Only Slaves Wear Ties

The ancient Romans branded their slaves to separate them from free men. The modern brand is the necktie.

No man ever wore a tie alone at home on a lazy Sunday. You wear it to impress someone, because you have to, because it's the "professional" thing to do. So the tie is a tell. It means there is someone you cannot afford to anger.

As Nassim Taleb put it, a free person is "someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment." The man in the tie fails the test. A boss, a shareholder, the tenure committee: any one of them can end his career with a bad opinion.

The West Coast tech worker lost the costume but not the cage. His career still lives and dies on someone else's opinion. He can be fired by a boss who dislikes him, cut in the next round of layoffs the company blames on AI, or canceled on Slack. He is not free.

Short of FU money, there is one clear path to freedom: a diversified client base. A job is a business with a single client, one who can fire you whenever he likes. Fifty clients on long-term contracts is another thing entirely. That is freedom.

And this is the part that is actually great for the people you serve. The freedom to piss people off is also the freedom to do your best, most honest, most useful work. When you are not afraid to lose a client, you can finally tell them the truth. And the truth might be the very thing that delights them.