# Should I Start a Side Hustle? I've Had the Domain Name for Two Years.
I've owned the domain name for two years. It's a good one — short, memorable, the kind of name that looks like a real business waiting to happen. I registered it one night when I couldn't sleep, fired up with the idea, told my partner about it the next morning over coffee, and then... bought the domain. And that's where the business ended.
Two years. I haven't built anything on it. Not a landing page, not a logo, not a single post. Every few months I open the domain registrar, renew it for another year (it's cheap, so it's easy to keep the dream alive), and close the tab. The domain is a tiny monument to a business that exists only in my head.
The part I'm not proud of: I tell people I have "something in the works." I say it with a knowing smile, like I'm protecting a big secret. There is no big secret. There's a domain name and two years of postponing.
And my day job? I hate it. Not the people — the work. The meetings about meetings. The feeling that my best years are being spent in rooms I don't want to be in, building things I don't care about, for reasons I can't fully explain to myself. The side hustle was supposed to be my way out. Which is why it's so confusing that I can't seem to start it.
The three signs it wasn't about the money
Here's what I noticed once I started paying attention:
- I'd research other people's side hustles — the success stories, the "how I made it" posts — and feel a rush of motivation that evaporated by the weekend. Motivation was the product I was consuming, not the thing I was building.
- I'd told the domain registrar to auto-renew before I'd told myself I was going to actually start. Buying time was the move. The domain wasn't a business — it was a promise to my future self that I'd have another life, eventually, without ever having to make this one work.
- When my partner asked about it — gently, supportively — I'd get defensive. Defensiveness about a thing you claim to want is the tell that the thing isn't what you think it is.
What the reading said
I did a reading. The question: should I start the side hustle?
The reading didn't assess the market. It asked: what are you actually trying to leave, and why is the exit door the thing you're building instead of the thing you're escaping?
That landed. Because the side hustle was never about a business. It was an escape hatch — a way to believe I had a way out of a job I couldn't admit I needed to leave. As long as the domain existed, I had a story: I'm not stuck, I'm incubating. The side hustle was the excuse that let me stay in a job I hate, because leaving the job is scary and buying a domain is not.
The truth I'd been avoiding: I didn't need a side hustle. I needed to either fix my job or leave it. The side hustle was a third, safer-feeling option that let me do neither — and it had cost me two years of pretending to be in motion while standing completely still.
What happened
I didn't start the side hustle. I let the domain expire.
I'm not going to tell you I quit my job and found my calling — I didn't. What I did was smaller and scarier: I stopped using the side hustle as a shield and had the conversation with myself about what I actually wanted from work. That conversation is still ongoing. But here's the difference: I'm no longer telling myself a story where the business that doesn't exist is the way out. The way out, whatever it is, has to be real, and it has to start with the job I already have.
Maybe someday I'll build something. If I do, it'll be because I want to build it — not because I need it to be my emergency exit from a life I'm afraid to change directly.
Anyway. The domain expired three months ago. Somebody else probably bought it by now and is doing the same thing with it that I did: holding it, waiting for the right time, telling themselves a story. The right time was never the domain's fault.
If you've got a project that's been "in the works" for longer than it's been worked on — and you can't explain why you keep postponing it — try a reading. Three numbers. No account. It won't build the business for you. But it might show you what you're actually building, and it's not always the thing you think.
FAQ
Q: How do I know if a side hustle is real or just an escape? A: Check what you'd do with it if your main job got better tomorrow. If the project still excites you — you'd build it anyway — it's real. If it quietly becomes irrelevant the moment work stops sucking, it was never about the project. It was about the exit. See also: Left the Dream Job That Wasn't: What the Reading Told Me Before I Quit. — the escape hatch pattern, different hatches.
Q: Isn't a side hustle a sensible way to de-risk leaving a job? A: It can be. De-risking means building something real and testing the market while you still have a paycheck. That's smart. What I was doing wasn't de-risking — it was buying a domain and calling it strategy. The difference is whether anything gets built. If nothing has been built in two years, you're not de-risking. You're decorating an exit.
Q: What if I genuinely hate my job but don't know what else to do? A: Then the work is figuring that out — and it's real, important work. But it won't be done by a side project you never start. The side hustle was keeping me from the harder question because it looked like motion. Naming the real problem is scarier and slower, and it's the only thing that actually moves.
Q: How does a reading help with a career question like this? A: It separates the project from the purpose it's serving. I thought I was deciding whether to start a business. I was actually deciding whether I could face the job I was too scared to deal with directly. The reading showed me the domain was a shield. Once I could see it, the decision about the domain got easy — and the real decision got visible.