Passive Income | Side Hustles | Societal Issues

Our Obsession With Side Hustles & Passive Income Signals a Deep Social Problem

It’s a mess and I’m a hypocrite.

I think my dad might be proud of me. He said that he wished he had done what I’m doing when he was my age. That of course being building consistent streams of passive income.

I wish I could take all the credit and consider myself a keen eyed “investor” or “entrepreneur” with a ton of foresight, but this is far from the truth. Unfortunately, the reality is much darker.

I’m scared about the uncertainty of my future and I want some control over my life, and I don’t think I’m alone.

I think this because one typical evening, in a clear state of mind, I clicked on a YouTube video about “10 easy ways to earn money in your sleep!” The video had hundreds of thousands of views.

The algorithm has been feeding me content on passive income and investing ever since. The truth is, I’m lucky I have easy access to information that my dad never had.

Or am I?

Passive income has become an obsession for many millennials and Gen Z. My feeds are populated by articles and YouTube videos about “financial freedom (TM)” and “how I earned $1,823.77 a month from writing about (insert hobby here)!”

While the algorithms that guide my digital eye are tailoring themselves to my engagement and are probably a poor metric to accurately assess a true cultural zeitgeist or collective unconscious on their own, I do think that the volume of content and popularity of these topics is telling.

What speaks to me even more are the conversations I find myself having with my peers. Chats over coffee are focused more and more on starting a side business for after work hours or monetizing hobbies.

Yup, the phrase we all groan at but are also addicted to, the Side Hustle.

Now, I’ve found some pretty peculiar ways to make a buck myself. From shaking my phone every day to earn tiny bits of Bitcoin, to getting an inexpensive cryptocurrency miner that provides network service to Internet of Things devices, as well as some more conventional methods like finding a great deal on a stock with a high dividend yield that pays monthly.

I also have a pretty sweet side gig as a contractor tutoring at my local university. But I don’t think it’s purely out of an entrepreneurial spirit that I’ve been inspired to build up these streams of income.

Sure, it’s fun and exciting to find new ways to earn, and it has definitely enriched my life by leading me to learn about a number of fields I would otherwise have no exposure to. But I think the exponential growth of interest in passive income and side hustles in society is symptomatic of a much deeper problem.

Young people like myself, my friends, and millions of others, are feeling very uncertain about the stability of our futures and like we don’t have any control over our lives.

There are a lot of pieces of evidence that converge on these points.

For example, millennials are more hesitant to have kids due to climate change. Also, along with levels of Co2 in the atmosphere, mental health issues are on the rise, with new existential conditions emerging such as climate anxiety and climate depression (also referred to as eco-anxiety and eco-depression).

And more than this, we see where this current financial system is heading.

Costs of living do. Not. Stop. Rocketing. Up. And the amount of money we can earn to keep up hasn’t kept pace in over half a century. We can’t help but wonder, “what will things look like in 30 to 40 years? Will I ever have the privilege to retire?” “Will I even be alive when I’m 60 years old?”

No wonder it’s costing us our sanity.

Living without the luxury of generational wealth is like running a marathon at a sprinter’s pace.

Whatever we have never feels like enough because we don’t know how much we’ll need in the future to feed the endless void that is the belly of capitalism or save ourselves from social and climate collapse.

And we feel powerless about it.

These fears keep us working for corporations that have gobbled just about all of the meaningful competition in their markets. We work in our isolated corner of some monolith doing the same things over and over and over and over. If we decide we’ve had enough of one job, we are forced to march into the mouth of some other corporate behemoth.

We have no choice, so we keep getting chewed up because we have to.

This makes the song of passive income and side hustling so musical to our ears. Building streams of income does a few things for our psyche: it helps soothe our worries about the future by providing increased financial stability and a distraction from doom scrolling, and gives us something creative in our lives that we can control.

But we shouldn’t have to feel guilty about having creative outlets that ease our worries and don’t earn us money.

The phrase “earning a living” has never been more disgusting to me.

How do we fix a broken system when that system is what keeps our focuses so narrowly fixed on the accumulation of our own resources and wealth by threatening the penalty of death?

An especially cruel death at that, a death that is long and undignified. A death that involves taking one’s home and shelter, alienating a person from their community, letting them get sick and denying them healthcare, exposing them to violent conditions and trauma…

If you don’t have money, you will die.

We just don’t have the time or mental resources left at the end of the work day to commit to making change. What we do have is an ever increasing feeling of unease about the security of our future and our place in the world.

Ultimately, I don’t have the answer. This is the part where I’m supposed to whip up some cozy, feel-good take-away, but maybe it’s okay to break the narrative once in a while to stare at reality.

I love helping people develop their knowledge and passions into sources of income, because it means they can allocate the resources to do it. It lights up their creativity, provides meaning, and gives greater financial stability and freedom. But it’s important to recognize the underlying reasons why side hustles and passive income have become such large trends.

There’s something seriously wrong with our financial system that needs to be addressed.

I feel like I’m caught between two worlds: the one we currently live in, with a dreadful future of climate and societal collapse that leads me to push my head into the sands of “liberation” through capital (i.e., side hustles), and another of impassioned action towards meaningful change.

Being an adult with a pulse is a really confusing thing to be. Economic realities driving self interest compete with our values, hopes, and dreams for our collective future.

On the one hand, I want to grow something that’s mine, something that I control and care about that doesn’t belong to some corporation. Something that helps me feel safer when I think about the future, or distracts me from thinking about the future at all. But on the other, I also want to contribute to the well-being of both my global and local communities by helping create a more equitable and just way of distributing resources, which I realize likely doesn’t fit within the status quo.

I think reflection and awareness are some of the first steps in working this dissonance out. We need to know what we’re buying into and why. This will help inform our ideas, decisions, and voting for what comes next.

But for now, it’s a mess and I’m a hypocrite.