Being scheduled is someone else's calendar becoming your life. You show up at 9, leave at 6, take lunch when the office empties — you are a resource being allocated, same as a server running a task. Autonomy is different: you decide what matters and when, you can say no without justifying it to a manager, you can work at 2am if that is when the problem makes sense. The 996 people I know are scheduled; they are not autonomous. The worst part is they tell themselves they are ambitious, when really they just lost the ability to say no. I have friends doing freelance hardware consulting now — they make less money but they choose their projects and their hours, and that changed something in them I cannot describe except that they seem less tired in their eyes.
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