The jobless Americans chasing the dream of ‘passive income’

Workers say they're replacing career ambitions with low-stakes side hustles. But are many of the schemes too good to be true?

Aubrey, a 26-year-old in Florida, does not recommend working at a hotel in the middle of a pandemic. The floors were constantly understaffed and inventory seemed to disappear overnight. In fact, Aubrey was genuinely relieved when she was finally laid off. And like so many newly occupation-free members of the American workforce, Aubrey turned to the internet and searched for any sort of minimal-effort side-hustle that seemed feasible.

Aubrey found hope with what she describes as low-content books". With just a layperson's grasp of graphic design, Aubrey was able to flood the Amazon marketplace with a tide of scholastic notebooks, graph-paper pamphlets and crossword collections. There is no real writing involved in the low-content book scheme, which is exactly the point. All Aubrey needs to do is come up with an appetizing front cover and trust that the shadowy algorithm takes care of business. My most successful product is randomly a vegetable' blank lined notebook where I just scattered some pictures of cartoonish onions, pumpkins and leeks on the cover," she tells me. It has done pretty well and is about $200 of my sales."