had to consider whether the arrangement could support the life I wanted over time. My recent travels have reinforced that lesson. Moving between countries can reveal alternatives to the expectations you've inherited, but it doesn't remove the economic relationships that determine which alternatives are available to you.

The ability to leave is also distributed unequally. Someone with savings, a portable income, and a passport that permits relatively unrestricted travel can respond to deteriorating circumstances in ways that others cannot. A professional who can afford to abandon a career possesses options unavailable to someone living paycheck to paycheck. The freedom celebrated in stories about people escaping conventional employment is often made possible by resources accumulated through the very arrangements they are attempting to leave.

This is where Albert Hirschman's distinction between exit and voice becomes useful. In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Hirschman examined how people respond when organizations deteriorate. Exit involves withdrawing participation, while voice involves attempting to change the organization through complaint, negotiation, or collective pressure. Both can influence institutions, but they operate through different relationships to power.

Exit accepts the existing terms of participation and seeks an alternative. Voice challenges those terms.

When an employee leaves a company because of inadequate compensation, the employer may lose a valuable worker. When employees organize to negotiate compensation collectively, they challenge the employer's authority to determine how the economic value they produce will be distributed. When someone leaves an unaffordable city, property owners may find another tenant capable of paying the rent. When tenants organize around housing conditions, rents, or public policy, they challenge the arrangements through which housing generates income.

The difference matters because those who control institutions are not necessarily threatened by individual dissatisfaction. They may be perfectly capable of accommodating a continuous flow of dissatisfied people leaving and new people arriving. Employers can replace workers, particularly when there are more qualified applicants than available positions. In housing markets characterized by scarcity, landlords can replace tenants. The departure of any particular individual may impose a cost, but it doesn't necessarily challenge the authority of those who determine the conditions of participation.

Collective voice presents a different problem. It can transform dissatisfaction from a collection of private grievances into a challenge to the distribution of economic power. Workers who organize are no longer negotiating solely as individuals whose livelihoods depend on remaining employed. Tenants acting together can exert pressure unavailable to any single household. Political movements can demand changes to laws and institutions that individual consumers have little capacity to influence.

None of this guarantees that collective action will succeed. Institutions can resist, retaliate, or accommodate demands without surrendering meaningful authority. But the possibility of changing the terms of participation is fundamentally different from the ability to select among terms established by someone else.

A culture that treats individual responsibility as the highest expression of agency has difficulty accommodating this distinction. The ambitious worker is encouraged to find a better job rather than organize their current workplace. The resourceful renter moves to a cheaper neighborhood rather than confronts the conditions producing unaffordable housing. The dissatisfied professional becomes an entrepreneur rather than questions why economic independence seems to require escaping employment altogether. These responses are celebrated because they demonstrate initiative, while directing dissatisfaction away from the institutions responsible for producing it.

There is a historical dimension to this that runs through the city I'm returning to. In May 1886, workers across Chicago struck for an eight-hour day. A labor rally at Haymarket Square descended into violence after a bomb was thrown at police, who responded with gunfire. The subsequent prosecutions resulted in four men being executed the following year. The Haymarket affair became an enduring symbol of the conflict surrounding organized labor, and the broader struggle for the eight-hour workday continued long after the men were buried.

Many of the protections now associated with ordinary employment were not granted because employers gradually became more enlightened. The eight-hour workday, workplace safety standards, collective bargaining rights, and restrictions on child labor emerged through prolonged political conflict, labor organizing, and pressure on institutions that frequently resisted those changes. Their development was uneven, and the victories were incomplete, but they established that the conditions of economic participation could be contested rather than accepted.

Chicago was once a center of a labor movement that understood economic conditions as something workers could change collectively. I'm returning to the same city after spending six months trying to figure out how to escape those conditions individually. More than a century separates these experiences, but the contrast reveals how dramatically our understanding of economic agency has shifted. We encourage people to negotiate better arrangements for themselves while treating the possibility of collectively changing those arrangements as unrealistic, outdated, or unnecessarily confrontational. Corporations, investment firms, and industry associations organize to advance their economic interests, while workers are increasingly encouraged to understand their interests primarily as individuals.

Some people succeed in doing exactly what they're encouraged to do. They build profitable businesses, accumulate assets, or establish incomes that allow them to escape the insecurity of conventional employment. Their success becomes evidence that the opportunities remain available to anyone sufficiently determined to pursue them. The exceptional outcome is used to validate the general arrangement, even when the arrangement could never produce the same outcome for everyone participating in it.

This is one of the more effective ways an unequal system can preserve its legitimacy. It doesn't need to prevent people from succeeding. It needs enough visible examples of success to sustain the belief that failure remains primarily an individual responsibility.

There is another consequence, however, that receives less attention. The people with the greatest ability to leave deteriorating institutions may also possess the resources necessary to challenge them. Education, professional networks, savings, social influence, and geographic mobility provide options for escape, but they can also provide leverage for collective action. When those individuals leave, the people who remain may lose potential allies with the means to exert pressure on employers, landlords, or political institutions.

The result can become self-reinforcing. Institutions don't necessarily need to satisfy everyone if those most capable of challenging them can find acceptable alternatives elsewhere. Employers can continue replacing dissatisfied workers, property owners can continue seeking tenants willing to pay prevailing rents, and political leaders can continue treating economic insecurity as a problem of individual adaptation. The people who remain dependent on these arrangements often possess the fewest resources with which to contest them.

Those who successfully escape may eventually develop an interest in preserving the arrangements they once resented. Someone who leaves an expensive housing market and later purchases investment property may become more concerned with protecting property values than with expanding affordable housing. A professional who establishes a successful business may come to view labor primarily as an expense rather than as the source of their own previous insecurity. Their individual circumstances have improved, but their relationship to economic power has changed alongside them.

This is not an argument that everyone who becomes successful abandons their former convictions. It is an observation about how material interests shape political and economic behavior. People who acquire assets and authority often develop reasons to protect the conditions that make those assets valuable and that authority useful. The pursuit of independence can therefore produce an uncomfortable outcome: people escape an arrangement by acquiring a stake in its preservation.

For those without the resources to leave, the consequences are more severe. They remain subject to institutions that have lost some of the people most capable of organizing opposition. Meanwhile, the success stories of those who escaped are held up as proof that opportunity remains available. The system can accommodate individual departures while using those departures to reinforce its legitimacy.

I don't think people should remain in exploitative workplaces or unaffordable cities out of some obligation to collective struggle. That would simply impose another burden on individuals already navigating difficult circumstances. I've spent months enjoying the freedom to leave places, reconsider expectations, and imagine different ways of living. I don't regret any of it. Travel has made it easier to recognize that the arrangements governing American life are neither natural nor inevitable. It has also made me more conscious of how much of my own freedom depends on advantages that aren't universally available.

As I return to Chicago, I'm still planning to pursue entrepreneurship. I want to build an income that allows me to live with greater independence, and I don't intend to abandon those ambitions because they exist within an economic system I find difficult to defend. But I also recognize that succeeding personally would not resolve the contradictions that motivated me to pursue independence in the first place. If anything, success may make those contradictions easier for me to ignore.

That possibility troubles me more than the prospect of returning to conventional employment. I can imagine a future in which I've built a profitable business, established the geographic freedom I want, and become sufficiently insulated from the economic pressures that once occupied so much of my attention. I might look back on the uncertainty of this period as something I overcame through persistence and good decisions. It would be easy to forget how much of my opportunity depended on circumstances that others cannot reproduce, or how little my success would say about the conditions confronting people who remain dependent on conventional employment.

The experience has made me more sympathetic to people trying to find their own exits, and more skeptical of a culture that presents those exits as sufficient responses to institutional failure. We've built an extraordinary vocabulary around personal freedom, self-improvement, and independence, while allowing the collective mechanisms through which ordinary people can challenge economic power to weaken.

I'm returning home with a greater appreciation for the freedom to leave, and a growing suspicion of the society that has made leaving such an attractive proposition. The people who can afford to exit may find better lives elsewhere, but the institutions they abandon remain in place for everyone who cannot. Their departures may even make those institutions harder to challenge.

I still intend to find a better way to live. What I no longer want is to mistake my ability to do so for evidence that the arrangement itself is working.