I agree 100% that there are no "easy jobs" left that "anyone can do"... well, there are... they just haven't been automated away yet. That's a different, and bigger discussion, but I think we are rapidly heading to a situation where a free labor market will not have employment for a majority of people at anything resembling a living wage. It's going to be a huge problem by itself, and the problems that will come along with it, are going to be defining challenges of this century, just as the World Wars were defining challenges of the previous century. (Climate change is another, and the relationship between economies and energy generation means these two issues are closely related.)

I am not saying "don't follow your dreams", I am saying "the math shows this isn't a realistic path unless you are extraordinarily good". It's supply and demand. The barrier to entry is super low, for a ton of these a $400 laptop, used iPad, or any old smartphone is the basic tool of the job and not much more. There are a zillion people who want to try it. Meanwhile the barrier to success is super high... figuring out how to get tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands of people, to pay attention to your work daily, clicking on ads and links, coming back constantly. Meanwhile, anyone who can do a mediocre job of writing software can disappear into a corporate IT department making 50% more than median wage in their area. No reason not to try your hand at it... barrier to entry is low! But seeing this as "well, I'm just going to quit my job and become an influencer"... not a good plan unless you have significant savings to fall back on... which means you are already doing well for yourself, or have something like well-to-do parents you can fall back on. Catch-22.

I have been a paid content creator... I have 14 years of experience doing freelance writing work under my belt. Indeed, that freelance writing work was the springboard that built my fulltime career, so I am pretty well-qualified to talk about the difficulties of doing content on a weekly basis. not saying this to bigfoot the discussion with "well I have done it so what do you know?" but I am saying that I am intimately familiar with the challenges that influencers and social media creators go through. It was exceedingly difficult and I had clients who were handling much of the labor of building and maintaining an audience, marketing the material, and so on. If I was handling that myself, yes, I would have gotten a bigger slice of the checks, but I would be doing all of the labor and having to learn even more new skills to do that.

J.Ja.