Nguyen LNP - Vietnamese freelance writer | Vietnamese freelancer | Web design, writing, digital marketing services

Freelancing & Mental Health

Staying healthy is often referred to physical health in common sense but mental health is also as important and is necessary to take care for, and should never be neglected. But the concept of mental health seems to be quite abstract in comparison to physical health.

There sure is a lot of research has been done on the topic but everyone seems to pay more attention to and discuss more on physical health like how to keep form, how to have nice body, ways to cut fat, etc. not to mention acknowledge mental health’s importance enough to take action to keep one’s mind healthy.

To keep our mind healthy, we can’t just tell it to stay positive as we cannot simply avoid running into problems, staying away from frustrated situations, we cannot make our mind work the way we want just by saying “Hey buddy, let’s have a good mood and be nice.” And to me, the solution is taking action in advance, “work out” with my mind to get it ready for everything, not just wait to react when things happen.

And in order to do that, I take up new hobbies to keep my mind busy outside working hours. Some choose reading books, some favor playing board games, solving puzzles etc. and I choose Photography. As a form of visual art, it can as well amuse me and help me develop new skills I can put into use. After spending hours writing, crafting words and sentences, please my mind with something visual is a good thing to do. To take photos, I have to walk around, to take a look at everything around and many writing prompts can suddenly come up which is good for work. And walking is also a sports activity which is good for my physical health.

To me, hobbies do not simply keep our mind from being idle, keep us staying positive, hobbies can help us sharpen our mind and in many other good aspects. Overall, it’s good for our mental health.

I want to hear about your hobbies!

Nguyen LNP - Vietnamese freelance writer | Vietnamese freelancer | Web design, writing, digital marketing services

Industry 4.0 and Freelancing

Industry 4.0 has already passed the starting line and AI has started taking over human’s place in some work sectors. That’s the truth. It is said that the service sector and industrial sector are the most heavily affected sectors. Jobs in factories, related to assembly lines, or in banks where some works are repetitive and based on sets of rules which require no human judgement. Or even jobs like barista or chef, recent news show that labs and universities are working on various kinds of AI that can do human jobs efficiently and that corporations are more than willing to replace human workforce with robots, AI to cut costs.

But the real thing we should care about here is whether if it would affect the freelancing world. The exact answer is yet to be known but I would give it a Yes and would like to make an analysis of how Industry 4.0 could affect the world of freelancers.

As more and more human jobs in some sectors are going to be taken over by AI, more and more people will be in need of new work opportunities, will seek alternative sources of income, and, we can say that, doing freelance jobs using online platforms is a viable solution.

Why? Because it requires little to no transportation, people can work online conveniently from their home. Some may try to argue by saying that it’s unlikely the case as people can’t do jobs they don’t have skills for. But then there are always simple freelance jobs and more than that, they can start studying, acquiring new skills. With clear goals and determination (just like how we started) they definitely can start online freelancing in no time.

The problem is, for the newcomers and also for veteran freelancers, more people in the fields meaning pitching will become more competitive, finding a job will be harder. Everything will change when suddenly there are many more freelancers start getting into the market at once.

That’s very likely to be the case and it’s high time we started acting to adapt to the changes, maybe by acquiring new sets of skills, new knowledge pertaining to Industry 4.0, to machines, robots, AI while also sharpening our skill sets to make sure that we would stay in the market.

All in all, to go along with Industry 4.0, we act, not just react.