Ask Dethroner: Is Steve Pavlina a Smarmy Gasbag Making $40k a Month?

Robert B. writes, “In this article, the author claims he makes $40,000/month off of his ad-supported blog. I spend my days and nights online and have never heard of the guy. This leads me to believe that there is even bigger money in blogging than I previously imagined — do you think there is any way in hell this guy makes as much as he claims?”

Robert also questioned the veracity of the article author’s claims about “10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job”—a guy named Steve Pavlina, who I first ran into when he blogged about his experiments with polyphasic sleep. So there are really two questions here which I’ll address separately.

First, the blogging for big bucks. Pavlina claims he’s pulling down $40k a month from his blog. It’s possible, for sure—Pavlina runs exactly the sort of self-help website that appeals to people who are willing to give up some cash in the hopes that they’ll be able to buy a little bit of his motivational fortitude. While ad dollars online are still increasing, it looks like Pavlina is mostly using Google Adsense, which isn’t exactly a money milkshake machine. I suspect he’s not making $40k on click-based ads, but perhaps is making that amount of money via other business deals that work in conjunction with the site.

But the dude’s a fruitcake, so who knows if he’s even telling the truth. Look at his Million Dollar Experiment, where participants use the “power of intention” to “manifest” wealth. They’ve raised a million dollars… by willing themselves to winning lottery prizes and the like.

I’m all for the power of positive thinking—even the self-programming part of telling yourself what you want to help quiet the aching doubt of the subconscious—but the dude’s obviously off his rocker if he thinks collecting a bunch of people on a virtual team and tallying their income has somehow manifested it. Or to put it another way: we’re going to manifest $10,000 in a single day. I want you all to think really hard about going to work today. Magickal!

So then you get to Pavlina’s “You Should Never Get a Job” screed, where he offers up dorodango turds like “Did you know that the word boss comes from the Dutch word baas, which historically means master?”

“Boss” means “master”? No shit?

What’s subtle about Pavlina’s advice is that it all is pleasantly, affirmingly true in the absence of external pressure. Pavlina’s one of those people who believes—and wants you to believe—a person should be able to will their way out of any situation. He’s found a way to make a living by avoiding an office job and is now under the delusion that there is something inhuman about working in a hierarchy for wages.

What’s insulting about this proposition is that Pavlina puts working for a wage on par with slavery, which is exactly what working for a wage is not. Pavlina wants the money afforded by the opportunities of capitalism but the humanist pride of socialism.

What is so icky about all this is that I basically agree with a lot of what he’s saying. I don’t like working for someone else, either, so I’m trying to structure my life so that I can minimize my need to. But on the way, I’m also working for other masters. I’m not so prideful to be humbled by the need to occasionally suck it up and work for a wage, nor am I so smugly deluded that I think that “[generating] income through other means” doesn’t come with its share of ass-kissing—at the very least to your customers, about whom Pavlina offers this advice: “If you have a business and one customer says ‘no’ to you, you simply say ‘next.’”

Pavlina even builds in defenses to his perspective, using the sort of reverse psychology kung-fu favored by evangelists and hucksters:

If any of this makes you mad, that’s a step in the right direction. Anger is a higher level of consciousness than apathy, so it’s a lot better than being numb all the time. Any emotion — even confusion — is better than apathy. If you work through your feelings instead of repressing them, you’ll soon emerge on the doorstep of courage.

If you find anything he says irritating, you see, it’s because you’ve not yet reached the doorstep of courage (just past the sidewalk of doucheflakery.)

The whole god damn article is hinges on one stupid semantic twist: Steve Pavlina works, even if he doesn’t have a “job.” He works at writing articles that insult their audience by downplaying the stresses of everyday living and asking for donations “so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too.”

Here’s what I say: You want to work for yourself? Awesome. I support that entirely; we live in a rich country and opportunity for money abounds. Live a little.

Are you fine turning in 40 hours and going home and slamming a beer? Awesome. I support that entirely; we live for a short time and opportunity for pleasure abounds. Live a little.