I like my job. It also feels like a prison.
I left my last job on a Friday in 2024. That following Monday, I was in Nashville doing tour prep for an artist I’d spend the rest of the year on the road with, running sound. No day job on the side, no safety net gig to fall back on, no plan to return to tech. I thought I was done. I loved it. Every load-in, every show, every 2am drive to the next city - I was doing exactly what I wanted to be doing, and I was good at it.
Then I injured my back. Badly enough that I needed surgery, and it nearly cost me my house.
I went back to a full-time job with benefits. I don’t regret that. I like where I work now - I like the people, I like the problems we’re solving, I’d make the same choice again. But I want to be honest about what happened: I didn’t come back to tech because I missed it, or because touring stopped being what I wanted. I came back because loving the work wasn’t enough to keep a roof over my head the moment my back needed a surgeon instead of a work ethic.
Two things can be true
I like my job. I also find it oppressive that I need an employer to survive.
Those aren’t in tension. They’re just both true at the same time, and most of the conversation about work in this country doesn’t leave room for that. You’re either trapped in a soul-crushing job you hate, or you’re fine, free, living the dream - grateful, presumably, for the privilege of health insurance. There’s no category for liking the work and resenting the leash.
But the leash is the point. It’s not that my employer is holding it badly. It’s that the leash exists at all, attached to something as basic as whether I can see a doctor without going bankrupt, and it stays invisible right up until you try to walk away from it.
I don’t dream about wealth. The only version of it I’m interested in is the kind that buys me out of needing to sell my time to survive - enough that a bad month, or a bad back, doesn’t put my house on the line. Past that, I don’t want a bigger house, a nicer car, or the kind of money that buys distance from other people. What I want is time - the freedom to spend my days on the work that actually interests me, without asking anyone’s permission and without my health insurance riding on the answer.
I tried. I meant it. I know exactly what’s on the other side of walking away - it’s the year on the road, and the injury that ended it.
What the leash is made of
Roughly 60 percent of Americans under 65 get health insurance through a job, covering about 165.6 million people as of 2025. That’s not a fringe benefit sitting alongside employment. For most people in this country, it’s the primary mechanism for accessing healthcare at all.
COBRA is supposed to be the safety valve - the law that lets you keep your coverage after you leave a job. In practice it means paying the full premium yourself, your old share and your employer’s old share combined, plus an administrative fee. The national average for individual coverage runs $400 to $700 a month. Mine ran closer to $1,200. Family coverage can run $2,000 to $3,000. That’s before you’ve even paid a doctor, a surgeon, or a physical therapist.
Roughly two-thirds of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. trace back to medical expenses or income lost to illness. Three-quarters of the people in that group had insurance when they got sick.
I had insurance. I still nearly lost my house.
That’s the part that matters. Having coverage, having savings, being careful, doing everything right - none of it is enough insulation against a body that stops cooperating. The system was never built to protect you from that. And underneath the healthcare piece is the other half of the leash: forty-nine states let an employer end that coverage, and your income, for any reason or no reason at all. Not misconduct. Not performance. Any reason. The job that gives you access to a doctor is also a job you have no claim to keeping.
Why we defend the leash
The obvious question, and the one that took me longest to sit with honestly: if the mechanism is this visible, why doesn’t more of the country want it gone?
It’s not stupidity. And it’s not propaganda, or not only propaganda. Research on system justification suggests something closer to a survival reflex - people become more motivated to defend the systems they depend on for their livelihood the more dependent on them they are, not less. Questioning the thing that keeps you insured, housed, and employed is destabilizing in a way that questioning something you don’t need is not. So people don’t examine it. They build a story around it instead - it’s fine, it’s normal, other countries have their own problems, at least I have a job.
I’ve built that story myself. Some days I still tell it. I can lay out the COBRA math, name the exact month my back gave out, and still show up to work the next morning and mostly not think about any of it, because thinking about it constantly would make the job unlivable. That’s not hypocrisy. A system built on your dependence doesn’t stop at taking your labor. It trains the story that makes handing the labor over feel fine.
Maybe that’s the cost nobody puts a number on. Not the premiums, not the COBRA bill, not the medical debt. The fact that naming the leash clearly and still needing it to survive is the normal condition, not the exception.
What I’d choose if choosing were free
I still think about that year I spent on the road. Not with regret - I’d do it again, the exact same way, knowing what came after. But I think about it differently now than I did before I started writing this.
I used to tell the story as a health story. Bad break, hard year, glad I had a job to come back to. Somewhere in writing this out, it became a different story: I had exactly one version of freedom available to me, tried it, and found out the floor under it was healthcare I couldn’t access without an employer. Not bad luck. The system working exactly as built.
I like my job. I said that at the start and I still mean it - the people, the work, none of that is performance. But I don’t know how to fully separate liking this job from needing this job to exist as a person with a functioning spine. Maybe liking the work is real and the leash is real and neither one cancels the other out. That might be what it means to do good work inside a system that would let you lose everything for getting hurt.
I don’t know what I’d choose if choosing were free - if losing this job didn’t also mean losing the thing that keeps my back from ending me again. I’d like to think I’d pick the road again. The tour bus, the load-ins, the 2am drives.
I don’t get to find out. Neither do most of you. The system was built to make sure of that.