You’ve been fixing cracks in drywall for the past 8 hours, and now you have about 15 minutes until your next shift. You took a delivery gig to save up for a better car because your old one blew a gasket. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now you’re walking up 3 flights of stairs with a 50-pound box of protein powder someone ordered an hour ago, and you don’t even feel that tired. At the end of the day, you’re walking home with an extra 400 bucks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This side hustle thing is turning out to be great!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yeah, it feels awesome for the first few weeks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then, after a while, you’re falling asleep behind the wheel as you’re driving home from work because you’ve been running on 4 hours of sleep for weeks. Aside from not getting enough rest, you’ve also been eating nothing but gas station hot dogs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobody talks about this part because it’s always all about the money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The word ‘flexible’ is what sells most people on a side hustle, and that’s totally understandable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What’s not to like about working when you want and how much you want?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you need a night off, no problem, you can take it whenever you want. But what almost nobody gets is that you can’t go on like this for long. Just give it a few months. You may have decided that you’ll only work 3 nights a week, and not after 10 P.M. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then you get a bill that’s bigger than you expected, or your kid needs money for a school trip. So you tell yourself it’s going to be just one more night. So you add another night, and then another. And 10 P.M. becomes 11:30.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So basically, what happened was that the job at the start seemed like a great opportunity; it was super flexible, it had great earning potential \u2013 amazing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But now, it’s almost a normal part of your income. And then, when you count it, you start feeling as if it’s part of your monthly financial plan \u2013 you need it. The flexibility slowly starts to fade. It becomes a necessity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The issue is that you already have a full schedule, and it’s not like you’ve chosen to replace low income with something better. What you’re doing is stacking more work on top of a life that’s already demanding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, what do you end up sacrificing? Rest. It’s always rest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s the only place where you can find extra time, so that’s what gets cut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the apps only make it worse because they reward speed and availability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You need to get 50 boxes from Evanston to Chicago? That’s a 30-minute drive, but if you get there in 27 minutes, you get rewarded for it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n