Being a bit of a "Numbers Geek," I like to keep track of my progress and chart "how I am doing" with pretty much everything from my blood pressure to my investments.
As I have written about before, I was taught about the value of passive income at an early age, and the whole idea has had a major impact on my thinking, to this day.
Income Without "Working"
As I increasingly attempted to "adult" (used as a verb) my way through life, I repeatedly looked at ways to generate passive income, in one way or another.
I was a landlord for a while, owning a couple of condos that rented out but learned the hard way about declining real estate markets and economies. I also learned about tenants calling at all hours because a disposal was clogged. Too "hands on" for my liking.
Then I turned to writing because the idea of ongoing royalties was more in line with my acceptable risk level: I felt far more comfortable with making a large "energy investment" to put at risk, rather than a large "capital investment" in things that would return a passive income. I joined my first "get paid for content" site in 1999 and actually kept getting a few royalty dollars for over a decade.
I also tried my hand at stock photography and print-to-order greeting card design, once again ventures where the only thing "at risk" to earn those residuals was my initial creativity and willingness to plug away at it.
Predicting a Chaotic Future
I've never really thought of myself as a "prophet" or "futurist," but even back in the 1980's it seemed almost inevitable to me that more and more human jobs would be replaced by robots and automation... as a result of which we would increasingly move towards a world in which the entire notion of "working" would end up looking like almost nothing we were used to.
I suppose this sense was also somewhat fueled by having been a voracious reader of science fiction since my early teens...
Naturally, most people thought I was nuts — and they still do! — and pointed to all manners of projections showing that while people would be "made obsolete" there would all sorts of new jobs for them to slide into.
To be honest, I don't give a rat's rear end what so-called "economists" and "experts" predict about future job growth and the economy... the primary "problem" being that they typically work with forecasting models while the rest of us live in the real world. Chances are they've never tried living in their cars, wondering how they would scrounge up a couple of dollars to buy a can of baked beans to ward off starvation...
The analogy I like to use is that of the weather. I don't care that the latest meteorological predictions say that there is a 90% chance of sun today when I can look out the window and it is RAINING and there are heavy clouds everywhere.
But I digress.
Technological Obsolescence, Once Again...
It seems painfully obvious to me that within another 20 years, huge numbers of people will quite simply be displaced by AI and automation, and they will simply NOT be NEEDED to fulfill work tasks on a level that even remotely resembles anything we're familiar with today.
Meanwhile, the "Talking Heads" drone on about re-training the workforce and blah, blah, blah but the old slur "Learn to code!" has pretty much become solid gold bullshit because more and more AI can actually write its own code and no humans are needed. Or... where perhaps there were once openings for 500 coders, there's now room for 10 supervisors.
"Having a JOB," itself, may be headed towards obsolescence... or be regarded as a great privilege, rather than a necessity or a right.
Solving the Supply vs. Demand Bottleneck
Unfortunately we're also hurtling towards a massive bottleneck as automation will continue to create more and more products for us to consume... a reality that will run in parallel with the traditional "Profit Paradigm" meaning that the corporations owning the automation seem unlikely to lower prices of goods even though they no longer have to pay the salaries and health insurance of millions of "Ed Bobs" and "Thelma Sues," just a tiny amount for robotic maintenance...
That will crash head-first into the attendant reality that you're producing a bunch of stuff for people who increasingly have no visible means of income to purchase that stuff because they no longer have jobs or even access to jobs.
And trust me, the uber-wealthy won't be taking up the slack by suddenly developing the need for 15,000 toaster ovens or 93 Teslas each!
So... Passive Income to the Rescue?
Which brings us to the importance of passive income: this idea that in a rapidly shrinking workspace, we can somehow derive income from sources other than working, in the traditional sense of the word.
In many ways, this is where there is an opening for applied decentralization, perhaps in ways similar to what we are already seeing on a micro scale here in the Greater Hive ecosystem through projects ranging from CUB DeFi to several individuals leveraging their individual skills and ambitions as dividend paying tokens that serve as a sort of crowdfunding.
As a micro example, Mrs. Denmarkguy's non-profit has a Hive account, which in turn owns some UTOPIS tokens, and this morning a small amount of Hive arrived in her wallet as a dividend. The ability to own those tokens the result of social engagement.
Now, if we can somehow figure out how to expand that on a truly massive scale, perhaps it offers a glimmer of hope that we will not have to end up living in cardboard refrigerator boxes or tents at the sides of the freeway... or wind up in some dystopian version of a particular Black Mirror episode living out our lives as little more than meat puppets in the Matrix.
And so, I look at the 3.103 Hive I earned from curation yesterday and have both gratitude, as well as hope that we will somehow be able to keep living, breathing, eating and blogging in a future where we no longer have such things as "going to work," except as it applies to pursuing our interests.
And maybe that's not such a bad life.
Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your week!
How about YOU? Do you think passive income will become a major part of YOUR future? If so, what sources do you think it will come from? Do you think "work" (for humans) will continue to exist on the SCALE it does today? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20211005 22:52 PDT
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