Sure, a lot of these people were just buying hype from these "get rich from drop shipping!" influencers, just like a million other suckers who got dollar signs in their eyes with real estate schemes, pyramid sale schemes, yada yada, a tale as old as time. I don't think this "passive income" trap is really anything new, and I don't think it was some unique thing that "ate a generation of entrepreneurs", as if that trap didn't exist then instead we'd see all these successful people.
Instead, what I think has drastically changed over the past 40 years or so is the ability of a solopreneur to make real money. Just look at all the posts on HN asking about how much people make on their side gigs. You rarely see anything more than a couple hundred bucks a month. There are notable exceptions, but unfortunately a lot of those notable exceptions are scammy, spammy business models. It's just simply much harder as a small/smaller business to make money and compete with the big boys. Wealth inequality doesn't just apply to people, but also companies. For example, in the past many entrepreneurial types may have started retail stores, while now it's incredibly difficult to compete with the likes of Amazon et al. I read an article recently that the number of public companies has halved compared to a few decades ago. The Wilshire 5000 stock index, for example, actually only includes about 3400-3700 companies now.
I suspect this is largely sampling bias.
I host meetups for indie founders, and several attendees earn their living through solo businesses. When I go to conferences like Microconf, I meet lots more.
The problem with measuring financial success by who posts about it on HN is:
* The more someone is making at their solo business, the less they want to blab about it and attract competitors.
* The people earning at the low end are more desperate for people to see what they're doing so they can pick up new customers, so they're more likely to talk about their work.
* The more successful founders are busier and spend less time posting on HN.
Exactly! And this is why every time I see someone selling a course while bragging about making a lot of money, I know for sure they are _not_ making money.
Victor Niederhoffer, The Education of a Speculator
But yeah I'm guessing the guy selling the course makes more off that than his fba business
No indy hedgefund algotrader gives away their golden goose, that would crowed out the trade.
Isn't this also sampling bias?
I thought it was supposed to be "passive".
Speaking of sampling bias, isn't this like asking a shovel vendor about the success rate of gold prospectors? :)
I don't stand to gain anything by exaggerating the results of the meetup attendees. Unless you think I'm trying to recruit people on HN to come to my meetups and meet successful founders?
> I suspect this is largely sampling bias.
FTFY.
Hard disagree.
As the article notes, I think if you concentrate on a real business, not a scam-y 'get rich quick scheme' business then, especially with the internet, its never been easier to run a solo business at scale.
For myself, I wrote an app as a side hobby, which then took off, so I started working on it part-time, then moved to full-time when the revenue justified.
It's now growing to where it exceeds what I would have made working for someone else.
Note this took 7+ years of constant work, improvements and care.
It's the type of dedication that makes you competitive with even larger organisations.
And the time required to be a 'success' ensures that you won't have any competitors who just want to make a quick buck or get to "passive income" within a year or two.
Just because you took 7+ years to develop a business does not mean that all businesses require that or that it is the only way.
It's enough to pay for itself easily and pay for a vacation or two a year, for about 4 hours of work a week. If we really put effort in, it could replace our day jobs.
Where most people go wrong is their expectation. We expected this to fund a vacation and maybe car payments. That it's doing that is exactly right and we don't want to take it any further. If people had that view, instead of feeling like they have to make a billion dollars, I think side gigs would be a different beast entirely.
You can be comfortable on not very much money with realistic expectations while not working yourself to the bone was kind of my point.
The dog walking business example was also appropriate in my mind. My spouse fortunately broke even, minus time, on her attempt with drop shipping garbage nobody really needs. Now she makes decent money with her oil paintings. Not "passive income" but real money and profit. Not enough to retire (that's what I am for!) but actual money nonetheless.
She also has a few art shows she applies to and goes presents at those. I think this is where most of her recurring customers come from honestly, and not Instagram. Though she has had a few commissions from Instagram.
A side note on those looking to buy art, you might refrain from asking for a custom piece. If you see something you like, there's a good chance you don't know why you like it even if you think you do. So when you give the artist a picture you want them to translate into something like oil, it'll probably disappoint. The frustrations I've seen my wife go through trying to get a commission right is tiring.
Years before your spouse enrolled in that Amazon course, people were spending tens of thousands of dollars on Trump University. Many years before that I had a friend that got sucked into the Equinox International MLM scam. Point being those types of promises of easy money after paying for a course, or outright scams, are not something new or unique.
The vast majority of people who fall for things like MLMs will continue to pursue similar scams and never graduate to "real entrepreneurship" even when there's obvious and not terribly difficult paths (most anyone can become a realtor and at least not lose terrible amounts of money, even if they never get to "full-time job" levels).
Some people just lack the capacity for this sort of thing, and unfortunately fraudsters target them by trying to convince them otherwise.
From my perspective, you have to take a lot of shots, I did around 20 side hustle ideas last year and 2 are making over $100/mo. The other 18 I dropped. The only note I will give is that the 2 that succeeded really played to my strengths.
About me: I once had a hustle that did around $6k/month but that was many years ago and I decided I would be happier as a hired gun coder. The rise of AI made me rethink this so I'm clawing my back to providing services.
These desperate attempts at passive income are simply another symptom of the absence of a functioning economy.
This is such a naive take. Nobody is coming to US to try to outgun you. The moment petrodollar wobbles, the moment US Dollar stops being the world reserve currency, the game will be over for you. You will discover what it really means to be competitive, once the world stops giving you goods essentially in exchange for glass beads.
Pretty sure the current administrations end game here is copying North Korea. The rich have enough oil in Texas to perpetuate their lifestyle, while violently suppressing all opposition.
Dropshipping, affiliate SEO, print-on-demand... these face the same margin compression regardless of how engaged you are. Ad cost inflation, platform saturation, algorithmic displacement, etc... it doesn't matter whether the operator is engaged or not.
Caring's a moat only where differentiation is possible. In commoditized markets, it doesn't move the needle.
When I was in high school 25 years ago, unless you got lucky with an IPO, tech didn't pay all that well. (I worked in software while I was in high school, so I know some of this first hand).
It was office space. It didn't matter how smart you were, if you didn't go into management, or join Apple/Microsoft at just the right time, you weren't going to live a rich lifestyle.
Not only that, you'd probably be reporting to some MBA type biz guy who has no idea how software works, you'd not be well respected, and your perks were drip coffee and occasional donuts on friday.
Of course brilliant, hard working, talented engineers said "fuck that" and go build something awesome themselves. Things have changed drastically. Now, brilliant hard working people can literally make millions at dozens of companies .
You will report to another engineer who has slightly optimized for soft skills, you get lavish perks (except amazon, but at least you get paid well there), and real equity.
There's a whole spectrum of options for ambitious software folk that didn't texist ~25 years ago.
So, my view is skewed, but I got the impression software engineering was not a place people were retiring 'early' from, unless you made it in management. It seemed like a pretty standard office job, maybe with a little more perks due to the eccentric nature of the majority of workers.
Do I have the wrong impression?
You're conflating two different things. Thanks to software, it's easier today than it's ever been to make money as a small business / solopreneur. It's also harder to compete with the big boys, possibly for the same reason and due to economies of scale.
That's why I don't bother entering the same markets the big boys are in. There are plenty of niche markets which they don't bother touching where a small business can thrive.
We remember the success stories, we don't remember the bankruptcies.
Internet businesses by contrast have a power law distribution. Meaning if you perform average you will end up with just $100 per month. The potential upside is infitite though.
The outcome of the average business person is very different between physical and online business.
Part of that was accurately diagnosed by the article in the bit about the dog walking business vs dog walking platform.
My partner bootstrapped a successful full-time cleaning business that she ran for a few years and the limiting factor was basically her ability to hire and retain good employees. A physical cleaning business has no path to scale like a tech company though.
is someone making money on a side gig really a solopreneur? By definition a side gig is not something you expect to make significant amounts of money on. if a side gig starts generating significant amounts of money then you would probably make it your primary gig.
"Passive income brain" people are not the only one's trying to "build revenue engines," that same sort of talk exists in corporate America. There are already people that that own companies which are there "to generate passive income for me," right now--there's a whole class of millionaires and billionaires that don't have to work. Passive income people didn't ruin the "content quality of the entire internet" and are far from the only ones doing so. Many of these folks are likely the ones that would have owned a hardware store if America didn't ignore it's regulatory duties while preaching about how "important" small business is.
In the U.S. situation really seems to have fossilized into a few big players/platforms, and they continue to freeze up through the process of things like private equity roll-ups. There's a thread on the front page right now about Amazon's alleged price-fixing tactics, which hurt customers and small businesses. Further: Real-estate is an investment, so for most being able to pay commercial rents is a pipe dream. Healthcare is tied to employment, so people are less free to try and start something other than "on the side."
American's choose "convenience" when shopping and to put people in power that serve these large companies or their owners, not small businesses or communities. Dropshipping, creating a "sweaty startup," etc... it's all just people trying to make do within the system they're trapped in.
It has long been easy for anyone to buy health insurance without an employer in the US. If you are self employed, you can even pay for it with pre tax income.
The problem is it costs $500 to $2,500 per month per person plus $10,000 out of pocket maximum per year, which means you need a high income to be able to afford it.
But, public hospitals with low or no cost care exist in some of these places, and from my observation, I do currently think it's a contributing factor to why small businesses are more likely to exist. But, it's only one knob to turn.
What do you think happens when you get sick as a self employed person? Do you think a health insurance company pays claims? Self-employed health insurance = Orwell's 1984
At least when you work for a corporation you don't have to see the truly ugly side of health insurance claim denial. Many people don't see this until their 50s/60s when they lose employer health insurance.
If you were earning above six figures then your numbers may be correct but let’s be honest and not dissuade folks from doing their own research. Everyone’s goals are different.
> I read an article recently that the number of public companies has halved compared to a few decades ago.
That's not because there are fewer companies but rather because private markets have much more capital.
OpenAI is the extreme example. If it were public, it would be the ~tenth most valuable public company in the world.
That amazed me when I heard it recently. The number of tradeable things continues to increase, but most of them are two or three steps removed from real-world production.
The author is acting like it hasn't always been this way. But it always has.
There have always been people who felt the allure of the get rich quick scheme. Its always been true that if they just spent the same effort on doing things properly they would probably make it but instead they bounce from one stupid scheme to the next.
Often its combined with some ideology about how the normal world is full of suckers and they are going to escape by not playing the game. Fraudsters love to target people who want to pull one over on the world. They are easy to manipulate so they usually fall for it when presented with an opportunity too good to be true.
The article, with a couple details about the specific examples changed could have probably been written in victorian times.
Get-rich-quick books have been around a long, long time. I'd wager they've been around since the printing press. And they always devolve into "buy low, sell high" or selling get-rich-quick systems to other people.
Passive income's not new either. It was (sometimes still is) a massive marketing play for franchisees. Spend $100k+ to open a franchise; the franchisor takes care of the rest; grab a hammock while you watch the money roll in. Never ever works that way, but that's how they've been marketed for a while.
If you look at the world of indie tabletop RPGs, for example: Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Press makes a very good living and a significant percentage of it is "passive" sales of his back catalog. But if he stopped publishing and promoting new game projects, sales of that back catalog would very likely shrivel to nothing within a calendar year.
The open-secret ingredient is always more work.
It's why someone like Crawford can afford to tell everyone exactly how he does what he does... Giving away extensive production files that show you his whole creative process, soup to nuts: 99% of people aren't going to put in the work necessary to sustain the passive portion of an individual income.
The problem is how long and what you have to do to get that 3-5 million number. No one who is drawn to the “passive income” hustle is thinking “work a normal job for 30 years, live under my means, and invest everything I can”. They want to get much more immediate results so they can enjoy life on easy street because grinding it out for so long sounds extremely depressing.
What you describe is a retirement plan, not a passive income lifestyle. Kinda the opposite of escaping.
It is good to encourage people to save money and invest them, but 8 out of 10 people out there don't earn enough to gather so much capital to live off it.
25x expenses in s&p 500 works ok. (Adjust the multiplier for your level of pessimism) Funding it isn't easy, but save a good amount of your income for a few decades and control your expenses and you can get there.
EDIT: I'm also kind of writing in the context of having your own little economic engine that you own and control, and can be continually running, rather than owning a tiny piece of the abstracted aggregation of an entire economy's engines. That said, dead-simple, low-fee, market-indexed funds are a generally good place to put the surplus fruits of your own little economic engine.
Real estate. Historically, that's the way to escape work. It helps to inherit it.
This is why I still do random sampling of Reddit, Twitter, Threads, and a few other social media sites: It’s a good way to keep up with some of the discussion trends that start spreading in online discussions.
I can pick up quickly when someone is parroting the latest info memes from Reddit or Twitter now. It’s very helpful for identifying who isn’t really thinking for themselves and will latch on to the first opinion they see on a topic.
I can’t bring myself to watch TikTok or other video shorts, though.
Quite the opposite for me. I'd like to have freedom to work on things I want to work on without "paying rent", "paying medical bills", or "short term profitability" being a constraint.
Much cheaper too, ridiculously enough.
dividends and treasury bonds give passive earnings, you need capital. the "passive income" savants did not and do not have capital.
case in point: it should not be noteworthy that the author's friend was "$800 in the hole", it should be such a rounding error that it couldn't be any of Joan's concern. And honestly, it probably isn't and Joan put an obsessive amount of weight into an off-comment.
$800,000 in treasuries, on the other hand, now you have passive income - only ~$37,000/yr - but enough to live like a royalty in South East Asia for the next 30 years, passively, followed by getting all $800,000 back.
Class inequality aside, throwing darts at the wall and seeing what sticks isn't a bad business strategy, and you really don't need to be passionate about any particular business idea to collect income.
I hope Joan's friends found something that worked from them. For me its just stay employed so I can accumulate capital for the side projects. Sometimes side projects become bigger than the employment, but my businesses are just expeditions, not forever projects.
I've never watched dropshipping influencers but I did sell some of my own electronics on eBay and noticed some opportunities in the process. Sometimes I put up identical listings as someone else's at a wildly inflated price, and people would buy from me because it seemed more serious. I would buy from the cheaper ad and put my own buyer's address in the shipping destination. Never seeing the product. Not scalable as I think its against the one of the terms, but you can do it between marketplaces too.
It was enormously influential and was likely involved in every one of these failed entrepreneur's ventures
This discussion reads like 'staying inside from 2019-2022 changed social structures' without saying COVID once
> What actually makes money hasn't changed. You find something people need. You get good at providing it. You charge a fair price and you keep showing up even when it's tedious and even when you don't want to. You build relationships over years. You build reputation over years.
You can make money doing this, yes--but most people who are really rich don't. There are lots of ways to game the system that don't involve the kinds of wacky things the article talks about.
I would say really successful companies at least go through a stage of Building Something People Want. Even if they stray from that as they become more successful.
I remember saying, "sounds like scamway or something" and he actually had to say that it was in fact amway he was talking about. uncomfortable.
didn't go much further than that.
Looking backwards I realized how little friction we had getting to know these people, etc... sigh.
when you look at the real business model of those who have had success they are still selling the soap in retirement. It is not going to get you rich, but it isn't too bad a life.
well it was - the only people I know in amway are in their 80s and so it may be different.
amway deserves the hate. Truth is it isn't as easy as they tell you.
8<------------
Free to do what? Sit on a beach, apparently. Every single one of these people wanted to sit on a beach. I've never understood this. Have they been to a beach? There's sand. It gets everywhere. You can sit there for maybe three hours before you want to do literally anything else.
8<------------
I laughed out loud when I read it, because it's so true.
At the same time, you guys really can't imagine relaxing on a beach for more than a few hours? Like i'm not really a beach person but back when i lived near the ocean i spent the odd saturday just unwinding on the beach with a book. Certainly wouldn't want that every day, but y'all acting like it would be impossible to enjoy say abeach vacation for a few days seems crazy to me.
(also I could happily relax anywhere for a few hours, but ideally not on a beach because that's uncomfortable)
Living near the beach is nice.
You can sit on it, walk on it, swim on it, surf on it, run on it, fish on it.
Better than a cement sidewalk, IMO.
House maintenance costs in sea air cost at least double. Appliances and aircon rusts and corrodes. Everything needs regular painting.
Cars rust out. I buy second hand shitters and replace them every ~5 years. Certainly not worthwhile owning anything collectable or precious.
If you want a garden, be prepared to spend twice the time and money and, perhaps plants and trees still struggle or die.
I live in New Brighton in Christchurch, mostly because it is cheap housing (for no reason I can understand). Plus the coastal wind from the sea avoids hayfever (town is irritating for me).
It has a good community. Many people that choose a beach vibe are relaxed and friendly.
- The productivity gang, if everyone is so productive and so well organised then what are the outcomes of this productivity?
- Self help - if self help books are solving real problems then where is the need to buy multiple self help books?
- The course trap - if someone is already earning millions dollars where is the need for him to sell $699 course
These are some questions I would ask myself regularly, there is nothing right or wrong because end of the everyone has to servive.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/04/...
The author apparently never read Tim Ferriss’ The 4 hour work week which not only whiteboarded some of the described schemes 20 years ago, but also had an illustration of a hammock suspended between two palm trees on the cover.
That was the dream: Set up a system, live on a beach.
What some devs usually fall for ( not by watching some youtube video, but by falling into the idea organically on their own as a kind of emergent behaviour ) is doing the minimal effort of a saas, like a template of the necessary part without adding the actual value.
The way this most often presents itself is a payment proxy, think about the minimal requirements for any software service, it charges money, so that's where they start, a stripe account, maybe an LLC, payment links or payment tables, they can now charge money. Then they make a frontend, a website, of any kind, this comes first, not to serve some kind of need, a landing page, and the actual product is a landing page as well, use react as well because that's the thing you do.
Finally, what is computing, it has something to do with data, so let users upload some images or videos, then you let them charge users for it. Bam, you have now reached the same app SaaS that millions of indie devs developed, like a patreon thing, an OnlyFans if you allow that shit, a gumroad. A host that allows uploaders to charge money.
If you don't even want to go through the hassle of hosting the images or content, you can just let the users upload a link, and charge for that
Must be thousands of these Linktree, campsite, taplink, patreon, cafecito, matecito, tecito.
The dropshipping thing is similar to this but it has a physical component, the idea of a business is just the minimal core, a caricature conception of what a business is, you buy a thing, and you sell it for more.
I started a business like this, but it wasn't passive. I shipped everything to my office before inspecting and shipping product out.
It lasted almost 10 years with 1 million annual revenue.
It was not passive.
I just upped my retirement contribution and decided that the big evil BigCos can do all the value creating and the finance middle men can have their take.
I guess that's the reason everyone does the slumlord or VRBO thing.
Yeah there's a fair amount of that here too.
Thinking about it on a meta level I think on the "low end" it's basically just a hack around how expensive employees are when you consider exposure. Sure you could have your $15/hr guys stay late and power wash your box trucks, deep clean your facility, etc, but some guy with a van will come in and do it on the weekend for a flat fee and if he falls off the ladder that's not your problem.
And on the high end it's a hack around overhead. You can have some guy show up on a jobsite, set up a tent to keep predatory eyes off and weld up the broken thing on your backhoe or the rental company calls that guy and repairs it on your job site without telling you giving you deniability. No expensive compliance costs of adding hot work to your job site or running a shop where that stuff happens regularly.
>if I am happy I would rather not know.
Always better to be able to say you don't know rather than "I asked and the answer seemed fishy but I didn't probe".
The cost of starting a new business has returned to the historical baseline.
While that isn’t always true, honesty is a great defense against being enlisted in scams that promise easy money.
And one day on campus I see him drive up in a Mercedes. And I ask him what’s going on.
Well, he tells me that he learned a little bit about cryptocurrency, and now he had gone into business where he advises people on how to invest in cryptocurrency. And I thought, “That’s really wise!” and I hope he is still doing well!
Basically a great way to stay above the hype and scams. Surely some sort of federal regulations would begin to apply... but good luck!
He was smart, but not necessarily wise. Wisdom would've been not spending the money on a Mercedes at 20 years old.
I mean that's ok he was a kid. I would've done the same at that age.
Calling it “ambition” is generous IMO. Passive income chasers always give “desperation” more than “ambition”. I also feel a bit weird about mourning “a diverted generation of entrepreneurs”, personally I feel like this generational obsession with entrepreneurship almost forcibly led to the dropshipping scams we see today. In a world where everyone is constantly trying to get some side project off the ground of course some folks are going to pursue the shortcut version of that.
I personally made it happen by working a FAANG SWE job for 13 years, not getting sidetracked by the startup cult, saving and investing 70% of my after tax income, etc. And no I didn't get into crypto, but I still managed to make it with conventional investments.
In fact, I chose to pursue a career in the tech industry in order to pursue financial independence in the first place. Because I knew back then (circa 2005) all the tech Kool aid was BS. That "don't be evil" was just a facade. And time has proven me right and my haters wrong, those who thought it was unethical for me to place wealth building ahead of career building.
It's been four years since I've been out of a job. Now I'm creating more passion oriented content. I'm never bored.
that might well be the first time I've seen "career" and "ethical" conflated in that way. I've definitely seen the people who think you're a fool and possibly a sucker if you chase short term wealth over career stability, and there's definitely a veneer of unethicalness clinging to the notion of get-rich-quick, but I cannot understand how "establish yourself in a career" is an ethical concern.
Twelve year olds?
I knew a few guys like that in crypto too, before crypto came along and they got into that, this guy told me he’d written a twitter app, it was a bot that pumped gold at some influencers command. Spurred me to write an app though.
- Every client of mine during my contracting days. It took me way too long to reply with, "Oh that's great news! I wasn't sure of my availability, and was certain I was going to be way too expensive. Glad you got it figured out."
Once, when fed up with this during a discussion on a small moonlighting job I said "Yeah, kids are pretty good with this stuff these days, Tell you what - have him get started and I'll be available to give him any help he needs at 2x my rate".
I responded that he was the one who had reached out to me, and if he feels like his son can do it then he shouldn't have wasted his time trying to find a contractor since that will be more expensive.
The client didn't like the attitude and I didn't get the job, but I was kind of glad because it was pretty clear to me that he would have tried to weasel out of paying me regardless.
I told him that I don't really build websites, and what I mostly do is write things that move information from one computer to another and that I haven't really enjoyed web development so it's not something that I do in my free time so I'm not good at it, and he should check out SquareSpace or Wix something.
He kept assuring me that it would "be easy". To shut him up, I gave him a quote of my daily rate for contract work (which honestly wasn't even that high by software engineering standards), and he backed off because he didn't realize how expensive software engineering is.
This also ruined Reddit as the source for this research. Before social media growth hackers figured out how to run campaigns on Reddit (around three years ago feels right, though I'm sure it's been happening at a smaller scale for a lot longer), you could type "best $THING site:reddit.com" and be fairly sure that you'll get a discussion about really good products amongst actual people. Nowadays, you can be fairly sure that most of the discussion is astroturfing, with some of it being completely AI-generated.
This is also ruining my _other_ use case for Reddit: finding good places to eat in my favorite cities recommended by locals that live there.
> podcast hosts interviewing each other in an endless circle of mutual promotion where everyone claimed to make $30K/month
It's always $30k/mo _revenue_. Never profit. We don't talk about profit.
They'll keep existing as long as the root cause that creates them (massive wealth inequality in general and the growing delta between productivity and wages) exists, so probably until our financial systems fully collapse in about 2032.
One thing the author does NOT see, however, is that the local folks doing all the hard work like mowing lawns, building furniture, etc. are in absolute panic over "AI" because their niche little lawn mowing/car washing/house cleaning business has been determined to be irrelevant by ChatGPT, etc. Oh and before you ask, there are folks claiming they can solve that exact thing, and those hard working folks are buying those products, hoping it will solve their downtrend in internet leads.
How does what ChatGPT thinks about lawnmowing matter? Like, specifically, who's going to be mowing the lawns if it's not the people who are currently doing it?
so some guy with a robot, Elon Mows, of course initially it will be just kids from India remote controlling the robots, but ... the AI is coming!
(okay, it's likely about leads and advertising, the negative sum game, and OpenAI wants to have an ad-supported free tier)
How would you approach someone to help them out of it? Don't think I can just throw them this article and say "you're wrong".
if it would be so easy to build personal passive income businesses hedge funds would be going around recruiting people and funding them. or the government. or the Effrctive Altruist.
but most small business are bad, inefficient, hard to scale them, etc.
(that doesn't mean there are no way to make money this way, but economically those boil down to bets. sure, sure, the aforementioned fancy investment funds also do bets, usually more sophisticated ones, and who doesn't, right? unless you are actively building a bunker somewhere around the Darién gap and recruiting people to your doomsday cult you are betting on the global economy chugging along.
but! eventually one has to price in risks-weighted return, and usually "passive income" is pretty poor compared to a boring job that pays really well.)
This is a good article indeed.
I like the sound of a "rent seeking social parasite" trap.
As the Mikado says in the eponymous Gilbert & Sullivan opera:
"something humorous, but lingering, with either boiling oil or melted lead."
That was before I became old enough (as I am now) to live off my superannuation and pension, which is also "passive income" but joy of joys, not a side gig. I'm not in denial about where my pension income comes from. It's other people's labour. That's what I'm invested in.
A more hasty fellow might have flagged this post as self-advertisement without necessary tags.
Sure, these people could have "worked" for their money, self-employed or as a "wagey in a cagey", but the whole point was that they didn't want to do it.
I now work in high level education in one of the top universities in that field in Europe and so I am in touch with many of his generational peers. Sadly I can't help but recognize this a significant trend, within some students (luckily a minority) thst has emerged in the past 5 years. As if they want to do the thing without actually doing the thing. Like a musician who wants to be a musician, but despises spending time on playing or rehearsing actual music.
I am not entirely sure what it is all about, but I could imagine both the internet and a certain US president has shaped the idea that appearance is the only thing that matters, while substance is for losers and suckers.
Passive income is from rental properties, mutual funds and (my dream) a rich uncle's trust fund.
the piece ive been thinking about though is the distinction between extractive info-products and compiled info-products. the affiliate blog churning out blender reviews someone never touched is extractive. but a furniture maker who writes a book about furniture making, from 20 years of doing it, isnt really "passive income" even if the book sells while they sleep. its just consulting-at-scale. the work was front-loaded, not absent.
the trap as she frames it is when the book comes first and the 20 years of experience never happens. when the product IS the meta-product about how to make the product. thats the ouroboros she nails.
fwiw im currently 4 days into a 30-day experiment shipping public work daily before asking anyone to pay for a compiled version. its painful in a way the "passive" framing cant accommodate, which is probably a sign its real. the people who sold "passive" never had to live through the days where nothing happens.
Were these the people who were really going to do anything substantive anyway? Or just the shortcut-taking types?
Then he delegated more and more responsibilities, allowing them to make decisions for anything up to a certain dollar amount, then kept raising the dollar amount.
This ended in him checking email a few times a week totaling about 4 hours altogether.
I do disagree that all sub$100 blenders are the same, though. But still! The main reason restaurants use Vitamix blenders is that they are so much safer when blending burning hot stuff, like soups. When you turn off a normal blender, you’re fairly likely to create an air bubble that pops a little later, sending drops of very hot liquid into the face/eyes of the operator. A Vitamix, if you turn it off correctly, does not create the bubble. This is irrelevant for most home users, including me. So I don’t have one.
Ah, the story of a generation
