4HWW Update

June 3, 2024

‘Giving Up’ E-commerce

I’ve been feeling a bit depressed these past few months, struggling with myself over where to take my e-commerce journey.

I’m still unsure where the drive to pursue e-commerce came from or comes from, but I think I have reached the end of the road for now.

Since my last post on the topic, I’ve tested many more products and tested them through a dropshipping model using Facebook ads.

Looking back, I see all that I’ve learned and the darker aspects of the economy I’ve faced along the way. I’d like to think that’s why I felt the need to try.

I wanted to follow Tim Ferris’s recommendations in his book to become a free human. That remains a touchstone for me.

But along the way, I’ve encountered greed, the desperation for more money, and the consumerism-driven economy. I was forced to face where goods are manufactured. I thought it’d be easier to source from countries other than China, but it turns out there’s a reason so many things are made there. It’s the easiest place to source from without much capital.

I learned how difficult it is to launch a genuinely good product and convince people that they need it. I learned about marketing angles, ad copy frameworks, and understanding what people truly desire. The average person needs to be convinced that something is good for them; it’s easier to sell them something they want, even if they don’t need it.

I learned about profit margins and how easy it is to make costly calculation mistakes. I learned that it’s always better to have more headroom than you expect because things naturally go wrong.

I originally entered e-commerce with a naive mindset—I thought I could ethically source a product that would bring genuine value to people and just run quality ads to the right audience.

Recently, I’ve been taking more walks to a local park in my neighborhood, where I bumped into a group of people doing taichi. Many of them were older, and through our conversations, I had insights that led to several eureka moments. I heard a whisper inside me saying, “LISTEN,” and so I did.

One of the topics of conversation with this tai chi group over brunch was hitchhiking and how they all used to hitchhike everywhere when they were younger. They were much older than me, either retired or soon-to-be retired.

You can still hitchhike today, but it’s different. Of course, there are rideshare apps, but it’s far less common to do so the traditional way.

It’s the same with e-commerce. The type of e-commerce that allows you to quit your 9-5 job and requires only minimal maintenance still exists, but it’s different and less easy to achieve nowadays.

Tim Ferris made it sound far easier than it is, but you have to consider that he wrote his book, The Four Hour Work-Week, back when selling things online was still new and services like Shopify didn’t exist yet.

I’ve gone through enough loops and tried enough things to understand the importance of commitment and sticking to one thing. I had committed to seeing e-commerce through to the end—not only for myself and my desire for freedom but also for the 16-year-old inside me who wanted to pursue what Tim Ferris recommended but lacked the resources and conviction.

Another topic that came up with the tai chi group was their varied job histories. One woman had gone through 45 jobs, and another man had too many to count.

Here I was, still worrying about job security and what would happen if I let people down or let myself down. They told me it’s easier and less punishing nowadays to switch careers or jobs.

I realized that while I should worry less about switching directions, there is value in sticking to one thing. Constantly switching for the rest of my life won’t lead to satisfaction. I need to move toward figuring things out rather than switching just to cope with current pain and find temporary relief.

The biggest insight came from talking to an 80-year-old woman. She didn’t realize what she said was exactly what I needed to hear. She just said it out of the blue, perhaps sensing it from how I presented myself and the little I said.

She mentioned how much she liked my name, Emma. She had been reading about slavery and told me that plantations are mentioned by Jane Austen in Emma.

I realized that at the time, the wealthy made money by exploiting people and mass-producing resources at plantations. They did everything they could to maximize profit margins without considering the destruction they were causing because that’s how the system was structured.

This is parallel to the world of e-commerce and our current economy. If I cannot accept myself as a businessperson contributing to slavery during that period, doing the same today is not in integrity with myself.

I want to help people recognize that they don’t need nearly as much as they think they do. So much of low-budget e-commerce is convincing people they need what they don’t.

My great-great-grandparents sold opium. They were part of this exploitation cycle. Maybe that’s why the 80-year-old’s musings on slavery hit me so hard. I recognize the pain of that era deep within me and don’t want to repeat the exploitation my ancestors took part in. Opium addiction eventually destroyed them too, and much of my family struggled with addiction following that generation.

It’s interesting because I gave up on e-commerce for many of the same reasons I did as a 16-year-old. I owed it to her to try. She trusts me more now and knows we can tag-team our way through this life and a society where things are wonky and wrong.

There may be a way for me to explore selling products online in the future, but creating one the way Tim Ferris recommends is not in the cards for now.

The depression has lifted, but I’m still figuring out the next steps.

My intention is to use what I have learned with integrity. To recognize how my words may influence others to act against their best interests, to recognize when I am being sold to, and when my psychological hot buttons are being activated. To use this knowledge responsibly and choose integrity over the narrative of ‘that’s just how the world works.’