Easy money! It would have been better never to have heard that term, but it seemed to have been lodged in my ears from birth. Easy money! The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once noted that most people hold the idea that there are easy ways to make money as an article of faith, and his powers of observation about this aspect of human nature were as well focused as a sharpshooter’s eyesight. Easy money! The cry awakens feeling in people’s breast akin to the first buds of spring. The sad fact of the matter is that there isn’t such an animal, and there never has been, but in our age of advanced technology there has been an additional word added to this glittering notion: easy money online. Suffering catfish, is it ever easy to fall in love with that one. Young passion has absolutely nothing on the raw heat generated when people hear that there are unlimited chances to make easy money online, and this has never been more true that it is today, what with the economy in shambles for most people and the specter of a reduced lifestyle staring each and every one of us in the face. If it is true that entire barrels of physical ink were spilt before the arrival of the Internet into our homes businesses and pockets, then it is doubly true that entire rivers of digital ink have been posted with the sole purpose to declaim the availability of easy ways to make money. Normally, I’m not inclined to go on at length about how to earn easy money, but the log-simple truth of the matter is that if one thinks about the phrase easy money for a minute or two, it may occur to the reasonable person that there is more than one available definition that could actually be true.

Easy money, as far as I’m concerned, is any money that can be earned without having to swing a pick axe for ten hours a day in the summer heat. Now that’s one definition that works against the usual, well accepted idea about how to make easy money. As long as the work doesn’t require a heavy, hand-held instrument designed primarily to raise blisters on my hands, and the work can be done under an air-conditioner, it’s easy money to me. I suspect that anyone reading this essay that has actually had to spend what seemed like an eternity breaking up hardpan under a broiling sun would readily agree with me. Granted, the vast majority of people conceive of easy money online, for example, as something slightly slimy, but I have learned that it doesn’t have to be that way in each and every case. For example, I am a college teacher who has not stepped foot in a physical classroom for the last five years. I work solely from a computer, and the room my computer is in is almost too cold because I’ve got excellent air conditioning running the entire time I teach. Now, compared to the effort I had to make to get dressed, drive to a campus and trot from classroom to classroom, what I earn now is by any calculus available to me easy money. As you might imagine, since I spend a good deal of time using my computer, I eventually found my way to the various online proclamations about making easy money online from something other than teaching. As I moved through the various pitches and poorly written screeds about easy money, I soon understood that there was a new definition for the phrase I had been hearing all my life, and I discovered that with a little hard work, which the easy ways to make money always require to actually make that easy money, I could bring in additional income. As a veteran legman, which is an old newspaper term for a researcher, I began checking out the main ways of making the much fabled and eternally ballyhooed easy money.

Easy money now means something entirely different for me than it did back in the day when I had to sweat for it. Now, with the help of the Internet and my writing skills, I can earn easy money by publishing essays online. It is true, and I’ll be the first one to admit it, that writing appropriate content for publication on the Internet is a chore if for no other reason than I can’t do anything else when I am researching the information I will write about and then writing intelligently and informatively about it. However, I can attest to the dead certain fact that if I work in a determined and consistent fashion writing essays about a variety of interesting subjects and then publishing them on the Internet in select locations, such as the one that is allowing you to read this essay right now, I will be able to make easy money on a consistent basis. If the definition of easy money doesn’t include implements that dig and break, and if I can write about topics that interest me, such as easy ways to make money, and I can sit in an air conditioned room while I work, then I am in possession of a new kind of El Dorado that arrived by redefining the term easy money. I can say with certainty there are easy ways to make money, and that I am engaged in them every day because I do not want to ever pick hold a pick axe again.