If you search “passive income” on Facebook and Instagram, you will be inundated with videos promising that if you just do a few easy steps, you can earn money without even thinking about it. Just a few affiliate links or Etsy listings, and you will be rolling in dough without doing any work.

The idea of earning money without doing any work is immensely appealing. It speaks to our animal instinct to pursue pleasure (money) and avoid pain (work). While I don’t object to most kinds of passive income — renting your house, for example — I think that our culture’s obsession with living off of passive income reveals something deeply problematic. We are disconnected from our work; work no longer holds any meaning to us beyond the possibility of earning money. The fact that our ideal is “no work, all profit” reveals that we don’t value work as a human capacity.

All play and no work…

This is a very new phenomenon in human history. I think of my great-grandfather, a dentist in a small farming community in Iowa. He would often be paid for his work in chickens or sides of pork. His poorer customers would give him a bag of beans. That simple exchange is fundamental to work: You invest work in something, and it gives you the fruit of your labors. 

Passive income culture circumvents the “giving” part of that exchange. It demands the fruit of your labor without investment. It is all take and no give. 

Before I continue, I want to clarify that I am speaking of the culture at large. Some individuals may be profiting from an online course they spent hours creating, a digital Etsy product they designed, or something else they invested time and energy in. I am not speaking of that kind of income — in fact, I would argue that digitizing your art or class is an efficient and smart way to reach a wider audience. 

I do object, however, to the misguided ideal of fully automated work, which attempts to cut out the human element altogether. Some examples: 

• using AI to generate “informative” videos;
• generating Etsy or Amazon products with a print-to-order model and automated software;
• and copy and paste affiliate links on an AI-generated website. 

These products and advertising are flooding the online space. Those who profit from them miss out on the essential, human character of work.

In the beginning

Genesis clues us into the importance of work. Before Adam and Eve commit the first sin, they are commanded to work: “God blessed them and God said to them: Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.” We can understand God’s command to “subdue” the earth as a command to work. In Hebrew, the word commonly translated as “subdue” is  “kabash” which can also be translated as “press down” or “bring into bondage.” To an Old Testament reader, the word would have evoked an image of farming. 

Sin did not create work; work already existed as a means to live out our human nature as the image of God. Sin certainly made it harder to work – Adam must now work “by the sweat of his brow” – but work itself was pre-lapsarian. To work is part of what it means to exist well as a human and to fulfill our end. Work in this sense is an overwhelmingly positive good.

A radical understanding of “work”

The positive understanding of work in Genesis lies in sharp contradiction to other creation myths. The concept of work in Genesis was likely formed in explicit contradiction to pagan creation myths that framed work as a terrible burden hoisted on man. 

The Babylonians’ Enuma Elish, for example,  would have been familiar to the authors of Genesis (especially if, as many scholars think, Genesis was developed in part during the Babylonian exile). In the Enuma Elish, man is created out of the body of a dragon and forced into slave labor by the gods. That was the framework with which the Babylonians understood themselves and their work: they were created from an act of violence, with no inherent dignity, and consigned to toil as slaves for the entirety of their lives. We can understand Genesis as a response to that tale of work as drudgery. In Genesis, man is created out of love by Love Himself and is given the ability to serve his creator not bound by fear, but out of love. 

The Judeo-Christian understanding of work that became the basis for Western civilization was completely radical to the Babylonians. Work has inherent dignity, which the Babylonians would have scoffed at.

The new paganism and work

The dignity of work is a radical concept in today’s secular culture, too. Like the authors of Genesis, we are surrounded by a culture that views work as drudgery. Nowhere is that more obvious than our culture’s fixation on passive income. Of course, if work is simply drudgery that has no connection to our community or human dignity, then passive income would be a perfect solution to getting what we need to live. 

But work shouldn’t be drudgery: work is imbued with meaning. Even the most monotonous of tasks has meaning and dignity precisely because the human person has meaning and dignity. St. Pope John Paul II noticed the degradation of work and the worker in the modern world. In response, he wrote Laborem Exercens, an encyclical letter to the Church emphasizing the dignity of work. In it, he writes:

In other words, work allows man to live according to his nature, to “realize his humanity.” This is the case regardless of the content of your work. No matter how productive or important your work is, in the eyes of the world, the Pope would argue that it has value and meaning for yourself and for the community that benefits from your work.

The problem with passive work

Passive income culture misses this point entirely. Its ideal is a system of income that requires no interaction with consumers of the products it generates (often by AI). First the industrial world and now the digital world have allowed for impersonal consumerism that would have been unimaginable 200 years ago – and certainly for the authors of Genesis. It is historically the exception, rather than the norm, not to know where our kitchen table was made and by whom, who made our bed linens or who milled the flour in our bread. “It is characteristic of work that it first and foremost unites people. In this consists its social power: the power to build a community,” St. John Paul II writes (IV.20). By doing work that requires real investment of time and energy, we contribute to an exchange within our communities. For Christians, community is never entirely earth-bound. The community we can foster through an authentic exchange of goods and services on earth is analogous to the exchange of love in the communion of Saints in Heaven. 

Not only does work bring us into communion with others, but it also brings us into communion with God. “Man is the image of God partly through the mandate received from his Creator to subdue, to dominate, the earth. In carrying out this mandate, man, every human being, reflects the very action of the Creator of the Universe,” the pope writes (II.4). By working, man imitates the work of God when he created the Universe. Work is an invitation to co-creation with God.

Working with Christ

When God became man, Christ demonstrated the dignity of work. The first 30 years of his life were dedicated in part to his labor as a carpenter. Only in the last three years of his life did Jesus serve in his public ministry. 

Our work not only can be an imitation of the Father’s act of creation, but it can also be an act of devotion to the Son. Love can transform the most tedious, difficult work into acts of devotion. And Christ will never weary of working beside us.