Most people imagine self-employment as a kind of freedom from the office. In reality, it means you are no longer renting out your time to others, but instead choosing how to invest it in pursuits that feel meaningful to you. You don’t have weekends, but you don’t really have weekdays either. The boundary between “work” and “not-work” starts to look less like a wall and more like one of those lines in quantum mechanics that’s only there if you measure it. Maybe the real freedom isn’t in having more time off, but in not needing time off.