Why you should not blog about your work and personal finances and make it seem like anyone could do it.

There is a trend here on Medium and the internet as a whole rife with braggart posts about how people, seemingly effortlessly, earn tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars—sometimes even millions. All sorts of words and catch phrases get tossed around: Effortlessly. Passive income. Quick side gig. In just one month. Only 15 hours a week. And you can too.

This is nonsense.

First of all, anyone worth their salt would not be out and about on here, in the wild, or anywhere, bragging about income, earnings, or their personal financial intimacies. Why? It’s entirely tasteless. It smacks of hubris. And it’s embarrassing for us to read. People should be ashamed to puff themselves up and reveal their personal financial details related to their methods of making a living.

Earning a living is always a unique situation and anyone I know who makes any amount of money works hard to earn it. Even passive income streams resulted from hard work that definitely require continued attention. There are no get-rich-quick schemes. And there is no easy path to worthwhile meaningful work and earnings. The road to even moderate meaningful and satisfactory success is crooked and always uphill.

Sure, you will always hear about exceptions to the rule. They do exist. And there are gazillionares out there who arrived at wealth via some easy wacky method.

I recommend against this.

Why?

Because myself and anyone I have ever met—even wealthy people—did not get to any level of meaningful and satisfactory success with some easy quick method after having read some blog post on the internet. Even my successes that yielded little to no money, like the one time I was picked up by a big publishing agency, took hundreds, or possibly thousands of hours of actual hard work.

Any realistic advice about finding direction and gaining satisfaction in life should include these words… Study. Hard work. Late nights. Mistakes. False starts. Despair. Confusion. Pick yourself up and start again. Keep learning. Stay humble.

And now after having been working for over four decades since that first time I picked up a rake or a shovel as a kid to make some spare cash in the 70s, I can tell you confidently, money is not a worthwhile goal in life. Meaningful and satisfactory work is the goal. Money is just this artifice created as a means of exchange to convert different forms of work into other forms of work. If you are not earning money in a meaningful and satisfying way, then accumulating and spending money will be comparably devoid of meaning and satisfaction.

Any emptiness and lack of satisfaction you might be experiencing in life could also quite possibly be directly related to a lack of direction and meaningful worthwhile work. Work toward a goal in life and you may find these deficiencies evaporate. And money, well, if you are working hard you’ll be happy and it’ll seem like it appeared magically.

And for God’s sake, keep your finances to yourself.