Many of the blogs I write and post are completely based on my own experiences and my own thoughts. The reason I enjoy blogging is because it gives me an outlet to share what’s going on in my head. Sometimes the only person that reads my blog is my wife, other times it can get in front of hundreds of people, but honestly the number of people reading it was never my goal. I just wanted to have a platform to share thoughts, ideas, and attempt to improve my writing skills.
This particular blog dives into what I feel like is a shift in our society. Throughout recent history, looking back through our parents and grandparents, a large focal point as an adult was to find a good job, that paid you a good income, and gave you good benefits. And you worked hard for the company until you could retire. Once you got old enough to retire, you would take your pension or some other form of retirement, and oftentimes it would last through the few years you had left.
Although that was great for many decades, as that process provided financial stability to families that generations before never had, that process doesn’t work well anymore. I think this is for a multitude of reasons:
Company pensions and loyalty are completely gone.
The ability to retire at the end of that process is no longer an option for most due to factors like rising health costs.
With the constant rise of inflation, and wages not keeping up, most households have to rely on two to three incomes.
The increase in different opportunities has opened doors to new pathways to financial stability.
With younger generations not liking this path presented to them while growing up, things started to change. Over the past 10-15 years, I feel like there has been a slow shift to individuals wanting to be in business for themselves, opposed to working for a company. For a while, there was a big emphasis on being an entrepreneur. It felt like being an entrepreneur was some kind of fad, almost everyone I knew talked about it. Then we started to see an increase in people doing things like Etsy shops, or selling things on Amazon or Facebook.
This led to the rise of the ‘side hustle’, where people started finding ways to have a side income outside of their full-time income. With the rise of side hustles and solopreneurship, began the age of content creation. People started flooding to things like starting a podcast, creating content on YouTube, and now a big emphasis on creating income through content on social media. People are finding new ways to create income like never before.
Personally, I think it’s amazing. Although it is sad to think that we need to find some kind of side business in order to have a livable household income, the fact that so many people want to pursue something for themselves is great to see. I do believe this is an essential key to having true happiness.
Most of us have to get a job, where we spend roughly 40 hours a week building another person’s dream, just so we can put food on the table and a roof over our heads. More often than not, this job isn’t something we are excited or passionate about, it’s just something we need in order to live. Part of me thinks this is why we have seen such a rise in things like depression. People feel trapped in a job, that will lead them nowhere, that they don’t truly love.
When you have something you are passionate about, something that you are excited to do that gets you out of bed every day, you live a much happier and more fulfilled life. When you spend a third of your life supporting someone else’s dream, you essentially rob yourself of that happiness. Now don’t get me wrong, I know not every person wants to be in business for themselves, some people want that stability of a paycheck. Being a family-man, with an amazing wife and six kids at home, I like that stability too. But that’s why I love seeing so many people find passion projects on the side. It provides an opportunity to keep that stable job, while also building your own dream with limitless possibilities.
Whether you are podcasting, making shirts and selling them on Etsy, creating funny videos to post on TikTok, or taking your thoughts and throwing them on a blog, all of these things give us a chance to pursue a passion. And I believe if we all find something like that, a little passion project that brings us joy and has potential to supplement (or eventually replace) our income, then I truly believe we will start to see an increase in happiness and the communities around us will be better for it.
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