When you write online about financial independence and working toward living your best life, there is a certain pressure. Are the things that I am telling people useful, truthful, and helpful? Will I actually help you to become financially independent? Will I actually help you to live a better life?
The Real Meaning of Financial Independence
One of my biggest learnings after a few years of Life Outside The Maze, is understanding what being financially independent really means. It starts with laying a foundation to change one’s trajectory. There is a hard numbers piece that involves knowing how much money you need to never have to work again. Getting there means, earning more, spending less, and investing to harness the power of compound interest.
However, actually feeling the way that we all envision being financially independent should feel is much more complicated. It involves understanding the link between money and happiness. Paradoxically it means thinking a great deal about money while building wealth and then appropriately limiting thinking about it once you have plenty rather than letting it consume you like a miser. Actually living the lifestyle that I envisioned requires refocusing energy onto some of the biggest determiners of happiness in life such as relationships and positivity. If one leaves employment, financial independence also involves building a healthy and fulfilling lifestyle outside the traditional career path once working an 8 to 5 becomes optional.
On your way to financial independence and living a life outside the maze, the internet and various media can be useful in some ways but destructive in others. To explain why, let’s look at the internet and what drives much of the content that we take in.
Beware The Internet
There is a prophetic Chappelle Show skit from 2004 where Dave asks, “what if the internet were real?” He walks around the mall of the internet looking for news. Instead he gets sidetracked and stumbles across lots of increasingly disturbing porn. He tries to date but he gets cat fished. Some guy is always jumping out asking him if he wants to enlarge his penis. Guys keep appearing next to him in booths. One is pitching gambling next to another offering debt consolidation. I remember that internet of 2004.
Today, the internet is far more targeted and subtle but way more scary than 2004. Most of us do not know how pervasive, consolidated, and individualized data collection has become. My physical location, everything that I look at, purchase, and do. These things are all collected by my devices, apps, and sites. Service companies aggregate my disparate data into a unified profile that is for sale (or more accurately for rent). The scary thing is that algorithms and AI are making online platforms staggeringly good at manipulating my specific profile through campaigns and calls to action. These AI technologies and algorithms are advancing at incredible rates presently which raises an important question:
What is the only logical end when the real product of a free internet is actually the incremental behavioral change of consumers available for purchase? What does it mean for your independence and your feeling of wellbeing and financial success?
Will It Make Money From You or Make You Money
I love the internet as a free portal for almost anyone to access infinite information and knowledge. This was the original purpose. However, now 32 years later someone has to pay the bills. The internet has to make money to incentivize sustaining and growing it. Hence the only economic goal of the platforms where we spend our time online is to get us to click more things, read more things, buy things and eventually believe things that suit those funding the campaigns that your profile is being subjected to. This is not intentionally malicious. It is simply a bi-product of companies wanting to “micro-target” and encircle future clients in messaging that ends in a sale. That sale can be buying cornflakes or voting for Greg Stillson for president.
Are You Online or Is It On You
In an effort to fight for your attention, platforms have become active as opposed to passive. I find it kind of weird that we so willingly conceded to our phones and apps actively pinging us with notifications and alerts that we did not initiate. Making us check in, excuse reminders, see the latest update, etc. It truly raises the question of who is the tool today and who is the user today?
With all of this is mind, it is important to understand that the internet has a conflict of interest with your own. Content people do not consume and the internet profits off of your consumption not your contentment. This applies to search, it applies to media platforms like you tube and others, and it especially applies to social media today.
Contentment and Social Media
In a previous article, I wrote about how seeking a perfect appearing digital life can be a hindrance to actually living a good real life. While I am a total techie, I also have no personal social media accounts of any kind. Blasphemy you may say. Call me a visionary rebel or a dinosaur, I won’t care. You can’t tag me or unfriend me either way. Does that mean that I win by not playing?
My initial concern over social media was that my individuality might become generalized by having to click boxes and simplify myself into a standard profile framework. However, I could not have predicted that social ties would be manipulated to sell things. I did not predict the depression that we feel from how great everyone else’s life is in their feed compared to yours. I didn’t foresee generations hooked on the dopamine euphoria of likes or thrown into despair over so few likes in a life defined by an online identity. The new philosophical question may be if a tree falls in the woods but it is not on instagram, or tiktok, etc, did it ever even happen? Does it even matter?
A Fundamental Flaw
One of the biggest things that I have learned from writing on the internet for a few years now is that under the current revenue models it is fundamentally flawed as a tool to educate and create complex positive behavioral change when other ends are so much easier and so much more profitable. It is of course more profitable to get quick clicks and controversial shares than it is to create the life and behavioral changes that will make one financially independent and happily living life outside the maze. If one is rich and happy perhaps they are content. If they are content they won’t consume. There is no profit in that. Hence each of us has to take ownership and take control to actually feel success and independence.
Furthermore, the very accuracy of what you read online and even the integrity of independent voices online are constantly being pulled toward a gray area. Let me use my own story to explain.
My Story: A Pull Toward the Gray Area
After years of trying to “get ahead,” I realized that I was at a point in my life where I could stop working for others to get money and instead could start working for myself to get happiness. Bright eyed me started writing about it because I just couldn’t help myself. It became this website.
While I have no personal social media accounts, I did set out to create something that would reach people. As such, I got Life Outside The Maze on Twitter and Facebook. Eventually, people started finding this site which was my goal but it also supports social media and some of the not so great aforementioned things about it.
The more people that read this site, the more hosting and website services fees that I have to pay to keep it running. It becomes tempting to just run ads on the site to cover these costs. I do consider myself financially savvy after all and I’d rather someone else pay the bills. You can see how the pull toward the gray area starts. Should I really be writing for free and paying out of pocket to put it out there?
When Writing Becomes Mere Content
There was a time when financial independence was not really represented online. The idea had been around forever but not online. In this early vacuum, passionate bloggers filled it writing about the 4% rule, the miracle of compound interest, and how it is indeed possible to have financial freedom in 10 years or so. For these early writers, growth was organic and viral.
However, today the field is crowded and growingly competitive for reader attention. It did not take long for me to realize that many others were also writing online about financial independence, happiness, and living a good life. I am not trying to take over the internet with my tiny site. However, if you write something but no one reads it then why are you even writing?
The headline of an article remains the biggest determiner of whether anyone reads what you write. This is why headlines say stuff like “The Top 6 Secrets to Wealth That No one ever Shares,” as opposed to an alternate but more truthful title such as: “A few Ways to Save Money That are on My Mind.” There is no fact checker online. The only feedback is how many clicks it gets. If creators use this as their feedback, it helps drive consumption. However, it may be at the expense of clarity or even truth.
When I write something like you are reading now, the hosting platform has all these tools that suggest to me how to re-write the headline for SEO (search engine optimization). However, at what point does SEO become clickbait or turn into a guy jumping out and yelling at Chappelle to watch more porn?
How Writing Becomes Mere Content
Most blog platforms have Yoast or some other tool that tells you if your sentences are too long or hard to understand. It also suggests simplifications to your articles and can help you to SEO the entire article itself. As a rule of thumb, articles get the most clicks when written at no more than a 14-15 year old’s reading level. In short, one is encouraged to use simplistic language and simplify articles even if it betrays more complex concepts that may actually be worth mastering.
A great example of this is the 4% rule. It is oft repeated in the echo chamber that if you can live off of 4% of your invested net worth portfolio, you can retire forever. However, did you know that this assumes zero taxes or fees on your gains in that portfolio and that you may need 20% more per year to pay capital gains taxes before you cover any of your budgeted expenses? Did you know that the median return on a 50/50 stock / bond portfolio living under the 4% rule after 30 years is that you end up with 3 times as much money as you started with? Paradoxically, at the same time, did you know that the same 50/50 portfolio that has a 96% success rate over 30 years has a 45% chance of failure over 60 years?
The 4% rule is just one example of how simple short SEO optimized highly readable answers are encouraged even if it betrays the complexity of the very concepts that you may be banking your financial future on. Don’t get me wrong, I call many financial independence bloggers friends. Most of us have only the best of intent and there is a legacy of community and helping people. However, the forces pulling you toward the gray area as an independent writer are powerful. As a reader on the path you need to understand this.
Who’s Voice Is It?
If I write articles on search terms that are heavily searched I will get more clicks. Eventually though would it even be my own ideas anymore? I am also emailed several times a week by companies that want me to write an article selling their product. Often they want to write one for me in my voice and will pay me if I just allow it. I imagine the pressures only increase as one monetizes his or her site and has affiliates and sponsors to appease.
It is in these ways that even well intentioned independent content writers get pulled toward a gray area. What eventually makes it in front of your eyes may not be the best content or even be remotely truthful. It may just be the best marketed or the most provocative.
Wealth, Happiness, and The Internet
The internet is a miracle for providing information. However, it is not passive. The internet today is designed to keep you clicking. Even if you reach financial independence, internet and social media can actually keep you from feeling the way that you thought your best life was supposed to feel.
My hope is that this article helps you to understand the hidden motives and bias of both writers and the internet itself as you create your own path to wealth and happiness. In a previous article about killing the master, I advocated striving to understand and move beyond the teacher rather than getting caught idolizing anyone. Moreover, reading to get ideas and motivation may be helpful but understand that the very platforms that you are using may encourage endless clickbait ratholes over learning. It may even prioritize doom scrolling and controversy over truth.
In part 2 of this article, I will explain further some of the catch 22s of getting money advice online and how to know who to listen to. I’ll also cover why your best mentor might not be online at all.
Feel free to add something useful or ask a question in the comments below.
I’m passionate about financial independence, happiness, success, and adventure. Subscribe below if you want to get an occasional email directly from me with a few thoughts and latest articles.
6 comments
Thanks for sharing. I didn’t even realize that content creators face such a dilemma on a regular basis. It definitely sounds like a difficult job to balance authenticity with readership.
Great idea to not use social media anymore. I stopped about 5 years ago when I saw how effectively certain people could use it to divide people further. And then we found out that those people were doing it intentionally, and it worked.
Unfortunately there is a price to pay for free content, and it is almost always higher than we think.
Yeah Dominic, we had some friends over for dinner over the weekend and one is a marketing exec for a startup. One of my sons said something about how the game he likes to play online is free and my friend casually offered, “remember if you are not paying for the product you are the product.” Leave it to the marketing pro to sum up in one sentence what took me like 300 words 😉
What am interesting read! I get bothered by articles glossing over the 4% rule especially given that we are in the middle of the largest financial experiment in US history, but to your point “4% RULE” gets eyeballs, “4% for 30 years Guideline, but you may want to pad that given where treasury rates are” doesn’t roll off the tongue or grab attention as something easy to digest. Thanks for not compromising.
The internet is like a credit card, if you are foolish it can manipulate you, if you are wise you can use it to your advantage without consequences. I have no social media, no ads on my blog , no SEO and plenty of readers. I don’t care what my hosting costs are, it’s pocket change. I don’t let any AI tools critique my style, I like how I write. And I certainly don’t need to earn any more money. So I’m good. I think people who want to combine being heard with making money are the ones facing the ethical conflicts. I think it can be done successfully, but not easily. You have a natural conflict of interest to hold in check if you try to profit from a blog.
Yeah your simile of the internet being like a credit card is a good one. I recently came across a figure that credit card companies run tens of thousands of experiments per year to try to extract the most value from each person. It seems like it gets harder to be wise when wise people and machines are working harder to manipulate you. I agree on the natural conflict of interest and just added a 2nd part of this article kind of examining that more. It is an interesting dilemma of who do you trust as a reader and what are my own motivations as a writer. Thanks for sharing your thoughts Steveark.
I really enjoyed you pointing out the flaws with the 4% rule. So many assume this hard and fast rule, but there are so many more factors at play than people realize. Great point.