Ever since the Internet was invented, online business coaches have been promoting a particular image of financial liberation. It is usually some variation on this theme: quit your nine-to-five office job, become your own boss, follow this success template and watch cash roll in while you sip coconuts on the beach.
You’ve seen this movie, right? It looks tempting. The allure of easy money. But is this really the dream we want to be living?
For a moment let’s forget about the legions of self-anointed “experts” that get rich from selling us this dream… Let’s just look at what passive income is.
Why passive income is dead money
What is passive income? It is the promise of a supersized payout for minimal effort. A steady stream of resource flowing in, without little to no energy going out.
The temptation pulls us into trance. While we’re doped up on unachievable ideals of beauty, power and esteem, it whispers in our ear: “Grab this bounty! And get away with leaving the smallest contribution you can.”
We can more easily see how early retirement means early death. If we withhold creativity and generativity from the world when we’re still healthy and capable of contributing, then we suffer deep existential crises — consciously or unconsciously.
Similarly, passive income is dead money. It lacks the vitality of life force energy.
When we consume energy without giving back to the ecosystem around us, we are either feeding from a storehouse of accumulated resources, or extracting from others.
In Nature, we would call this a parasite.
All living systems have parasites. Parasites are part of divine design. To some extent, their presence helps us keep our systems alert and maintain healthy immunity. But when there’s an overgrowth of parasites, passages get blocked, the movement of energy slows down, and disease starts to take root.
Too many parasites are not good for the overall system. But you might wonder, as individuals, why wouldn’t we all want to be parasites? That is assuming of course that we can thrive as a parasite without eventually destroying the system we feed from? That is an excellent question, as it begets more questions…
A benevolent and indifferent world
The best reason that I can find for not being a parasite (besides concern for the system’s eventual demise) is that the Universe is both benevolent and indifferent to us. As individuals, it treats us accordingly based on our own orientation towards life.
Do unto the Universe as you want to be done to, or something like that.
Life is benevolent when we are humble in our interconnectedness. We remember that everything we have has been built on the backs of ancestors who came before us, and is buoyed by the energy of those who walk beside us.
Life becomes indifferent to us when we are prideful about the gifts it has given us. We cut ourselves off from true abundance when we think we can command and control reality in isolation — determined solely by our egoic efforts.
When we opt out of participating in the economic ecosystem of our community — we remove ourselves from the flow of universal energy. If we succeed in the game of passive income, what fails is our connection to the web of Life.
Passive income can be a boon for our bank accounts. But no matter how much resource we manage to accumulate, we will never free ourselves from scarcity programming this way. In the deadening isolation induced by self-sufficiency, our heart is left bereft and our soul path remains unfulfilled.
When we become monkeys doing what we’re told for the prize of passive income, we have imprisoned ourselves now, in exchange for the idea of freedom later. Effectively, we’ve consented to lock ourselves in a prison disguised as a key.
Freedom from wage slavery
Yet we need to take care that we don’t fall victim to the other extreme.
Those lobbying for the pursuit of financial freedom are not completely off-base. We understand that money has power. Having more choice gives us more freedom. And having more money certainly helps us have more choices.
We definitely don’t want to stay trapped in the old paradigm where work equals suffering, where exhaustion earns applause, or where achievement is a widely accepted measurement of worth.
The positive aspect of passive income is that embedded within it, there is the empowerment and encouragement to free ourselves from wage slavery.
The old paradigm that’s dying now has long been anchored by a core belief in wage slavery. The expired system was founded on the idea that we must trade our time (a finite resource) for money (a renewable resource).
Our liberation does depend in part on being able to decouple time from money. But it does not mean sitting around passively, doing nothing.
Working, seen and unseen
In order to decouple time from money as we engage in community-centered economic ecosystems, we need to reframe what qualifies as work. Work is active, creative, engaged, generative, and contributing. But work does not need to be stressful, competitive, sacrificing, overdoing, or depleting.
Work can be fruitful and fulfilling. It can be pleasurable. It can be easy. And it can even be invisible, or non-physical in nature.
Humans are evolving as beings. We are becoming more energetic, and less physical. This means the ways we influence reality are changing.
If you read this far, it means you are likely blessed with privilege; stewarding some resources; and carrying deep wisdom. It means your understanding of the unseen world can help reshape our current reality.
If you read this far, it means your highest value here on Earth now may have less to do with visible, physical labor. You can contribute more to humanity’s upleveling, far beyond the transactional exchange of time for money.
Instinctively, you know that your existence is not meant to be about mechanically slogging through 3D density, doing things from the ego, moving objects of matter around, and striving to reach specific goals and ends.
Instead, we can access abundance frequency by working in the realms of the unseen – which can take the shape of prayer, devotion, ritual, art, communion, gathering. Though none of these shapes completely encapsulates the un-nameable thing. They are only pointers to the essence of non-physical work.
Working in these ways may not constitute what we typically think of as work, but it is also certainly not passive. It is engagement. It is participation. It is contribution. It is being connected to the economic ecosystem of community, on an energetic level.
Trading time, for money, for time
If we look to passive income as the panacea for financial liberation, then we are grossly misled. The fool’s prize of passive income gets us to trade time for money now, so we can have time later. But we’re still trading time for money.
If you remember nothing else from reading this, please remember this: Time now is always more valuable than time later, because time later doesn’t actually exist. The idea of “time later” is the ultimate carrot on a stick.
If we are collecting resources from doing nothing — whether on a physical or non-physical plane — that is dead money. This kind of passive income erodes spirit and destroys community. Likewise, if sovereignty or authenticity is compromised in earning money, then our financial freedom is not truly free.
Real financial liberation means divesting from wage slavery, by quitting the work that we do unknowingly, according to the orders of external authority. When we liberate money from time-based reality, then we’ll truly be free.
I have much more to share related to the evolution of money and abundance in New Earth ecosystems. Things including on designing co-creative exchanges, on matching the containers to capacity… on True Abundance and Economic Ecosystems. Subscribe to my business updates email list to find out when the next online course offering opens for enrollment.