@Daojoan I think most people are seduced by "passive income" not as in they don't want to contribute, but instead as a form of security. If income is passive, then you cannot be fired.

It of course isn't true, but I suspect this is the underlying motivation for most.

Or well, it would be for me, maybe I'm weird, but I do think I'm still pretty human.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@Daojoan

I deal with this so often and it’s exhausting. It’s like talking to a Scientologist. AI has only made it worse because now it looks like they have a strategy or have thought about it, even though they don’t and haven’t.

Can you tell a compelling story? What is your strategy for serving your customers better than the market? How are you going to win?

I’m sick of this build-it-and-they-will-come bullshit.

@WarnerCrocker