I am employed as a senior software engineer at Microsoft, on the side I like to steal from parked cars with clearly visible valuables in suburbs adjacent to our office. You can make a fortune selling this garbage on the internet with little risk, I make usually an extra $800 - sometimes $2000 in a good week if multiple high end laptops.

I write news articles on nasengetu.com, and make calculators & tools for a living.

I teach some music private lessons and play jazz gigs. An easy side hustle that should require not more than 10 years of work for a couple of hours a day to qualify if you apply yourself. You could be a hundredaire! :-)

"Jazz Musician": someone who puts a $10000 horn in a $1000 car to play a $100 gig

I'm leasing my kidney. I'm 27 and did the calculation, it's just more profitable than selling. Picked this trend up on TikTok and can recommend. When I retire I plan to get it back.

Was a no-brainer.

I quit my engineering job at Apple in 2023 to buy an aluminum Olson-Grumman step van, and start a mobile knife sharpening business, in Seattle. burlyburr.com Each knife takes maybe 5 minutes and I charge $2/inch, mostly working on summer weekends in the farmers markets. Makes over $150/hr when business is lined up. Sporadic work though.

I think stuff like this needs to grow organically from a combination of passion and (social) opportunity. You may want to look around where you live, for gatherings, events, markets, and take the time to see if something speaks to you?

Modern life for many is too fast. We can consciously slow down and feel and listen and explore, and if we practice enough we can do that without pressure or direct goal, and then when you don’t expect it something will show up that matches.

I doubt your neighbor started with the idea.

For small and occasional activities it may be worth asking a tax professional how the local laws treat hobby income. In the past it has simplified my declaration of tax activity by avoiding business red tape for that class of income and I could declare expenses against it at small scale. It does have to be occasional or unserious enough to be classed as a hobby.

I work in healthcare by day, but I have an OnlyFans for my feet that makes me an additional $17,000 a month on average.

I don’t but I know someone who works in IT with a side gig of doing renovation. It’s definitely not very unusual though. The trick is to find small jobs that professionals try to avoid but big enough that ordinary people can’t do.

Let me tell you something that does not make money: selling fiction books as an independent author (through physical copies, Kindle ebooks and Kindle Unlimited). Family member is a good writer, has been trying to "make it" for a few years already (published multiple books, has good reviews), and the monthly profit is still not enough to buy a pizza.