Miscalculations
Almost two weeks have passed since I waved goodbye to employment and, as one would expect, I’ve been working longer hours for myself than any recent employer. Anyone who has decided to not pursue typical employment would understand this, as bills will not pay themselves. Money must continue to come in, and doing so without the support of an already established organisation means that every aspect of a product or service will fall onto the shoulders of the proprietor. Aside from a trip to Wakayama last weekend, I’ve been sitting in front of a keyboard for 16+ hours every day writing, researching, planning, and even coding. As of the time of this writing, this has translated into 14円 of income in the form of AdSense revenue. This works out to a little less than $0.10 USD. While everybody has to start somewhere, this sort of trajectory will be too little too late.
For the moment, my efforts have been focussed on three web properties that are expected to bring in a passive income by offering simple tools or information in exchange for clicks. At the prompting of some acquaintances, I’ve even created an account on Etsy in order to sell photography-centred items and digital prints. The first sale has yet to materialise despite the money invested in creating the account, posting each item, and running a limited number of ads, but this is said to also be par for the course. Selling things is hard and not something that I have ever excelled at.
Yesterday I was recounting the current state of my efforts to someone who has seen limited success with online products and services in the past and they could only nod in understanding. Without investing a remarkable amount of money in ads and time in social networking, any measure of success will require patience. So long as there are no unwelcome expenses in the near future, I have enough to get by for about three months before a traditional job becomes mandatory. A little over 50 hours per week was invested into these online efforts in the first 11 weeks of 2025 outside of the day job and, since clocking out for the final time on March 17th, the goal has been to work at least 80 hours per week. While I am not nearly as young as I once was, these sort of hours do not bother me. Ayumi lets me know when it’s time to step away from the keyboard for an hour or two and she’s been incredibly patient during this time of transition. I couldn’t ask for a better canine companion.
However, while recounting the effort and schedule yesterday, I was asked a question: “Do you really believe in the things you’re offering?”
This was the sort of question that a person asks when they already know the answer. Are the multiple sites that I’m working on passion projects or simply a means to an end? Naturally, these are just a means to an end. The things I really want to do have no market as far as I can tell. I want to travel the country in my car with my dog, taking pictures and writing of the adventures as we go. I want to revisit the 10Centuries codebase and modernise the heck out of it, giving people a place to write for an audience of readers without their work being used to train AI or satisfy algorithms. I want to make a place for photographers to share and sell their work without being scammed or nickle and dimed like so many of the existing photo markets do. At the end of the day, I want to be creative and offer something of value to the world.
What I want is impossible.
I relayed this yesterday expecting to hear something like “You’re right” or “That’s a nice dream, but maybe you should do something a little more realistic first”. Instead, I was told the opposite.
Why can’t you do those things? You have three months and you’re obviously passionate about them. You talk about Jordan Peterson’s ideas all the time, but you’re ignoring one of his rules: Work as hard as you possibly can on one thing and see what happens.
Indeed. I’m working a lot, but am I working as hard as I possibly can? Given that I’m writing this blog post, the answer is obviously in the negative. Rather than work on passive projects that have measurable degrees of success based on online resources like ahrefs, SemRush, or Google Search Console, I should be working on something that solves some of the frustrations that I face on a regular basis. After all, if something bothers me enough to invest time in "fixing it", there’s a high probability that it bothers others as well.