I don't think I'll ever quite understand this mentality that "not having a job"=="sitting at home all day". Do people not have hobbies of any kind? They really only find meaning in pursuit of money?
A job isn't solely about pursuit of money. Presumably, you are doing work that adds value for someone and/or society.
It's also a form of security should the online income suddenly dry up. It can also be a source of healthy social connections.
I was a homemaker for a lot of years. I did a lot of life enhancing stuff for me and other people. Trying to translate that into an adequate income post divorce has been enormously painful.
Some people successfully turn hobbies into careers. Others can't pull that off.
If someone's life works, changing some piece of it could cause it to come apart rapidly. Why risk that?
> Presumably, you are doing work that adds value for someone and/or society.
You can do that without being paid for it, and then you can control your own schedule completely.
> It's also a form of security should the online income suddenly dry up.
That's fair, but chances are if you managed to build something that generates enough passive income to live off of then you probably won't have much difficulty finding a job if you needed to.
> It can also be a source of healthy social connections.
I personally thing relying on work for social interaction is a terrible idea.
> If someone's life works, changing some piece of it could cause it to come apart rapidly. Why risk that?
Fair enough, but all I'm saying is I don't really understand how it works for them. To me, my job is just how I put food on the table, and my pursuit of money is purely so that one day I can do that without having to sell my time to someone else.
Different people relate to work differently. Some people have some of their best relationships through their work.
Your experience isn't invalid, but it also doesn't invalidate how other people experience life.
I replied because I started out as a homemaker, then I got divorced after about two decades. I got to have an extreme experience of doing useful things for reasons other than money, and when I got divorced it was financially and socially devastating.
My so-called friends didn't stick around. All the life enhancing, useful work I had done was not readily translated into paid work.
I've spent recent years figuring out how to have a healthy relationship to paid work. It's overall been a better experience for me than the years I did useful things for others without being paid for it.
I actually have a decent track record of being able to put my volunteer work on a resume to help me get a job and I had a corporate job for a while. But it was an entry level job that didn't pay enough and corporate life wasn't really a good fit for me.
I mean, wherever you go, there you are. I'm no less guilty of tunnel vision (so to speak) than you are. I'm just looking at the world through a different tunnel.
But I desperately want to have enough paid work and to relate to the world through that lens. I don't feel valued for the things I've done and I've literally lived in dire poverty for years, including several years of homelessness. No, people don't really care and I feel I've been badly burned for doing good things for other people and not getting compensated for it.
All those people that I did wonderful things for who got serious careers out of it have not helped me create a real career with sufficient income. It hasn't opened doors for me in terms of being taken seriously and adequately compensated.
It's been enormously frustrating, baffling and enraging. It's proven to be a stubbornly intractable problem.
I never want to be 100% financially dependent on just one thing again.
The guy in this discussion making $6000 a month for two or three hours of work each week may have no ability to replicate that success if this stops working. Lots of businesses have been harmed by the rise of ad blockers, losing as much as 80% of their income over night.
One slam dunk success doesn't guarantee you can readily create another. For many people, that kind of success is short-term and will never happen again.
It's why the NFL requires financial education for their players. They are all college educated, but they are also very young and most NFL careers are short-lived. For many of them, the two or three years they play pro football will be the most money they will make in their life.
If they spend it like they think this is their starting salary and it only gets better from here, then they basically party their asses off for a few short years followed by an injury, the sudden end of their career and no means whatsoever to make anywhere near that much ever again. If they didn't save and invest, it's gone and never coming back.
That's an all too common story for a rather wide variety of wildly successful experiences. That kind of extreme success is frequently described as luck because it's so hard to replicate.
In some parts of the world, if you meet people and they ask what do you do, and you say, "I do X, I work for Y" they nod and understand. If you say, "I run my business" you are met with serious suspicion, as a possible scam artist. It can impact you real life social network, dating etc. Not only that, online businesses are not guaranteed for life, things changes fast. But career is. You can say I have been a teacher, IT admin, programmer or XYZ for 20 years. Doesn't matter if you changed job once or 30 times.
I know people who work within their industry (health care) in a specific place that tends to be low paying. They could very easily switch (because people have tried recruiting them to do so because they worked with them previously and they know they're good) to a higher paying job with a lighter workload without moving but servicing a different group. But part of the appeal of the job is that they are working in support of this specific class of patients.
Dunno, I could see aspects other than money being a driver in someone sticking with something when a better opportunity or situation seems to be present with little effort.
Not necessarily pursuit of money. Work. The world is built on work. If we stop working we go back to living in wilderness - literally and figuratively. Hobbies are fun, but they aren’t work. Work provides a different kind of satisfaction.
Maybe it provides satisfaction for you. My most satisfying projects have always been the ones I was passionate enough about to do at home on my own or with a small group of like-minded people. I'd have done a lot more if I weren't balancing it with the necessary evil of a paying job.
Other way to put it: he likes his job, so he hasnt thought too much about doing something else with his time. If he would quit, he probably wouldnt be sitting at home all day but would end up doing something - however he hasnt thought much about it since he is content with the current situation, therefore "sitting at home all day" is just easy way to put it.
I dont think there is nothing wrong in staying at a job if you like it, even if you dont need it financially.
Unless you have enough money to comfortably retire, or at least, the social network that can catch you if you meet catastrophe, allowing your skills to erode or even allowing the perception that they have via not having a day job is probably a bad idea.
From a different perspective, the site sounds great but it's not something to be be guaranteed to be around forever. I understand steady employment, both from a security standpoint and from not having a gap in employment history.
Some people thrive in structure. Taking away their job wouldn't be freeing. It would remove a big foundation their life is built on. Not everyone want to self-motivate and build their own structure because there already exists large structures you can just find your place in.
So it's not about not having a hobby. It's about having a place and purpose in life.
