The Hidden Cost of Passive Income

If your goal is to earn money passively online, it will help immensely to have a realistic picture of the full emotional spectrum waiting for you at the finish line.

Not only will this help you get there faster by normalizing it into your reality, it will also help you prepare for the inevitable negative feelings that include guilt once you get there.

It can be easy to glorify the freedom in the form of money, time, and location that come from achieving passive income online, but most people don’t anticipate the psychological cost that comes from unplugging from “the matrix” of what many people consider to be the real world.

Let’s look into why living the dream almost always comes with a side effect of unexpected psychological consequences socially and internally.

We humans are wired as social creatures, and one of the ways that we create strong bonds is through shared experience. Online entrepreneurship is socially isolating by nature because most of the time you’ll find yourself all alone in a cafe rather than being in an office with coworkers.

The disconnect becomes even larger when the way you make money also becomes something people can’t relate to. It’s one thing to tell people you’re working remotely but grinding just like them for a paycheck inside of a tight schedule, and it’s an entirely different thing if you bring up work and you say it doesn’t actually require much work in the traditional sense for you to get paid.

Small talk about work, which is one of the most common forms of connecting with people, then becomes awkward because you feel bad about seeming like you’re bragging or making others feel bad about your situation.

Also, no matter how humbly you frame your situation, you might find that people misinterpret you. All of this combined makes it much harder to make a core group of friends, which often results in an unhealthy void not just socially but internally.

The second psychological battle we meet when achieving the passive income lifestyle is private. It stems from a lack of purpose or motivation. Countless entrepreneurs tell stories of hitting their “freedom number” only to fall into depression. It’s one of those things that you have to experience to fully understand.

When I stopped having to work for survival, I realized that there was only so much time I could spend surfing and traveling and chasing peak experiences. Much of these things end up feeling repetitive and empty, especially if you end up doing most of it alone which is more than likely the case if you’re a solopreneur.

The dopamine hit of seeing sales notifications pour in wore off, and I still had a life to live and fill with meaning. After having so much time and freedom to ponder life and purpose, I found that doing nothing, even if you make money, results in misery.

You’ll quickly realize that making money while doing nothing isn’t freedom, it’s drifting. The only way you can remedy this is by finding fulfillment and purpose.

A pursuit of freedom starts with the desire to escape the trap of your current life, but you’ll soon realize that filling this time with pleasure and consuming is a swift path to misery.

Once you have the freedom in finances, time, and location, the goal is to find work that feeds your passion and helps others, not because you have to, but because you truly want to. At this point, the guilt dissolves, and true satisfaction begins.