Too little for too much

There's a lot of talk about low wages. People busting their asses for a boss for a little over a thousand euros a month. An insult, really.
I gave it a try (briefly, to be honest) at being a high-end servant, complete with titles, livery, and assorted bullshit. I even earned enviable salaries, let's say the kind that would make the average Italian today stop complaining.

And yet I always felt cheated. 8 hours or more at the office, 5 or 6 days a week, barely a month of vacation a year. A horizon as far off as retirement day, by which point the best part of life will have been wasted between open-plan offices and company cafeterias, with only enough energy left to decide how to rest.

They were asking for the most precious thing I had: the freedom to run my own days. Every morning when I woke up, I felt my stomach squeezed in the jaws of a vise as invisible as it was physically real: I couldn't make sense of the kind of life I was living. No raise, bonus, assignment, title, or role would have made up for what I was giving up.

Besides, at the companies where I worked I was always treated pretty well, all things considered. I even met some good people, a few of whom I've stayed in touch with. So it wasn't a matter of the wrong workplace. It was really my own personal incompatibility with that kind of life.
The decision to walk away from everything, which seemed like madness — especially back when a permanent contract was practically ironclad by law —  was, for me, the easiest one I could have made.

I've always preferred being a permanent temp, with nothing to hold onto, sometimes broke, but carefree, serene. Even, why not, happy.
So far, through ups and downs, I've gotten by. Maybe one day it'll end in catastrophe. I'll accept it precisely because up until the moment before, I'll have done what I wanted. If you can't live long, it's better to at least live well.

To sum it all up in an aphorism, I could say: "The price of my freedom is material poverty, because I said no every time I was offered money to give it up."

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.