Welcoming in 2025 and the Recession Question
Posted by Paul Silver
The evening of our first freelancers meet up of 2025 was snowy, which is quite a surprise for Brighton as we get very little snow. Happily, fourteen freelancers made it through the slush to meet in the Lord Nelson Inn in Brighton. This is some of what we talked about:
- Snow!
- The City of London is a law unto itself (literally)
- Clients/managers who want to put AI in products with no idea why
- The i360 – what will happen now?
- Sussex university thirty years ago and now
- The ethics of new clothes vs second hand
- Work levels
- The economy is not looking great – are we in a recession?
- Drumming and Samba
- Programming in Octal and C++
- Fourier Analysis
- Caring for parents
- Fyre festival
- Cutting down smoking via vaping
The Recession Question
Are we in a recession? There is a technical definition of whether the UK is in a recession and apparently we’re not officially in one as we’ve seen a tiny bit of growth. However, as someone who has freelanced through two recessions, it certainly feels like we’re in one. In fact, I’d say the last two years have been much worse than recessions in the recent past.
In past recessions, there was more work around for freelancers than usual, as full time staff were laid off and freelancers were used to temporarily fill in the gaps that left. That was terrible if you’d lost your job, but as a freelancer, it meant there was a variety of work around and although it was generally short term, you could chain enough together that the impact of the recession wasn’t too bad and you had the chance of more work coming from the new clients you’d just helped as the economy settled down.
The last two years have been bad for freelancers as the amount of available work has been very low. There is work around, but it takes a lot of digging to find it. It has been easier for people who have been freelance a long time as we generally have bigger personal networks to help find the work, but it hasn’t been great for anyone. If you started freelancing in the last couple of years and you think it’s hard going, you are right! It is not usually as hard to find work as it has been recently.
Will things get better soon? I don’t know. No one at our meet up knew. We hang on and do our best. We help each other finds leads. Some people have plenty of work, they try to help those who don’t. That’s one of the advantages of being in a group. I wouldn’t want to navigate freelancing at the moment without a load of other freelancers having my back, fortunately, I have that because of The Farm.
If you’d like to join us, please come to our meet ups. They’re every Wednesday. You can find out where on the home page.