A growing group of TikTok influencers are starting to build their platforms by facilitating passive income for their followers. Thousands of users regularly share their expertise, tips, and advice on how their followers could theoretically achieve the same level of passive income without doing anything.
One influencer claims she tried “every kind of side hustle” before landing on print-on-demand as the most profitable source of passive income, which she said earned her a “six-figure income as a teenager.” .
Interest in passive income has surged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The passive income subreddit has nearly 500,000 members, and the #passiveincome hashtag on TikTok has 1.2 million posts and billions of views. After the pandemic ends, many people will lose faith in the labor market and believe it has reached a point of no return.
Given the current economic climate and government policies, it's no wonder so many people are drawn to the lure of passive income. The middle and working classes are seeing the same opportunities that were available to their parents and grandparents lost, and their dreams of economic security are being left without the means to achieve it.
Amid unprecedented levels of income inequality, there is growing awareness among workers of the need to think differently about labor market uncertainty and financial security. But passive income may not be the only problem.
Earn money while you sleep
A 2022 study found that a significant portion of Gen Z receives financial advice from TikTok (34 percent) or YouTube (33 percent). They see influencers sharing their successes (and in rare cases, failures) and are motivated to try the strategies themselves.
A diverse passive income subculture has emerged, from hustlers in the financial industry to young women peddling money-making credit card schemes to their followers.
Many influencers who promote passive income schemes describe it as a way to “make money while you sleep”, suggesting that you can essentially make money by starting your first venture into a particular power generation business. Masu.
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As research conducted by sociologist Karen Gregory and I has shown, this is expressed even more literally by live streamers on platforms like Twitch. These streamers gain more viewers and attention by livestreaming themselves sleeping, with fans donating money, promoting their content, and buying emojis and other perks during the broadcast. Collect.
This indicates a desire to be free from work. Because “sleeping during a stream means setting aside and obfuscating the preparatory work that goes into it and profiting from the market through complete physical passivity.” So, to us, these sleep streamers seem to embody the logical endpoint of passive income as the ultimate dream of the moment under digital capitalism.
always sharpened
Although the idea of passive income is often romanticized, the reality is that many of these businesses require a lot of effort. Side hustles and other income-generating jobs often range from handling the logistics and costs of dropshipping (buying and reselling cheap products for a profit) to creating and selling online courses. It's incredibly time consuming to get there. about Earn passive income.
In fact, the understanding of what passive income is has changed significantly, from what the Internal Revenue Service describes as “substantially nonparticipatory activities” to “leveraged income,” which refers to maintaining an Airbnb rental property. It has even gone so far as to reuse such terms. Somehow I become passive.
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While many critics have rightly pointed out the false promises permeating the financial wisdom within these online subcultures, we must carefully consider the cultural and economic forces underpinning this change. need to do it.
As journalist Rebecca Jennings wrote in a March 2023 article, part of that is certainly good old-fashioned aspirational content and marketing. vox. “In short, it is the feeling that our primary goal as human beings is to make our lives as effective and efficient as possible,” she wrote. In other words, the idea is to “always strive.”
As a result, the concept of participating in multiple sources of income to protect against financial vulnerability is not only strategic; passive. Sure, you can divide your workforce into different entrepreneurial avenues, but ideally you can also launch them and then leave them without much maintenance. Let the money flow.
A new Gilded Age?
Get-rich-quick schemes are nothing new, and the ones currently being shared by “finfluencers” typically involve a complete lack of regulation or accountability, as well as a blurring of lines between regular social media content and advertising. Until then, there are many pitfalls. This is how users are expected to take the influencer's word for how much they're making in passive income.
Only 20 percent of Americans earn passive income, and nearly all of it comes from dividends, interest, or rental real estate (though whether rental real estate truly counts as passive income remains to be seen). debatable).
Although numbers for Canada are difficult to obtain, the Canadian Treasury estimated that in 2017, 83% of taxable passive income was accounted for by individuals in the top 1% of income earners.
Meaningful. The classic Wall Street passive income concept of investing in the right stocks and index funds, or owning real estate and supporting yourself with rent checks, is still here.
Nevertheless, in a new Gilded Age defined and built on wealth that is passively inherited or transferred and rarely distributed, the rest of us are blind to the platform economy waiting to be exploited. I can't go in.
The belief that our worth is our net worth turns all of us into enterprising wannabe achievers, seizing how to monetize what we can while we still can. For many, this means racing to seize opportunities before they disappear.
