The Myth of Making Money While You Sleep (and Why Only Mattress Firms Win)

If you’ve spent more than six minutes on the internet since 2008, someone has definitely tried to convince you that you can make money while you sleep. It sounds so wonderfully lazy, doesn’t it? No meetings, no alarms, no endless email chains — just you, a laptop, and a passive income stream that supposedly gushes cash while you drool on your pillow. Somewhere between an investment portfolio and a bedtime story, the “make money while you sleep” promise became the secular version of eternal salvation.

But, like most modern miracles, it turns out that the promise of easy money often requires a lot of very awake work. Sometimes, it’s not even money at all — just a long nap from which your bank balance never recovers.

Let’s take a stroll through the 21st-century bazaar of dreams, where everyone’s an entrepreneur, and nobody wants to admit they’re broke.

The original sin of “passive income” wasn’t greed. It was optimism. Early YouTubers and bloggers genuinely believed they’d cracked capitalism. You post a few videos, add some affiliate links, maybe publish an e-book about “hustle culture,” and boom — your PayPal starts pinging while you binge Netflix. The problem, of course, is that everyone else read the same how-to article. When a thousand people start selling “Ten Secrets to Making Passive Income,” what you end up with is an infinite pyramid of gurus teaching other gurus how to be gurus. It’s less a business model, more a matryoshka doll made of motivational quotes.

By 2015, the phrase “financial freedom” had joined “clean eating” and “mindfulness” as one of those ideas that sounded deep but came pre-packaged with hashtags. Instagram became the visual gospel of the sleep-rich. There were palm trees, infinity pools, and laptops perched artfully beside coconuts. “Work from anywhere,” the captions said — though “anywhere” usually meant Bali, because no one ever posted a shot of themselves grinding affiliate spreadsheets in a Croydon flat.

Of course, the earliest evangelists weren’t all liars. Some did make money while they slept — mostly by selling courses about how they made money while they slept. It was the perfect circular economy: your “product” was the illusion itself. Every testimonial, every webinar, every “limited-time” offer was part of a grand, self-recycling myth. The real commodity wasn’t income; it was hope, dressed in pastel infographics.

Then came the crypto bros. Their take on passive income was more… performance art. Staking tokens, yield farming, liquidity pools — words that sounded like they belonged in either a hedge fund or a fantasy novel. The pitch was irresistible: why toil when you could let your assets do the work? Your money could now “earn” while you sleep, dance, or upload TikToks. Until one day, it decided to take a long nap too, somewhere deep in the blockchain, never to return.

The brilliance of the “make money while you sleep” myth lies in how it flatters both our laziness and our vanity. It tells us we’re too smart for labour. We’re visionaries, not workers. We’re meant for spreadsheets of destiny, not spreadsheets of accounting. And so, people who once spent their nights watching reality TV now stay up late watching webinars about “automating revenue streams.”

One could almost admire the artistry of it. The modern passive income industry has achieved what alchemists and cult leaders only dreamed of — it’s turned aspiration into its own currency. You no longer have to build anything; you just have to believe.

But somewhere around 2020, belief started to wobble. The pandemic turned half the planet into aspiring online moguls. Everyone had a Shopify store, a dropshipping plan, or a content strategy scribbled on the back of a Tesco receipt. And because the internet loves irony, the real winners weren’t the new “entrepreneurs” — it was the platforms hosting them. Etsy made money while you slept. Amazon made money while you slept. Even the stock photography sites you used for your “launch content” made money while you slept. You, meanwhile, woke up to discover that your “passive” side hustle had quietly turned into a full-time job with zero HR and an abusive boss named Algorithm.

It’s not that passive income is impossible. It’s just that it’s rarely passive and even less often income. The people who truly make money in their sleep tend to have spent decades staying awake first. Landlords, for instance, can claim a sort of semi-passive income — but only after years of mortgages, maintenance calls, and tenants who think mould is a lifestyle choice. Investors earn while they sleep, but not before they’ve risked enough to have nightmares about it. Authors receive royalties, but only after writing books that took years and several existential crises.

The modern myth, however, skips all that. It photoshops out the pain. It’s a glossy montage of “before” and “after” without the endless “during.” And so, each year, new dreamers step up to the stage — convinced that this time, they’ll be the one who cracks the algorithm, goes viral, automates success, and logs off forever.

Then reality yawns. You buy a course. The course tells you to buy another course. You sign up for a newsletter. The newsletter tells you to join a mastermind group. You join the group. The group tells you to create your own course. Suddenly, you’re three months deep into a pyramid made entirely of PDFs and motivational Zoom calls. Somewhere, a “six-figure coach” thanks you for your contribution to their sleep fund.

The saddest part? The dream itself isn’t wrong. Wanting freedom from the 9-to-5 grind is deeply human. So is wanting to wake up one morning and realise that your effort has multiplied itself overnight. The problem is that most passive income fantasies have the moral geometry of a slot machine. They’re designed to keep you believing just long enough to feed the next round of optimism — the next e-book, the next token, the next AI-generated Etsy product that “sells itself.”

Meanwhile, the only people who truly manage to monetise sleep are mattress companies. There’s also a strange poetry to the way “making money while you sleep” became the defining fantasy of a generation that can’t sleep. Anxiety, burnout, doomscrolling — the modern condition has left us both exhausted and restless. No wonder we fantasise about rest that pays. Yet the deeper irony is that real rest, like real wealth, doesn’t come from constant hustle. It comes from knowing when to stop.

But stopping doesn’t trend well. It doesn’t sell courses or capture emails. And so the myth regenerates, fuelled by FOMO, glossy success reels, and the eternal promise of “financial freedom” just one webinar away. Each time it collapses, a new version emerges, rebranded for the times. Crypto gave way to NFTs, which gave way to AI side hustles. Now you can “train” a chatbot to make content for you, post it while you sleep, and supposedly wake up to revenue. In reality, you’ll wake up to discover your AI clone has started quoting motivational tweets and flirting with spambots.

Still, we fall for it — because the idea of effortless reward is older than capitalism itself. Ancient myths had golden geese; we have monetised sleep. The only difference is that geese occasionally laid actual eggs.

The “make money while you sleep” industry thrives on carefully choreographed relatability. The influencers don’t flaunt private jets anymore; they flaunt minimalism. They film themselves drinking matcha in linen shirts, telling you that success is “alignment.” Their wealth is now spiritual — or at least, rebranded as such. It’s not about greed; it’s about energy. They’ll tell you that you’re not failing because the system is rigged — you’re failing because you’re not “manifesting abundance.”

That’s the final twist of the myth: it manages to blame you for your own disillusionment. You didn’t make money in your sleep because you weren’t visualising hard enough. Your subconscious didn’t network properly. Your aura was off-brand. It’s capitalism crossed with astrology — and it’s oddly comforting until you check your overdraft.

Yet, amid the satire, a small truth glimmers. Some passive income dreams can work — when they start from genuine value rather than shortcuts. The retired teacher who sells language resources online. The musician whose songs bring in royalties years later. The coder whose app quietly pays the rent. These aren’t miracles; they’re craft and patience disguised as luck. The secret isn’t sleeping while you earn — it’s working long enough that your work doesn’t vanish when you rest.

Maybe that’s the only kind of passive income worth chasing: the kind that’s built on something real. Something that keeps giving because it genuinely matters to someone else, not just because a course told you it could. It doesn’t come from hacking the system — it comes from contributing to it.

So, yes, the “make money while you sleep” fantasy is seductive. But like all good myths, it tells us more about ourselves than about reality. We don’t really want to be rich while we sleep; we just want to believe that life doesn’t have to hurt so much while we’re awake.

And if you truly want to make money while you sleep? Forget crypto, dropshipping, or courses. Start a mattress company. Everyone’s tired, and the margins are great.