I appreciated when "passive income" was the flavor of the week because it was a good signpost for people you could ignore. In particular anybody who didn't understand that you could assign a present value to future income, or that infinite series can sum to finite values. Seriously, the prototypical example of being an author is not particularly passive income lol! A book being print-on-demand indefinitely != infinite income. 99% of copies will almost certainly be sold within a few years, not least due to active marketing on your part. It's very likely to be a worse deal than getting paid a quite modest and disappointing sounding amount up front.

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sfRattan 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The way it shakes out is that there's no widely accessible way of escaping actual, ongoing work, which is what unmotivated people actually hear behind the words "passive income." Whatever the industry/vertical/field, a tiny number will hit it so big that they can actually stop working. Everyone else can bolster their income with passive sources, but that passive income ultimately depends on continuing new stimulus into the market (new products/services, more work marketing) to keep the "passive" flow stable.

If you look at the world of indie tabletop RPGs, for example: Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Press makes a very good living and a significant percentage of it is "passive" sales of his back catalog. But if he stopped publishing and promoting new game projects, sales of that back catalog would very likely shrivel to nothing within a calendar year.

The open-secret ingredient is always more work.

It's why someone like Crawford can afford to tell everyone exactly how he does what he does... Giving away extensive production files that show you his whole creative process, soup to nuts: 99% of people aren't going to put in the work necessary to sustain the passive portion of an individual income.

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icedchai 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The way to escape is through consistent, long term investing in the stock market. You get a regular job and live below your means, investing the difference. Buy and hold. Invest regularly. Not day trading, long term. The problem is most people don’t have the patience, the right temperament, to do this.

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toast0 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The way it shakes out is that there's no widely accessible way of escaping actual, ongoing work, which is what unmotivated people actually hear behind the words "passive income."

25x expenses in s&p 500 works ok. (Adjust the multiplier for your level of pessimism) Funding it isn't easy, but save a good amount of your income for a few decades and control your expenses and you can get there.

	▲	sfRattan 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I generally agree, but that basically sounds like prudent investing for eventual retirement. Yes, tune the degree of aggression both in terms of work input and spending restraint, but the "work input" has to be high (and effective) for those few decades. EDIT: I'm also kind of writing in the context of having your own little economic engine that you own and control, and can be continually running, rather than owning a tiny piece of the abstracted aggregation of an entire economy's engines. That said, dead-simple, low-fee, market-indexed funds are a generally good place to put the surplus fruits of your own little economic engine.
	▲	Raidion an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Creating an additional 30%-50% on top of whatever a normal person would consider passive income in order to actually have passive income is NOT a realistic option for a huge % of the population.

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Aurornis an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I appreciated when "passive income" was the flavor of the week because it was a good signpost for people you could ignore.

This is why I still do random sampling of Reddit, Twitter, Threads, and a few other social media sites: It’s a good way to keep up with some of the discussion trends that start spreading in online discussions.

I can pick up quickly when someone is parroting the latest info memes from Reddit or Twitter now. It’s very helpful for identifying who isn’t really thinking for themselves and will latch on to the first opinion they see on a topic.

I can’t bring myself to watch TikTok or other video shorts, though.

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ghaff 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And that 4 figure advance from a publisher won’t go far either even if you earn it out and get a few royalties.

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bluGill 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

often the real value of writing a book is you can convince people to pay you to speak. I've had several classes at work where they gave me a book that had everything in the class.