Somewhere between 2020 and now, the world collectively decided that one source of income was embarrassing.
Not insufficient.
Not stressful.
Embarrassing.
And so everyone got a side hustle.
Your colleague is selling handmade candles.
Your cousin is dropshipping something from somewhere.
Your neighbor has a course about something she learned six months ago.
Your friend from university, who you remember as someone who once lost his own jacket at his own party, now has a personal brand.
Everyone is building something.
Everyone is monetizing something.
And almost none of it is making any real money, but that is not the point, and pointing it out makes you sound like you do not believe in people, which is not a reputation anyone wants.
So we all nod.
We all say it sounds amazing.
We all quietly open a new tab to see if our own idea is already taken.
It is already taken.
It has been taken since 2019.
The side hustle is not a new idea dressed in new clothes.
It is a very old human impulse wearing a ring light and a Canva logo.
The desire to build something of your own, to have something that is yours and not your employer’s, to feel like you are moving toward something rather than simply arriving at a salary every month.
That impulse is genuine.
It is also, in the hands of the internet, almost instantly monetized, gamified, and turned into content about itself.
There are now more people selling courses on how to sell courses than there are people who have successfully sold courses.
This is not a conspiracy.
It is just how attention works when you give it a marketplace.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote about the human need for self-actualization, the drive to become the most complete version of yourself.
He placed it at the top of his hierarchy for a reason.
It is the need that never fully gets met.
Which makes it, from a marketing perspective, absolutely perfect.
Because a need that never gets met is a need you can sell to indefinitely.
Every new side hustle course, every passive income blueprint, every “here is how I made six figures from my phone” video is speaking directly to that unmet need.
Not to your bank account.
To your sense of becoming.
I know this because I have bought into it.
Not literally, in the sense of spending significant money.
But in the quieter, more expensive sense of spending time.
Hours reading about systems I did not build.
Evenings watching people explain strategies I bookmarked and never returned to.
A weekend once where I designed a logo for a business that exists only as a folder on my desktop called “Ideas” that I have not opened since February.
The folder is still there.
The logo is quite good, actually.
The business remains theoretical.
Here is the thing that nobody in the side hustle conversation wants to say out loud.
Building something real takes an unreasonable amount of time.
Not hustle-culture time, where you wake up at 5 am and grind and manifest.
Actual, unglamorous, nothing-is-happening-yet time.
The kind of time that does not make good content.
The kind of time where you are doing the work and the work is not working yet, and you have to keep doing it anyway, without the dopamine hit of visible progress.
That part does not get the ring light treatment.
That part does not go on the Instagram story.
Nassim Taleb wrote about the “narrative fallacy,” our deeply human habit of constructing clean stories around messy, random events.
We see someone’s success, and we build a story.
They had an idea.
They worked hard.
It worked.
What we do not see is the eighteen months before the idea worked, where nothing worked, and they considered stopping every other Tuesday.
The side hustle internet sells you the story.
It cannot sell you the eighteen months because nobody would buy that.
And yet the eighteen months are the only part that actually produces anything.
There is a version of the side hustle conversation that is worth having.
It is the one that starts not with “how do I monetize this” but with “what would I build if I knew it would take three years and might not work and I was going to build it anyway.”
That question removes the fantasy.
What is left after the fantasy is removed is either nothing, in which case the side hustle was always just an idea you liked the idea of, or something real.
Something you would do at the end of a long day, not because a course told you it would scale, but because you cannot quite stop thinking about it.
That thing, whatever it is, is worth your time.
The candle business, the course, the personal brand, and the dropshipping operation are all fine.
Some of them will even make money.
But most of them are answers to a question that was never really about money.
The question was about whether you are capable of more than what your current life is asking of you.
The answer, for what it is worth, is almost certainly yes.
You do not need a ring light to find that out.
You just need to open the folder.
The logo really is quite good.
If the gap between an excellent plan and actual reality feels familiar, Why I Let AI Plan My Entire Week is a very specific account of that gap in action. And if you have ever wondered what you are actually chasing underneath the plan, The Best Gift I Ever Received arrived at a surprisingly similar question from a completely different direction.