💡 Side Hustle Trap series For the full picture of why stacking side hustles never buys freedom — and what replaces it — start with the cluster pillar. → Why an Employee’s Side Hustle Never Leads to Freedom
Introduction: What Does “Not Depending” Actually Mean?
“I want to live without depending on an employer.”
Perhaps that is why you sharpened your skills and started a side hustle. The world points the same way. This is no longer an age of relying on companies. With the ability to earn on your own, you can live anywhere. That is real independence. Dependence on an employer is spoken of vaguely as a weak state to be avoided, and getting out of it is treated as proof of having grown up.
But there is something worth pausing on. What state, concretely, does not depending on an employer refer to? If you leave and go freelance, does that count as not depending? If you build earning power through a side hustle, does that count as independence?
This article claims the following. The real condition is neither acquiring earning power nor being unemployed. It is whether you hold the means of production. Mistake this one point and you can find that, having escaped the company, you are standing inside a more precarious dependence than before.
📖 Contents
Sharpening “Earning Power” Does Not Change Your Position
Start with the most commonly offered prescription: build earning power and you will not need to depend on an employer.
What is earning power, in the end? It is raising the quality of your labour. Training yourself into labour that is faster, better, saleable at a higher price. It is true that with more of it you receive more for the same hours. But that only means you can sell labour at a higher price — the fact that what you sell is labour has not changed at all.
Picture a highly skilled craftsperson. Exceptional technique, work that is well regarded, high fees. And the moment those hands stop, income stops. However good the craft, while what is sold is that craft — that is, labour — there is no escaping the structure in which income halts when you do not move. Sharpening earning power may move the ceiling of income somewhat higher. It does not remove the ceiling.
There is a second trap here. The greater the earning power, the harder it becomes to let go of it. Someone who has acquired a technique that sells at a high rate grows deeply dependent on earning through that technique. Since I can earn this much, they accept more work and sink further into time-selling labour. Ironically, the more capable someone is, the more easily they lose the motive to leave — because there is no shortage of lucrative work in front of them. The phrase earning power is all you need for independence can in this way bind the most skilled people most tightly to the market for labour. The shift of perspective involved — that reward is set by the value delivered rather than the quantity of labour — is examined in the labour theory of value versus the utility theory of value.
Not Being Employed Is Not Independence
Next, a second misunderstanding: that not being employed by a company means not depending on one.
Most people with side hustles take the form of freelancer or sole trader — not employed. And they often mistake not being employed for being independent. But employment status is not the substance. The question to ask is whether what you sell is labour, or value generated by means of production you hold.
An employee sells labour under a contract of employment. A freelancer has no such contract but still sells their own labour, under contracts for services or commissions. The form differs; what is sold is the same — your time and effort. If anything, the freelancer stands in a more precarious position. An employee still has some cushioning: job protection, an employer covering part of social insurance. The freelancer has none of that cushion. Move and there is income; do not and there is not. Take sick leave and the income for that period vanishes entirely.
So leaving employment in the belief that going freelance brings freedom changes nothing structurally, if you are still selling labour without holding means of production. If anything, having lost the cushioning, you meet the wall of it halts when I stop more directly. What looks like escaping dependence on an employer can turn out to be a move into a barer dependence on the market.
The Real Condition Is Holding the Means of Production
So what is the real condition? It is holding means of production.
Means of production are the base from which value is generated — tools, equipment, mechanisms. For someone who holds them, the mechanism keeps producing value even while they are not moving. Someone who holds none has only their own time and effort to sell, so income arises only while they are in motion.
Here lies the decisive difference. Suppose two people earn the same amount each month. One earns as a skilled professional taking commissions. The other earns because a mechanism they built keeps turning. The figures match; the positions could not be more different. The first must work again next month to receive the same amount. The second continues to receive it even if they do no work at all next month, so long as the mechanism turns. Same figure — one is selling labour, the other holds means of production. The difference does not appear anywhere in the number that says how much is earned.
Dependence on an employer, pressed to its core, is the state of being unable to live without that income. And the route out of it is not building more earning power in order to sell labour at a higher price outside the company. It is holding a structure in which value arises without selling labour — that is, holding means of production. The concrete forms this can take for an individual are covered in the four leverages that require no permission.
Holding means of production was once the privilege of those with large capital. In the digital domain, however, an individual can hold their own with almost no outlay. Content that organises what you know, and a mechanism that delivers it to the people who need it — build it once and you have an asset that keeps delivering value while you are not moving, without special capital. What the wish not to depend on an employer was really pointing at was this: moving to the side that holds the means of production.
Conclusion: Do Not Mistake Where You Are Escaping To
When we want a life that does not depend on an employer, we readily set the goal as sharpening earning power or getting out of employment. But however high earning power rises, the position of selling labour does not change; and leaving employment without holding means of production simply moves you into a more precarious dependence. What actually dissolves dependence is neither the quality of your labour nor the presence of an employment contract, but this single point: whether you hold means of production.
So if you feel you do not want to depend on an employer, that feeling is sound. The task is not to mistake where you are escaping to. What to aim at is not a self that can sell labour at a higher price but a self that holds a structure in which value arises without selling labour.
The route for moving revenue structure itself from selling labour to holding means of production is set out in the hub of this cluster, Why an Employee’s Side Hustle Never Leads to Freedom.
Related: The suspicion that you may simply not be suited to being an employee is taken up in Not Being Suited to Employment Is Structural, Not a Personality Trait, the other entry point to this cluster. For an overview of how the individual arguments fit together, start from the structural autonomy master pillar.
