The New American Dream Is to Stop Working, and It Comes With Risks

A Wall Street Journal investigation says the old American ideal of hard work and climbing the corporate ladder is being replaced by a new one, earning money without a regular job. The story follows people making thousands of dollars a month through Amazon, Etsy, eBay and AI voice clones, while warning that the road to “passive income” is often risky, labor intensive at first, and sometimes deceptive.

One example is Greg Keogh, a trained mechanical engineer in Austin, Texas, who grew tired of commuting, office dress codes and end-of-day exhaustion. He had no inheritance or dividend portfolio, so he looked for a workaround. After a casual conversation with a dog owner who complained that lint rollers were too small, he designed a giant roller, about the width of a paper towel roll, and sold it on Amazon. Seven years later, he says he spends less than two hours a month on the business and earns between $50,000 and $115,000 a year. “That’s the ultimate power,” he told the Journal.

The trend reflects broader frustration in the U.S. The report says satisfaction with pay and promotion opportunities fell in March to the lowest level since 2014. More than half of Americans, and 60% of Gen Z, no longer believe a standard full-time job will deliver financial stability. AI has supercharged the appeal of these side hustles, especially for younger workers.

Among the people profiled is Michael Tremblay, a paper mill worker in Canada, who uses Anthropic’s Claude to identify niches for workbooks and guides, then quickly creates PDF products with AI and sells them on Etsy for hundreds of dollars a month. Matt Absu uses ElevenLabs to make voice clones of himself for audiobooks and videos, earning about $3,000 monthly. But sociology professor Victor Tan Chen of Virginia Commonwealth University warns that this is not a safe path, calling it “a gamble in our casino economy.”

The article also highlights the downside. Anna Lohrmann, a cancer patient trying to work from home, spent thousands on courses promising “magic” passive-income methods, only to make far less than expected. Another example is 19-year-old Ronnie Lim, who runs an arbitrage operation, selling on eBay items shipped from Amazon at a markup, even though the practice violates platform rules. The experts quoted say the “passive” income model usually requires heavy work at the start, and Keogh notes that even his success involved replacing 1,600 faulty handles by hand in his garage before the business became easier.