Online Entrepreneurship: The Internet’s New Prosperity Gospel

Prosperity Gospel: a religious belief that financial and physical well being are direct rewards for faith, positive thinking, and spending money.

Somewhere along the way, having a normal job as a person online has become deeply embarrassing.

Not in real life, obviously. In real life, people still go to work every day. They answer emails, they have an inconvenient commute, and colleagues they secretly hate. They eat sweaty meal deals at their desk and spend large chunks of the working week on teams calls where they use phrases like ‘circle back’ and discuss ‘the scope of the project’. Society continues to function as it does largely because millions of people quietly do extremely unsexy jobs every day.

But online everybody is a founder. Everybody is a CEO. A digital entrepreneur. A mindset mentor. A “freedom-based business owner” (whatever that means), and they’re all working remotely from a villa in Marbella and posting seventeen Instagram stories a day while you’re working from home wearing your pyjamas and a headset. Half your following list consists of people whose full time job is seemingly explaining that they no longer need a full time job. And I am equal parts fascinated and alarmed by them.

The internet has somehow created an entire economy based not on actually doing any work, but on performing the aesthetic of doing work. And call me a cynic, but the girl bosses on my for you page are not a huge step away from the scentsy sellers in my Facebook message requests.

I’m not saying working for yourself is fake. Plenty of people do. Freelancers do, so do creatives, consultants, small business owners, tradespeople. I do. These are real jobs requiring actual labour, expertise, and consistency. Most self employed people I know work harder than anyone else. But a growing group of people online are pushing a business model that appears suspiciously circular.

They are selling courses on how to make money online. The courses supposedly teach you how to make money online, through (you guessed it) selling courses. Coaches coach coaches to coach other coaches. These are entire ecosystems built around monetising the fantasy of monetisation. And apparently, every single person involved is making six figures a year.

What exactly is happening here?

The visual language of hustle culture is interesting, because the labour itself has become almost entirely invisible. Nobody is ever just working. Nobody is advertising a lifestyle that involves seven hours sitting at a desk, cursing at a spreadsheet. Nobody is talking about how 2-3pm is the worst hour of the day, and how Tuesday is the worst day of the week. Instead everything is Canva templates, AI voiceovers, and b roll footage of them typing furiously at a laptop.

There’s this constant implication, sometimes covert, sometimes entirely overt, that traditional employment is not just undesirable, but morally inferior. That if you still have a boss, still work set hours, still rely on a salary. If you’re happy with your holiday allowance and count down the days until the next bank holiday, that you simply haven’t optimised your mindset correctly. The modern internet treats traditional, stable employment like a personal failure.

And I understand why people buy into it, because traditional work is bleak for a lot of people. Wages that should be rising annually in line with inflation are stagnant. Rent is through the roof. Public transport in this country is a joke. So is the cost of childcare, car insurance, petrol, parking. The cost of your food shop has doubled, so has your mortgage. Of course people are drawn to the fantasy of autonomy. Of course “work from your laptop anywhere in the world” sounds appealing when your current reality is doing the work of three people, and living for the weekend.

But the internet has industrialised that desperation. That’s the sinister part.

A lot of these creators are not really selling a product. They’re selling proximity to a fantasy. The fantasy of ease. The fantasy of escape. The fantasy that somewhere out there exists a life completely free from boredom, hierarchy, routine, or financial anxiety if you simply purchase the right mentorship package. It’s a prosperity gospel for anyone with access to a smartphone.

And like all good scams, there’s always just enough truth in it to make it believable.

Because yes, some people do make money online. Some people have built incredible businesses. Some people genuinely are financially free.

But there exists a culture where appearing successful is often more profitable than being successful. Visibility has become confused with expertise. Confidence is misconstrued with authority. And the appearance of wealth is most covetable of all. There are people online monetising how they escaped the matrix, while spending twelve hours a day posting across five platforms. It’s almost as if, and stay with me here, the matrix now takes the form of facebook groups and affiliate links.

Modern hustle culture is shockingly reminiscent of good old fashioned MLMs. It’s so similar, in fact, that the language has barely changed. “Abundance mindset.” “Financial freedom.” “Building generational wealth.” “Community.” “Be your own boss.”

The only difference is the rebrand. The free cars for seller of the quarter have become beige home offices, where you burn sage and diptyque candles. The recruitment Facebook groups have been swapped for aspirational reels. The ‘hi babe’ messages have been replaced by instructions to click the link in a bio.

But underneath it, so much of it still relies on the same idea: your current life is inadequate, you are one mindset shift away from transformation, and the person selling you the dream just happens to have the answer. And that answer is conveniently available through a downloadable PDF. On their patreon. For a monthly fee. And there’s a gold tier, and a platinum tier, and an ultra special extra super elite tier, that you too can be a part of if you just part with your hard earned cash. But it’s ok - everyone knows you have to spend money to make money.

Historically, work produced tangible things. Now the product is often just content itself. The aesthetics do the heavy lifting. Luxury apartments. Expensive coffee machines. Airport content. Weekly resets. Fancy gyms. Monthly beauty maintenance. Tiny microphones clipped to expensive activewear sets. The internet rewards the performance of success long before actual success arrives.

Because performance is the business.

And I think that’s why this has grabbed my attention. Because it says something deeply bleak about modern work and modern aspiration. We no longer dream of meaningful careers. We dream of escaping labour entirely while still appearing ambitious to strangers online.

In the immortal words of Kim K, “it seems like nobody wants to work these days”. Everybody wants passive income. The more passive the better, in fact.

Nobody wants to accept that most worthwhile things often require sustained effort, repetition, boredom, admin, rejection and consistency over a very long period of time. The most genuinely successful people I know are rarely the ones posting “rise and grind” Instagram stories. They’re usually too busy actually working.

Which is perhaps the biggest tell of all.

The louder somebody performs entrepreneurship online, the more I begin to suspect the business itself may simply be entrepreneurship.

And I hate to be so cynical. It isn’t a good colour on me, and I really do believe that underneath all the beige branding there is something revolutionary about the internet.

For the first time in history, ordinary people like you and me have access to tools that once belonged almost exclusively to corporations, publishers, media companies and gatekeepers. You can learn skills online for free. You can build an audience from your bedroom. You can self publish a book, launch a business, sell art, find clients, make videos, start a newsletter, teach yourself design, editing, coding, marketing, and all without ever asking somebody else for permission or opportunity.

That part is real. But the tools have become secondary to the performance.

People stopped creating things and started creating identities around maybe eventually creating things. The internet is full of aspiring entrepreneurs endlessly consuming content about productivity, discipline, manifestation and personal branding while never actually making the thing they supposedly want to make, or doing the thing they so desperately want to do.

You do not need another PDF telling you how to optimise your morning routine. You just need to stop watching strangers explain how successful they are long enough to actually begin creating success for yourself.

Despite what the internet might suggest, there is nothing shameful about ordinary work. There is nothing embarrassing about having a stable income while building something on the side. And there is certainly nothing noble about performing burnout online for an audience of other exhausted people pretending they, too, are one mindset shift away from passive income.

One of my favourite online grifters, Joel Osteen, built an empire telling people prosperity was a sign of belief in God. Likewise, modern internet entrepreneurs will tell you that you can’t escape your 9-5 because you just simply don’t have enough faith in yourself.

I would like to encourage you to put the bank card down and find some self belief. You do not need to buy somebody else’s blueprint for a happy and successful life.

You are allowed to just start building one of your own.