The passive income movement was a fantasy about not having to give a shit.

[rosymaths@mathstodon.xyz]

@dahukanna @Daojoan That's a really insightful perspective.

[masek@infosec.exchange]

@Daojoan They fail 5 to 10 times and then start blaming it on women, migrants or everybody else.

We all had this already once in the 90s withe everyone and his uncle having online stores. But it was a lot more work back then...

At least that guy is only 800$ down. This can be a lot more expensive.

[ifrit@masto.ai]

@Daojoan
I didn't know "jade face roller" was a thing

[alrecenk@peoplemaking.games]

@Daojoan I live on passive income. I got it by pursuing an advanced degree, getting really good at what I do, and then working 60 hours/week for someone else while saving 75% of my income for several years, which I used to buy index funds. I wish I could say I provided meaningful value during that time, but that'd be a stretch. I'm trying to do meaningful work now, but it doesn't pay well, hence the living on passive income.

[interpipes@thx.gg]

@Daojoan of course the only “real” passive income business is to have a large pile of money and assets like a certain class of all too common landlord that nearly everyone has rented from, but that requires too much capital “to step into”, so of course they started grasping at ways they too could get away with giving no shits.

I have no idea why you would want this either. As you observe; my entire business is successful on giving a shit so that we are invited back.

[patrascan@ohai.social]

@Daojoan thank you for writing and posting this article describing a movement I did not know about. I see some interesting parallels with multilevel marketing as described in the excellent book "Little Bosses Everywhere".

[jkn@mastodon.online]

@BubblegumYeti @Daojoan I have to deal with people who seriously prompt ChatGPT with "make me money out of nothing" and expect it to work.

[mercg@mindly.social]

@Daojoan

Thank you, and delighted to hear jade roller guy was only $800 down.
Signed, guy who switched to meaningful work 17 years ago and am thankful every exhausting, difficult, frustrating af day.

[spodlife@sunny.garden]

@interpipes @Daojoan
I came to mention landlords too, as if flipping property or extracting crushing rents is passive. Only if you don't care about the property, or the tenants.

[timolaine@mastodon.green]

@Daojoan I think this is part of a larger picture. The central issue seems to be that it is not easy to find work that 1) is meaningful/valuable, 2) pays the bills, 3) one does not hate performing and 4) one is able to do.

My own opinion, and I may be wrong, is that we have constructed our societies and education systems to provide people with skills that are mostly valuable for someone else, i.e. they do not provide autonomy for an individual.

[timolaine@mastodon.green]

@Daojoan So, if we are cynical about it, the choice is roughly between a bullshit job, constant worry about money, or these mostly immoral schemes you describe so well.

[volcan01010@fosstodon.org]

@Daojoan At the risk of sounding like a bot, I wanted to say that was a great article and I really enjoyed reading it. Thank you for writing it.

I particularly liked the beach bit and the blender bit. I found the article because @mia boosted it. I'm sad that my view of the Internet has declined to the level that I'm worried about looking like a bot for sending unsolicited enthusiasm.

[clickhere@mastodon.ie]

@BubblegumYeti Yes, that's addressed by Joan in her piece.

@Daojoan

[shadows@beige.party]

@danbrotherston @Daojoan that’s how I feel about it, but most passive income seems exploitative, whether you’re tricking people into buying a product that they don’t need and/or exploiting cheap labor to build/maintain the product.

[countholdem@mastodon.social]

@Daojoan On one hand, "passive". On the other, not so much: a sustainable range.

A byproduct of single solve mindset education, is to erroneously fixate on one value set. And while this tends to lend more profit for the wealthy in more subjugated masses, it eventually spells disaster for most ecosystems.

[vampirepenguin@mastodon.social]

@Daojoan Our entire culture has been hollowed out by this thinking. And not just by fly-by-night dropshippers- people with MBAs from prestigious schools. This notion that nothing matters but the bottom line, and delivering as little as legally allowable is the correct and smart thing to do. The result is a negative feedback loop where the only thing that can compete is the shittiest thing. It's a race to the bottom and we all lose.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus@cyberplace.social]

@Daojoan It arguably looks a lot like conspiracy-theory entrepreneurship: the idea that there's a simple, but 'secret' in a contrarian they-don't-want-you-to-know sort of way, area where the game is rigged in your favor; hidden between the visible realms of being the man and grinding for the man.

Very much like the 'alternative medicine'; where there's some relatively trivial(compared to real medicine) miracle cure just quietly hiding out where you can find it but pharma R&D can't, for reasons.