"So what exactly do you do?" The question comes at every braai, every family gathering, every taxi ride where the driver makes small talk. And every time, I have to decide how honest to be.
Because the truth — that I run an affiliate marketing blog, a YouTube automation pipeline, a WooCommerce store with 197 products, a trading bot on MT5, and a Blogger site with 250 articles about geography — is not an answer that fits into the mental categories people have for "jobs." It doesn't fit into "he works at a company" or "he's in IT" or "he has a business." It's something else entirely, and something else makes people uncomfortable.
The Version My Family Knows
My family knows I "work on the internet." That's the phrase my mother uses when she explains it to her friends at church. "He works on the internet." It's said with a tone that suggests she's not entirely sure it's real, but she's choosing to believe in it the way she chooses to believe in the stock market — it exists, people make money from it, she doesn't understand how, and she hopes her son isn't losing money.
My father, before he passed, asked me every time I visited: "When are you getting a real job?" He wasn't being cruel. He was being practical. He'd worked at the same company for thirty years. The concept of making money without an employer, without a payslip, without a pension, was as foreign to him as speaking Mandarin. He worried about me. I could see it in his eyes every time I said "the business is growing." He heard "I'm unemployed and too proud to admit it."
The truth is somewhere in between. I'm not unemployed. I'm not employed either. I exist in a space that the previous generation doesn't have a word for, and the absence of a word makes them nervous.
The Version My Friends See
My friends think I'm a hustler. That's the word they use. "Justice is hustling." It's meant as a compliment, but it carries a subtle implication — hustling is what you do when you don't have a real plan. It's the gap between ambition and stability. It's what people do before they figure out what they actually want to do.
They see me posting on Facebook at midnight, publishing YouTube videos they don't watch, talking about "SEO" and "affiliate links" and "conversion rates" in ways that sound like a foreign language. They nod politely. They say "that's cool, man." And then they ask if I've seen the Champions League match.
I don't blame them. Before I started, I didn't know what affiliate marketing was either. I didn't know that you could earn commissions by linking to products. I didn't know that Google's algorithm could make or break a business. I didn't know that a six-line file called robots.txt could be the difference between profit and loss. This world is invisible to anyone who isn't in it.
The Version My Colleagues Imagine
The people I went to school with — the ones with corporate jobs, medical aid, and retirement annuities — they imagine something different. They think I'm a dreamer. They think I'm the guy who read too many "get rich online" articles and is slowly burning through his savings while telling everyone he's an entrepreneur.
And honestly? They're not entirely wrong. I did read too many articles. I did believe the stories about people who made six figures from their laptops while sitting on a beach. The difference between me and the dreamers they imagine is that I actually built something. It's small, it's fragile, and some months it earns less than a part-time job at Pick n Pay. But it exists. It generates revenue. It has customers, content, and infrastructure.
The hard part is that the infrastructure is invisible. When someone works at a bank, you can see the building. When someone opens a restaurant, you can smell the food. When someone builds an online business, there's nothing to point at. You can show them your website, and they'll say "nice," but they can't feel the 250 blog posts, the 197 products, the 40 automations, the 2 AM debugging sessions, or the months of zero revenue. It all compresses into a single web page that loads in one second and looks deceptively simple.
The Version I Don't Tell Anyone
Here's what I don't tell people: some weeks I make nothing. Not a single rand. The blog gets traffic, but nobody clicks. The YouTube videos get views, but nobody buys. The affiliate links sit there, clicked by bots, not humans. Those weeks, I feel exactly like what my colleagues imagine — a dreamer burning through savings.
Other weeks, a MaxBounty campaign converts. Someone clicks a JustAnswer link and asks a question, and I earn $25. Someone buys a supplement through my Amazon affiliate link, and I earn $4.50. Someone signs up for GetResponse through my link, and I earn $19.60 in recurring commissions. Those weeks, I feel like a genius.
The reality is that I'm neither. I'm not a dreamer, and I'm not a genius. I'm a person who chose a path with no guaranteed salary, no guaranteed timeline, and no guaranteed outcome. Every month is a roll of the dice, and the dice are loaded by an algorithm I can't control, a search engine I can't predict, and a social media platform that rate-limits me whenever it feels like it.
The Loneliness of the Unconventional
What my colleagues don't understand — and what I can't explain at a braai — is the loneliness of this path. When you work at a company, you have colleagues who understand your daily struggles. You can complain about your boss, laugh about a meeting, share the stress of a deadline. When you work alone on the internet, there's no one to complain to. The boss is an algorithm. The meetings are YouTube tutorials. The deadlines are self-imposed and therefore always flexible, which means they're also always broken.
I've tried to explain it. I've shown my mother the WooCommerce dashboard. I've shown my friends the YouTube analytics. They look, they nod, and then they say "so when are you getting a real job?" Not because they don't care, but because the gap between what I do and what they understand is too wide to bridge in a conversation.
The only people who truly get it are the ones in the Facebook groups and Discord servers — other affiliate marketers, other bloggers, other people who chose this strange path. We've never met in person, but we understand each other in ways that my childhood friends never will. We know what it feels like to refresh an analytics dashboard at 2 AM hoping the numbers moved. We know the thrill of a first commission and the fear of a Google algorithm update. We know the weight of working months for free, building something that might never pay off.
What I Wish They Knew
If I could tell my colleagues one thing, it would be this: what I do is real. It's not a hobby, it's not a phase, and it's not a detour on the way to a "proper" career. It's a business. It's small, it's unpredictable, and it doesn't come with medical aid. But it's mine. I built it from nothing — no investors, no team, no office, no budget beyond what I could scrape together from a Fiverr gig and a trading bot.
The next time someone asks "so what do you do?", I'll still say "I work on the internet." But now, at least, I know what I mean by that. And maybe that's enough.
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