Not sure where you are or your lifestyle but i found bartending nights/weekends and cooking/managing BoH mornings was a lot less stress and better money than something like retail or warehouse work. Bartending in a city can very easily push $40/hr and sometimes you’ll see a lot more. I’ve walked with $2k from a 14hr day before, it’s uncommon but it can happen especially if you work private events. Line starts at $20 many places and trains you for KM which can be $30+. You get free food and something of a social life even. There’s a reason lifers in restaurants seem to end up owning restaurants by the time they retire, playing smart you can actually do alright.

I’m still in that industry and still work but no longer find myself worried about my car breaking down or being short on this or that. If I don’t want to work as much this week I just don’t schedule it. If I want to disappear for a month or two and wander around some other forest I can. Festival out of state? No problem. Covid shut me down for a while but I had other revenue streams I built up. On average I make $300 hosting a 3hr jam with my own equipment a couple times a week, bartend another night averaging $200/8hrs in a dive, do the ordering/staffing along with opening the line occasionally for $400. In season regulars at work buy produce from me which I source from my garden or the neighbor I do some work for. In my free time I also flip bikes, cars and guitars. It’s a stretch to call myself “successful” in any traditional sense but I’m content knowing that if everything crashed and burned tomorrow I could survive.

Jobs like Amazon are intended to keep the poverty cycle in place. You’re exhausted so maybe you end up eating McDonald’s ($$$ for junk) after work. You have to commute to the business district so you burn more gas. Your free time you just want to sleep since you worked some OT. You go back to school in the evenings digging more debt and end up missing classes and whatnot since you’re exhausted from the warehouse pushing you to work more to cover the loans. It’s a vicious cycle. I’m aware that the bootstrap analogy is ridiculous but so is working for the —corporate overlords— shareholders while expecting to break free from their grasp.