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Millennials Are Abandoning Their Careers for Online Odd Jobs
When the market fell off the Covid Cliff, millennials were left reaching for anything (and everything)
It’s Tuesday morning at 9:20 in the foggy mountains of Lynden, Washington, and Adrianna Richardson plops down into a beanbag chair in her living room to answer emails.
However, the emails she receives seem to have her confused with multiple people. One person needs a logo for their online business. An insurance company in Texas needs a set of Facebook ads written. A mobile game development company wants a set of voice lines for a character in their game.
“I certainly didn’t mean to start out this way” Adrianna tells me over Zoom, laughing. “I just threw a bunch of irons in the fire and a bunch of them turned into something.”
When the market saw a stomach-lurching drop on March 23, 2020, sometimes called the “Covid Cliff,” the economic ripples and following layoffs left Adrianna, like many millennials and new college grads, reaching for anything.
When all else fails, turn to working online
“I had just graduated in December of 2019 with a degree in economics.” Adrianna is 24 now and sparkles with creative energy. The wall of her Zoom room is decorated with mementos from her years studying abroad in Japan or traveling with her mother on business trips across the US. “When the economy crashed, I could see that the next few years weren’t going to be a fast recovery, so I decided to do something about it.”
Adrianna lost her job at a restaurant when Washington locked down in March. With nothing else to do, she enjoyed a few weeks off, binge-watching The Tiger King, scrolling through TikTok, and relaxing at home. She tried learning to bake and started feeding hummingbirds. As the lockdown dragged on and her savings dwindled, with unemployment benefits still lagging due to system overload, Adrianna did what many people did: turned to working online.
Unable to find remote employment in a field that matched her degree, Adrianna put an ad on voices.com, a website that matches voice actors with companies needing voiceover work.
