Taylor Elyse Morrison has two and a half careers. One career involves a well-being and self-care app called Inner Workout, which she is preparing to launch soon. Then there is the corporate consulting role, which sees her working with Google and other companies as a facilitator.

The last “half” part of her career is a small coaching practice. “I don’t do a lot of advertising for it,” the 31-year-old explains, “but if people come to me for coaching, that’s what I offer.”

Morrison’s working life provides her with flexibility, freedom, and the ability to choose what kind of work she engages in on a day-to-day basis. Those can be the components of a fulfilling professional life, and a solid recipe for work-life balance.

However, without the right structures and practices in place, this sort of job structure has the potential to turn into another form of hustle culture and lead to burnout.

THE RISE OF PORTFOLIO CAREERS

Morrison joins a growing number of individuals who have opted to have a portfolio career—a term that has been coined to describe those who make a living through multiple means, a practice that has existed for as long as money has been around. Scott Sonenshein, a management professor at Rice University, says that while the “pandemic exacerbated the trend,” the prevalence of people pursuing portfolio careers started during the  formation of the sharing economy and gig work platforms.

Sonenshein recalls doing research on the sharing economy in 2014, and said that he was struck by how many different backgrounds people with multiple jobs had. “Some of them were in relatively high-skilled jobs,” he says, “being a consultant, for example, and moonlighting as an Uber driver.” People were attracted to the idea that they could earn supplemental income beyond their 9-to-5, whether it was for the long-term or for a specific large purchase, like an engagement ring.

According to a 2022 McKinsey survey, 36% of respondents—which translates roughly to about 58 million Americans—identify as independent workers (which included those who were fully self-employed, as well as those who earned supplemental income in addition to their regular job). This is an increase from 2016, where McKinsey research estimated the figure at 27%. A 2023 research paper by the University of Chicago also found that those who reported self-employment income on their tax filings—largely through platform-based gig work—increased from just over 1 million workers in 2015 to about 5 million in 2021.

As the sharing economy took off, Sonenshein notes, other trends in the workforce and the labor market also unfolded. With wages not growing at the same rate of inflation, having multiple jobs became an “important means to survive,” especially among workers earning lower wages.

Fast-forward to the pandemic, “People started having an existential thought process,” he says. Of course, those who pursued portfolio careers out of economic necessity still did so, but Sonenshein says he saw more and more people choosing to do so to take greater control of their own life. Amid uncertainty, people “realized they could take control of their career by not relying on a single employer who may or may not need them,” he says.

A FLEXIBLE ALTERNATIVE TO CORPORATE WORK LIFE

For Morrison, pursuing a portfolio career came from a desire to own her business and the discovery that a multifaceted approach suited her well. As someone who was diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood, Morrison found that working on a variety of projects, combined with the autonomy to set her own schedule and the ability to choose what work to take on was more appealing than climbing the corporate ladder.

Morrison herself started in a corporate role but realized after a year that it wasn’t for her. She shifted to working in startups while pursuing side hustles and became fully self-employed in September 2020. “For me, my rationale was like, I’m young, I don’t have a lot of responsibilities. If there is a time to try something new, it’s now.”

But while portfolio careers may be more normalized among the tech-savvy millennials and Gen Z, more and more older generations are also taking part. Ben Legg, cofounder and CEO of the Portfolio Collective—a digital community of portfolio careerists—said that the fastest-growing demographic after young adults is “mid-career professionals, who consciously choose to exit the corporate treadmill and become independent.”

AVOIDING THE TRAPPINGS OF HUSTLE CULTURE

Many who pursue portfolio careers out of choice, like Morrison, see it as a way to do work that is meaningful and engaging. Legg says that many are also attracted to the potential of better work-life balance and the lack of “long commutes and pointless meetings that go nowhere,” two things that are often synonymous with unfulfilling corporate jobs.

But there’s an argument, as CNBC Make It previously reported, that among Gen Z, portfolio careers have become a rebrand of hustle culture. Not only are many Gen Z workers pursuing side hustles and freelance projects, but they’re also working long hours at their 9-to-5s. A 2023 report by ADP Research Institute found that workers between the ages of 18 and 34 put in longer overtime hours than their older colleagues.

Sonenshein believes that the lack of structure is what makes some portfolio careerists fall into the hustle-culture mindset. When you’re working for yourself, he says, “you might feel like you always need to be working because there’s more incremental money to be earned for taking on additional gigs, as opposed to what you might be doing if you were working full-time for a traditional employer.”

For Morrison, the key to avoiding falling into hustle culture is doing a lot of work on defining what success means to her. “If you haven’t defined success for yourself, you’re guaranteed to be living and chasing someone else’s definition of success, which, in the society we live in, is [to] achieve as many things as possible,” she says. “That’s not my definition of success. So I don’t have that problem.”