What are your favorite side-hustle ideas?
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Inquiring after my favorite side-hustle is like asking me which tedium is my most preferred: mowing or laundry? Clearly, neither. But I don’t really have a choice, do I? Both are fatalistic and never-ending necessities of life, unavoidable and unreprovable. Ubiquitous and draining, the only consolation any of us has with them is the fact that they’re losses we all must absorb equally. As I’m mowing it, the grass is regrowing. As I’m washing, drying and folding, I’m soiling the garments I’m wearing. Sweating, hasting to finish these insipid and soul-sucking chores before I can return to progress. They’re kipple, like sweeping leaves on a windy day, or dusting your cooked-off flesh from the knick-knacks around the house.
The fact that side-hustles even exist enough to proclaim favorites amongst them aggravates me, when my grandfather could afford to buy and care for his house on a single salary. Now, a hefty percentage of the working class are burning through their odometers door dashing obese portions of over-priced food product to folks so afraid to leave the house that they’ll pay a 25 percent surcharge to have it delivered. Favorite side hustle? What am I supposed to say? Feet-beating financial services? Serial television mounting? Day-trading stock futures? Part-time third shift at the Walmart? Remote debt collection? Crafting and selling on Etsy? Book reselling on Ebay? Should I become an influencer shuffling pseudo-therapy or nutrition and fitness advice?
“Please, don’t forget to like and subscribe. I’ve got child support due in ten days.”
“Please, take a moment and click the like button. A hundred thousand more subscribers and I’ll be able to pay my back rent.”
“Please, contribute your hard-earned cash to my Patreon account. I deserve it because you watched what I posted.”
The absurdity is killing me. The normalization of unrest and perpetual exhaustion and sleep deprivation is infuriating. But to complain about it is fatalistic, too. What can we do about it? The wicked oligarchs have got us by the balls, and we can either acquiesce or lay flat. But unless everyone lays flat at once, the one who lays flat first watches the bottom fall out of his entire life, and he becomes a cautionary tale. Folks roll up their windows and lock the doors when they see him begging on the avenue corners, languishing beside the traffic lights, begging the change you’re fingering in your cupholder. “What good could this little do for a man in his situation?” we ask. The light greens and we pull off, him believing himself unseen.
I resent the implication of the prompt, the assumption that everyone who posts here actually has a favorite side hustle. It’s no longer something for those between jobs, or a temporary circumstance to save up for a big purchase, or a short-term solution to a bout of splurge spending. Nah, now, it’s our savior. We live to pay these bills and then turn around and die to afford the shortfall. We depend upon the side-hustle to either deliver us from jobs we hate, careers that don’t fulfill, or pay down debt we amassed when we were too immature to know how long the consequences would stick.
What’s your favorite obligation? Does the side-hustle have to pay? Can I say coloring grayscale in adult coloring books? Can I say ranting on this blog? Can I say riding my bike down to the basketball court in my neighborhood and getting shots up in the dark at 3AM, when I can hardly see the rim, but the air is cool and clean? Can I say hand pulling weeds in my yard until my cuticles bleed and then rubbing dirt in the lacerations? Can I say homeschooling my children? Can I say paying these absurd gas prices to road trip to visit my family? No, there’s no time for any of that. I need the money. And I hate that I need the money. That I’m a sweating hog for it. That I’m clocking out to clock right back in for it.
That, against my own will, I’m forced to trade my life for it.
I can’t help but think, Jesus got it right, again. “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”
That man let a thief hold the bag. That’s freedom.
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