Why relying on a single employer is a dangerous economic gamble — and how shifting from one buyer to two changes the whole picture.
The Black Screen on Tuesday
Last Tuesday, my former colleague logged into a routine 9 a.m. video call. Three minutes in, his screen went black.
Email, gone. Company portal, gone. His working life replaced by one automated message explaining how to post back the laptop. There was no manager on the call. No conversation at all. Just a form and an address label. That’s single employer risk, happening in real time to someone who did nothing wrong.
He’d shipped a major project the week before, ahead of schedule. Top-rated in his last review. None of it mattered, because performance has never been the thing that protects you — a spreadsheet decided there was one too many of him, and spreadsheets don’t read appraisals.
Over coffee a few days later, he said the thing everyone says:
“I need to get my CV out today. I have to find another job.”
I let him talk. Then I asked the question that visibly annoyed him:
“What if you don’t?”
There’s a short video version of this argument, if you’d rather watch it than read it.
You’ve Been Taught to Call a Monopoly “Stability”
Here’s the part corporate culture doesn’t say out loud: when you hold one salaried job, you have exactly one buyer for the only thing you’re selling — your time. That buyer sets the price, sets the hours, and can stop buying on a random Tuesday with no warning.
Economists have a word for a market with a single dominant buyer: monopsony. A monopoly is one seller holding the power. A monopsony is one buyer holding it — and in labor terms, that buyer is your employer.
Tell a freelancer they have exactly one client, no contract, and that client could vanish overnight — nobody calls that secure. Everyone tells them to go find a second client. Put the word “salaried” on the identical arrangement, though, and it reads as the responsible choice.
The Single-Tenant Building
Think of it as a building. A landlord with one tenant has simple, tidy income — right up until that tenant leaves. Then it isn’t tidy. It’s zero. A landlord with a building full of tenants loses one and barely feels it.
Most of us have spent our adult lives as the single tenant in someone else’s building and called it a career. It’s not a conspiracy — banks like a salaried borrower because predictable pay makes underwriting easier, and an employer reasonably prefers a workforce too dependent on one income to push hard on pay or walk. It’s just an arrangement that works for everyone except the tenant.
A Personal Reckoning
I understand the pull of this system firsthand — I was a single tenant in someone else’s building for years. I believed that working harder and staying loyal was the same thing as building something secure.
The turning point was small: my first invoice to someone who wasn’t my employer. It wasn’t much money. My hands were shaking when I sent it — I’d been conditioned to see income outside payroll as reckless. It took cashing that transfer to realize the opposite was true: that invoice was the first genuinely secure thing I’d done in a decade.
Where Income Actually Comes From
Step off the single track and the picture opens up. Money doesn’t only arrive as a salary on payday — it comes through a few different doors.
Door one is the one you know: trading hours for money. Honest, immediate, capped hard by the hours in a day. Door two is building something once that keeps earning — an article, a template, a guide someone downloads while you’re asleep. Door three is renting out what you already own — a spare room, a car, gear gathering dust between jobs. Door four is spotting value other people miss and passing it on to someone glad you did.
You don’t need all four open. You need to stop depending entirely on door one.
The Number That Matters Is Two
Say “multiple income streams” and people picture a spreadsheet with twelve rows and give up before starting. Forget twelve. The number that matters is two.
Nearly all the risk sits in the gap between one buyer and two. One is a single point of failure. Two is a different category of thing — the moment someone who isn’t your employer pays you for anything, you’ve stopped being a single-tenant building.
Here’s how to get there without setting fire to your evenings: name what share of your income one person’s decision could wipe out this quarter, and sit with that number honestly. Sell one skill to one buyer who isn’t your employer — one invoice is the goal, because it’s the first one that rewrites what you believe about yourself. Build one thing that earns while you sleep. Keep a fund with an honest, slightly ugly name — call it the black-screen fund, if that fits.
I wrote out the full four-step version of this, with deliverables for each step, in the newsletter breakdown.
This Isn’t a Demand That You Quit
A job isn’t the enemy. If you like your days and your team, and you’re glad someone else handles the sick pay — keep it. I’m not telling you to walk out tomorrow in a blaze of principle.
I’m telling you to stop treating the monopoly client as a fortress. It never was one. It was always a single tenant in a single building, and that building’s value can hit zero in the length of one video call.
Back to the Black Screen
My former colleague found another job eventually. Good for him. But this time, he also sold one small piece of what he knows to someone who wasn’t his employer. One invoice. Not much money. He said it felt “faintly ridiculous.”
I don’t think it was. I think it was the first morning in years a black screen couldn’t take everything from him.
You’re not your job title. You were never meant to be a single tenant. Keep the salary if you want it — just stop letting one buyer own the whole building.
The original long-form version of this piece is on Medium, if you’d like to read it there.