At the beginning of the pandemic, Sarah Murphy accepted a new role as a creative lead at a tech company. But when it came time to resign from her position in a different industry … she didn’t. “I felt trapped in the rat race, trapped in a certain career path, and just wasn’t really seeing a lot of opportunities for financial independence,” she said. “I knew that there was a certain amount that I could expect to make in my career, and then there were goals that I had that wouldn’t be attainable for another five to 10 years down the line.” So she decided to hold both positions at once. (Murphy requested a pseudonym in order to speak freely about her experience.)
Murphy managed this dual-role arrangement for about nine months—rolling back and forth between two separate laptops and exclusively marking her Slack status as “away” at both roles. The experiment gave her the chance to trial a new industry without going all-in. And she more than doubled her annual income to nearly $200,000, allowing her to save for a down payment and purchase her first home in one of the most expensive cities in the United States.
Murphy is one of the “overemployed”—employees secretly working more than one full-time job, aided by the rise of remote work ushered in by the Covid-19 pandemic. The phenomenon has become known through outlandish anecdotes: the software engineer working 10 remote jobs and set to earn $1.5 million in a year, the remote workers who “play tetris with their calendars” to manage conflicts across multiple jobs, the startup leaders with distributed teams who discover that their software engineers have second jobs.
For a time, Murphy thought she had stumbled upon a novel way of working—something she alone was experimenting with. But it wasn’t long into her new work arrangement that she realized there were scores of knowledge workers doing the exact same thing and discussing it online. On TikTok, the tag #overemployed has over 4.3 million views. The subreddit r/overemployed has over 89,000 members, and the accompanying Discord community has more than 32,000 users; during active periods of the day, a new member joins every few minutes. Both the subreddit and Discord exist under the banner of the Overemployed website, a resource hub and the home of this emerging work movement. These internet communities and online spaces have become a lifeline for people experimenting with or considering this new mode of work.
Despite the novelty of overemployment, if you dig deeper into the communities and their ethos, it’s all incredibly familiar. Though the overemployed, at first glance, seem to be resisting the backlash against hustle culture by embracing ever more work, they echo many talking points about work that have long since entered the mainstream—from disenchantment with corporations to the rejection of jobs monopolizing workers’ time and identity.
The pervasive feeling amongst millennials and zoomers that they can’t get ahead in work and life is hardly imagined. Across the US, inflation continues to rise, with rent inflation surging alongside. Housing scarcity is high while housing affordability is low, with increases in the cost of housing significantly outpacing wage growth across major cities. More recently, a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of 700 US executives and board members in various industries found that half of respondents are currently reducing headcount or plan to. With economic instability both looming and lingering, rescinded job offers and layoffs have become a first resort for bosses, and workers are bearing the brunt.
In an economy that’s gone awry, it’s no wonder doubling or tripling your income through overemployment feels like the new cheat code to financial freedom. Overemployment embraces the lure of earning additional steady income from the comfort of your own home while circumventing the precarious side hustles and gig work that fail to meet the needs of many.
Like Murphy, many overemployed individuals are achieving financial milestones that once seemed out of reach—from buying a home to building up sizable savings. In one Discord conversation, a member relishes the feeling of getting two paychecks on the same day while others react with emojis in delighted unison. In another channel, called “2x-success-stories,” members discuss wins ranging from paying off the credit card debt of loved ones to giving themselves raises of 130 percent or 200 percent by acquiring a second job.
But many of the wins aren’t material. Counterintuitively, proponents say the idea of working more—and the obligation to, in theory, work 80 or more hours per week—is not just financially freeing, but emotionally and professionally liberating as well. Discussions on Discord warn members of “red flag” behavior from companies—from startups with heavy meeting expectations to cultures of needless urgency. These conversations point to growing disenchantment with the idea that the workplace bears any resemblance to a family, with members often citing their real families—spouses, toddlers, parents—as the people they’re opting to prioritize above corporate loyalty. There’s a pervasive belief that many jobs are nothing more than an exchange of services for pay, until it’s no longer advantageous.
The overemployed are rarely seeking self-actualization and meaning-making at work. Many eschew career ambitions, adding additional jobs that are relatively junior and allow them to complete their work without the obligations that come with more senior roles. Those seeking fulfillment from their 9 to 5 are dissuaded across threads in Discord and Reddit, told to look elsewhere and resist the encroachment of businesses on their lives, and encouraged to find meaning outside the constraints of employment.
While stories about people with half a dozen jobs exist, most in the community simply work two, avoiding lifestyle inflation and expense creep and saving for their individual or family goals. Many are satisfied to coast at work, not necessarily because they’re eager to take advantage of corporations, but because they’ve already experienced the burnout that arose from overworking at a single job—receiving little in return for their efforts. In one thread, where someone considers resigning from one of their three roles, another poster responds matter-of-factly: “Don’t resign, just resign your mind.”
With multiple jobs, the posters say they never quite get attached to any. It’s a rejection of work as identity and an embrace of jobs as a means to an end. And most have an exit strategy, the financial goal or number that will see them pack it all in. Overemployment provides a sense of newfound confidence and positivity amid uncertain times, a feeling of taking back power.
Murphy has no moral qualms about overemployment, suggesting it’s both ethical and common. “My mom worked two jobs all the time growing up, but we don’t really think of that as weird because it’s a working-class situation,” she says. “But if you’re a knowledge worker and you’re working multiple jobs, there’s a sentiment that it’s unethical. It’s not, if you’re getting your work done.”
Still, Murphy was afraid of being found out and potentially losing both roles in the midst of the pandemic. Her anxieties reached a head when a meeting from human resources at her first job materialized on her work calendar. She was terrified her secret had been exposed. She imagined the HR coordinators at both companies somehow communicating and blowing up her life, with only herself to blame for trying to get ahead and save faster. In reality, the call was quite different: The company was in the midst of layoffs and she was being let go after several years. “I had saved up plenty of cash,” said Murphy. “I ended up being incredibly grateful that I had the secret second job.”
Overemployment is far from the only reimagining of work we’ve seen proliferate across the internet, earning new apostles through virality. The growing movement against work is being chronicled in r/antiwork, a subreddit that has grown to over 2 million followers since the start of the pandemic; posts from the subreddit frequently go viral on Twitter. Late 2022 brought “quiet quitting”—where people dissatisfied with their roles opt to stay instead of quit, scaling back to do the minimum—to the forefront of the news cycle. (Some have described this phenomenon as simply not allowing yourself to be exploited.) The FIRE movement (financial independence, retire early) has become a mainstay online, encouraging proponents to maximize their income while shrinking expenses to allow for early retirement or, more often, work that is more stimulating but less lucrative.
All of these modes of working point to dissatisfaction with the status quo and what it often means to have a full-time job. Bosses can be inept or even hurtful as they work on behalf of poorly managed organizations, burnout due to overwork is rampant, and the kind of work people might find most fulfilling is incompatible with their expenses. The strategies for approaching these problems vary, but the underlying impetus tends to remain constant.
In a thread on the Overemployed subreddit, one poster who pondered the divide between anti-work proponents and the overemployed received a response saying, “Antiwork and OE have an overlap. Antiwork talks about how the system is against the workers and we should tear that system down. OE thinks the system is against the workers and says ‘let's exploit it.’”
Isaac P, the pseudonymous founder of the overemployment community, who works two full-time roles himself, argues that the negative conversation around the ethics of overemployment is not being dominated by workers—who have something to gain—but by owners, who may have something to lose. He argues that businesses would be irresponsible to rely on a single revenue stream, yet individuals frequently find themselves in this predicament. “Mainstream thinking of this is still driven by people that have the mic—venture capitalists, founders, even small business owners,” Isaac said. “But no business in their right mind would put themselves in that position. So why should you? If you think like a business where you’re ‘You Inc’ or ‘Your Family Inc,’ why would you do that?”
Overemployment is more than just a style of work. It’s an ideology of individualism and self-reliance held by many who feel that corporations have turned their backs on workers. “A lot of people want to waste your time, and you can say no,” said Isaac about the extra demands placed on workers and how multiple jobs can grant people the power and security to decline. He cites more important things that people can opt to do: picking their kids up from school, cooking, or taking care of elderly parents. “The pandemic has woken a lot of people up to the important stuff about life.”