1. The Different Forms of Work
Onsite work — sitting in an office, nine-to-five (or, just as often, 9-9-6) — is no longer the dominant way to work.
After Covid, many companies kept some version of work-from-home, letting employees split their week between home and office. This is what people now call hybrid work.
Remote work is no longer a niche either. Given how global a lot of internet companies’ offices already are, you and your colleague on the other side of the world are, in some sense, both remote to each other — most coordination happens over Zoom, not in person.
Neither hybrid nor remote work changes working hours all that much on their own — that mostly still comes down to industry and company.
Beyond that, part-time work, gig work, and the digital nomad lifestyle have all been picking up steam on social media over the past couple of years, turning into something close to a “trend.”
My own first contact with part-time work and digital nomadism goes back to the spring semester of my junior year. Sometime in 2023, I came across the digital nomad community on Xiaohongshu, and it genuinely shook something loose in me. After learning more, I joined a community. Two months later — luckily — I landed my first paid gig, which covered the cost of joining many times over. That was the moment I realized I didn’t have to rely on a nine-to-five to make money. It also planted a small seed that, after graduation, ended up shaping my career choices more than almost anything else.
2. Finding Your Own Way of Living (and Working)
I think anyone who thinks even a little, after being exposed to the social-media compressed gospel of compounding and leverage, ends up wanting to build a system — to stop selling their time for money, to one day earn income while they sleep, to reach FIRE early. (FIRE: Financial Independence, Retire Early. Depending on your situation, there are several flavors — lean FIRE, fat FIRE, barista FIRE…)
To be clear: I’m not selling anything here. Aside from the actual Bible, there’s no such thing as scripture. The paragraph above is theoretically true, but it breaks down easily in practice — it depends entirely on the person, and everyone explores and arrives at it differently. What matters is doing it, and doing it for a long time. That last part is mostly a note to myself.
What Is Work, Really
By law, most people will work for at least 40 years. So what is the essence of work? Or, more precisely — what does work mean to you? Understanding this helps you figure out what kind of life you actually want to live.
For me: first, I need income from work to support myself (for now, at least, just myself). Second, work gives me a sense of accomplishment — I like a challenge, and there’s something genuinely satisfying about leveling up in real life. Third, I don’t like onsite work — or more precisely, I don’t like performing work.
During college, I interned at both an internet company and a professional services firm. Some of those internships felt great — the learning curve was steep, and I came away having learned a lot. Others made it painfully clear that clocking in and performing busyness, day after day, would slowly drain my flexibility, my ideas, and a certain spark.
That’s when I started thinking seriously about freelancing. After about a year of being a freelancer, here’s what I’ll say: it’s still a wall — it’s just that the side you’re standing on has changed.
What Work Actually Demands
Whatever form it takes, work always demands one thing: that your skills stay sharp (with a few exceptions, of course). And the longer you work, the more that demand shifts toward higher-end skills — expert-level experience, networks, and so on.
The only real difference is who absorbs the risk. Either the company takes on some of it for you — softening the blow of a future layoff or a tough job market — or you carry it all yourself, with a real chance that this month, or this year, nothing comes in.
It’s a bit like investing: a risk-averse person who buys stocks is probably going to spend a lot of time feeling nervous.
Two Traps, One on Each Side
- The stability trap. Stability feels safe, but it can quietly turn into a cage. People trade time for security without seeing the cost — until the day they want out, and discover the door is much heavier than they expected.
- The freedom trap. Freedom without an income system behind it is just anxiety with better branding. The goal isn’t to escape a job — it’s to build a kind of freedom that a steady cash flow can actually support.
What It Means to Live
Here’s the thing I’ve been chewing on most recently: how to actually live. A human life was never designed purely for work. Knowing how to live — and actually loving it — is a skill that’s both underrated and genuinely hard.
You don’t need to hit some number before you’re allowed to have a life. And having a lot of free time doesn’t automatically mean you’re living well.
Find your way of living first, and you’ll probably already know which way of working fits you.
3. A Survey of Digital Work and Opportunities
Everyone, everywhere, wants to know how to make money — what the tricks are, how to do it faster.
Reddit has whole communities built around side hustles, digital nomadism, passive income, making money with AI, and so on. China has its own equivalents — I won’t go into them here, but they’re easy to find.
A few things hold true on both sides:
- Junior-level opportunities are relatively scarce, whether you’re in a freelance community, picking up gigs on a platform, or finding your own clients. If you’re genuinely strong, that’s a different story.
- AI hasn’t killed the race. Content creation, coding, and so on still have real demand. And AI has also created new roles of its own — AI automation (helping small and medium businesses actually implement AI), faceless video (which lowers the barrier to entry somewhat, though it’s also easy to do badly).
- If you want to build something of your own — selling digital products on Etsy (templates, prompt kits…), running a newsletter, or running a YouTube channel — what matters most, in every case, is consistent, long-term effort.
Online, you’ll constantly run into posts like: I made $X a year doing this, or I started from zero and now I make $X a month doing that.
Take those with a grain of salt. Do examples like that genuinely exist? Probably — otherwise nobody would be hyping them. But nothing falls from the sky either; nobody just shows up and money starts flowing in.
First, posts like that do prove the lane works — if you genuinely commit to it, there’s a real chance of making money.
Second: don’t underestimate how hard anything is, and don’t overestimate it either. Most things in this world don’t require exceptional intelligence.
Finally, here are some directions that have actually proven to work (using overseas examples, which can largely transfer to the domestic ecosystem too):
- AI automation — automating repetitive work, using tools like Make, Zapier, n8n, and AI agents (LangChain, etc.).
- Ghostwriting — producing content across channels for founders and creators.
- Web design — what separates you from raw AI output is design and copy that actually convert, built with tools like Webflow and Framer.
- SEO — a strong, persistent demand overseas; AI has created a new variant of it too — AI SEO (GEO), i.e. how to get a brand or product surfaced inside AI answers, and how that product is represented within those answers.
- Email marketing — automated sequences, high-converting copy, audience segmentation, A/B testing.
- No-code app building — using tools like Bubble, Glide, and FlutterFlow to build for startups.
- Paid newsletters — building a niche audience and monetizing through subscriptions, sponsorships, affiliate marketing, or premium insights.
- Remote part-time CMO — advising startups on marketing, growth strategy, and positioning.
- Copywriting — websites, social, product copy — all judged on conversion.
- Digital products — Notion templates, mini-courses, and the like.
- Technical documentation — turning complex systems into clear guides, SOPs, internal wikis, API docs, and onboarding materials.
- Remote / niche HR roles.
- Scripts for faceless video — what matters most for faceless video isn’t the visuals, it’s the script and the audio quality.
- Online course consulting — helping creators, coaches, and experts turn their knowledge into structured online courses.
- Indie development — building a small tool around one specific problem and charging a monthly fee for it.
4. How to Actually Get Work / Make Money
Back to the earlier question: what does work actually demand?
Skills. Skills, and more skills. For most ordinary people, this is the only real path to earning money outside a company.
Which raises another question: in an age where AI is this strong, which skills are still worth investing in long-term?
I’ve posted versions of this question on Reddit and read through well over a hundred replies. The short version: some soft skills matter more now than ever — critical thinking, systems design, sales… which might sound like it’s saying nothing at all. The more specific, professional skills vary a lot from person to person, and some are AI-related, but it really depends on your individual situation — so I won’t go further into that here.
How to make money outside a company:
- Be genuinely good at what you do. No shortcut around this.
- Solve a specific problem (which is really about how you sell yourself, or your solution). For which group of people, solving which problem, with what solution. The pain point matters more than the solution itself.
- Build a body of work. Some roles want a portfolio — and a portfolio is itself a demonstration of competence. As mentioned, junior opportunities in freelancing and digital nomad work are scarce, but a strong body of work in the right niche can still let you leapfrog — an AI-generated video, a piece of copy, an automation workflow you built. Combined with the next point, the effect is more than the sum of its parts.
- Build in public. Use the reach of social media — let what you post there become an extension of your résumé.
- Turn your service into a system. Ask what parts of what you do can be systematized. This is the last step of the journey, not the first — the system comes after you’ve already proven something works.
To everyone who made it this far:
Earn enough, as Maugham put it, to secure “freedom’s source.” And, as Woolf imagined, to have “a room of one’s own.”
And from there — live a life that’s disciplined and rich, free and fully awake.