A digital painting of a lone man standing at the edge of a dark corporate city, facing a sunlit open road leading toward small independent buildings, symbolizing the choice between corporate confinement and personal freedom.

The company you work for isn’t your friend and it never will be

ByTC Marti

The company you work for wants to keep you indentured to and invested in them. Luckily, it doesn’t need to be that way in today’s world.

Far too many times, we’re taught to “get with a company and work for them. They’ll take care of you.” People who follow this mindset will cite healthcare benefits, retirement, life insurance, and other “perks” to the job that companies offer.

While some mask it as an exchange of services for a fixed amount of payment and benefits, I learned that’s not the case. No, I didn’t need to take a crash course in how toxic it was to work at a major corporation. I worked for one between Jan. 2024 and Jan. 2026, driving home what I had, for a long time, known.

I’m entrepreneurial, so I “broke my back” for 24 months writing about a sport I never bothered to follow until 2022. Come 2024, my success writing about that sport landed me the full-time job I needed for a short time so I could earn and put back money for what would become an eventual secession. To make the investments I needed and have enough to live on while pursuing my own endeavor.

It was tedious, disillusioning work. While the sport was fun to follow, the content I wrote was so short-lived and mind-numbing that I started to think, “How the hell can anyone remotely keep falling for this?” This being overdelivering headlines and underdelivering content; something you see far too often regardless of the sports media outlet.

The Early Takeaway: Companies want you enslaved, not self-sufficient

I remember sitting in a meeting with the senior director in May 2024, when he shared the hiring process with me, a staff writer from another division, and the editorial director. What he said, I’ll never forget: “The reason I wanted to talk to you both during the hiring process was so I knew exactly who I was hiring. I needed someone to have enough time to build this. No side businesses, or anything.”

I’m sure I twitched a little in my seat, even if it went unnoticed. But it confirmed to me that yes, the company you work for wants you under their thumb. And they will slowly squeeze the life out of you.

Fast-forward to Sep. 2025, and the crackdown made me feel like a prisoner trapped in my own home. By this point, we’d gotten a new director and senior director, both of whom arrived with a dehumanizing strategy.

During the earlier days of the job, I was writing for sports fans and spinning things my own way. Mind-numbing? Of course. But at least I had a personality that related to the reader since every piece I wrote had them in mind.

During my last four months on the job? That wasn’t the case.

Curveballs out of left field on a weekly basis

No longer did I write for fans, but for editors. And worse, so many of those “clickbait” headlines you probably crossed if you read about sports have come from this company. Written by writers who never wrote that article for you, but the people in charge who screwed with the headline and content, all to ensure you clicked through it before clicking on a few ads so they made money.

Translation: This company offered nothing of worth. Opinionated takes on sporting news sanitized by editors to ensure your eyes stayed glued to a four-inch device aren’t providing a service. It’s caging your mind.

To cage your mind, that same company first had to cage our minds. Unfortunately for them, they had a dissenter in their ranks who was busy penning his Declaration of Independence. 

So what did they do, exactly?

  • Workshop at least four, if not more, headlines and angles per day
  • Record everything we did on a tracking sheet
  • Confine ourselves to flooding just a few sites with content that had more than enough capable contractors
  • Submit everything to directors and expect to be thankful for their public scrutiny
  • In other words, they were erasing our unique writing voices

If this is happening in sports media, it’s for damn sure going on at the company you work for if you’re unlucky enough to be indentured to one.

Luckily, there’s a way out

Beyond the Lost Horizon by TC MartiA lot of people who read about others railing against companies automatically believe the writer is socialist or Marxist in one way, shape, or form. But for me, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Instead, we can escape corporate dread thanks to free market capitalism. Ron Paul always said, and I’m paraphrasing, that corporations love regulation and hate free markets because it stifles competition and increases barriers to entry.

But those with regulatory power can’t regulate everything all at once. It’s why owning a freedom-based business is easy to get into and make money in. And I guarantee that you’ll be a million times happier when you realize the payoff.

How it’s done

One way I’m running my own freedom-based business is through writing fiction. Not escapist fiction, but thought-provoking stories intended to stick with you long after you finished. It’s not formulaic genre fiction, but something that goes much, much deeper. If you’re looking for a prime example, check out my dystopian survival novella, Beyond the Lost Horizon.

And if you’re looking for another way to kickstart your freedom-based business, look no further than John Thornhill’s Online Success Coaching. You’ll be shocked at just how easy it is to get started these days in literally any niche.

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