During a hazy and formless 46-hour period last week, I had to Google what day it was. I want to clarify that I am an employed person and this was a working day. It’s just, somehow, the repetitive action of being alive had finally shattered my concept of time. It was Wednesday, anyway. I just Googled and checked and there’s another one coming around again this week.  

It does not help that I have been filling the hours with so many Netflix series that I am starting to doubt reality itself. It’s just there, isn’t it – bah-bom… The UI takes the decision of what to watch away from you. The Netflix autoplay – 20 too-loud seconds of The Hangover: Part II! Thank you, Netflix! – exists to create something close to enlightenment. But we’ll have to have something to show for it, surely? Surely? Surely?

Netflix can help with that. A cursory glance at Etsy, Depop and Instagram will show you that your friends and enemies and colleagues alike are using these endless hours to set up side hustles, adjacent to or in place of their previous jobs: handmade pottery clumps, £20 trays of GF brownies, “photography”. You, too, can get in on the action. And, secretly, all along, Netflix has been teaching you how. Watch and learn.

If you’ve ever had half an idea for a screenplay and been too afraid to sit down and write it, I’d encourage you to watch and learn from Netflix’s Hollywood. Set in the golden era of post-war studio filmmaking, Hollywood features a group of painfully attractive young actors and producers who pull together an Oscar-winning movie from the home base of “someone’s carwash”, convincing studios to bankroll it just by being nice to people at lavish mansion parties, and the resulting movie is so astonishing that it solves racism for ever. That idea you had for a zombie version of The Wizard Of Oz doesn’t seem so stupid now, does it? Write it up as a 120-page document and the streaming platform that made not one, but two series of Iron Fist will, almost certainly, commission it.

The Queen’s Gambit was a bit of an unexpected hit last year. In the first month of availability, 62 million households watched the story of a nerd orphan playing the ancient board game inside her own brain to escape the misery of her life and then, as her successful chess career (a thing, apparently?) unfolds, she gets slightly too into drink and drugs and wrecks an exquisite Parisian hotel room on the end of a days-long bender. If that doesn’t sound like a post-lockdown vibe, I don’t know what does.

Chess has probably been done to death. They have Deep Blue now and I don’t think you’ll learn how to defeat a chess supercomputer by watching enough Netflix to finally figure out what castling is, but if Floor Is Lava is anything to go by, there’s profit to be made from turning even the stupidest childhood games into something adults can compete over. Board game cafés and adult trampoline parks are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s time to buy a sports hall and turn it into a gigantic British bulldog battledome.

A lot of people watched Tidying Up With Marie Kondo and became inspired to spring clean their homes. This was wrong. The takeaway lesson from Ms Marie Kondo is: rich people will literally pay you to do anything if you smile enough while you’re doing it and rebadge it as a lifestyle.

Here’s my pitch: it is possible to make money by reinventing a chore in a glamorous way simply by doing it in a semi-nice outfit or having a fun catchphrase around it (Ms Kondo’s “spark joy” is just a slightly less Live Laugh Love version of Mrs Hinch saying goodnight to her sink). Ms Kondo has the tidying-up market closed off. Respect to her for that, but surely there are some other ones you can do. Can you make a banking CEO pay you to tell them how to rake up leaves? Can someone in a Notting Hill townhouse get you to “consult” on taking the bins out? I really feel like I could convince most of the buyers on Selling Sunset to let me change their bedding for them by calling it “re-nesting”. Whatever you do, take a page out of Queer Eye’s book and don’t try and do anything before getting a haircut, shaving in a very brave new way and buying a pair of chic trousers to half-tuck a shirt into.

I have to be quite legally delicate here because the authorities tend to put you on certain lists if you condone meth distribution in writing, but Netflix’s grittier dramas can give you a primer in how to succeed in business from the bottom up. Breaking Bad teaches us: be careful which megacorporations you make a deal with, don’t be afraid of an odd-couple business partnership, scaling up can maximise profits while increasing risk, invest in bug spray. Ozark says: it is OK to relocate based on the needs of your business, your significant other can be a business partner, too, try to scope out any potential vendors to see if they do or don’t want to kill your children first. Narcos: it can be profitable to take your business international. Better Call Saul: lying for profit is fun and rewarding. Until the series finale era of your business – when eerie twins crawl from Mexico to murder you, or people get the back of their skull shot out right in front of you while you are tied to a chair in someone else’s basement, or until your wife threatens to work with the authorities in a way where you’re never really sure again that she is not – a lot of these business techniques can actually be really useful. Here’s the real lesson, I suppose: know when to stop.

In early 2020, the internet was enraptured with the gripping documentary The Social Dilemma, which explained in detail how the looming and evil algorithm works to dominate our lives, learning about us from our search history and selectively showing us the news we want to see and slowly, incrementally, radicalising us all and swaying entire elections by manipulating the reams of data we’ve all been uploading to the cloud for years. Didn’t stop you going on Instagram for even one minute, though, did it? Not one minute at all.

So, we know there’s an algorithm. Good. Time to make it work for you. If you think you’re not cut out to be an influencer, take a leaf out of Emily In Paris’ book, in which Ms Lily Collins is given a glamorous new job in the cut-throat marketing industry in one of the world’s most beautiful cities just because she has nice eyebrows. If that doesn’t work for you, the easiest path towards viral fame is, sadly, failure. Try and recreate one of the routines from Cheer on TikTok and, as a million teenagers log on at once to abuse your face, body, movement and name, you can calmly watch bathed in an ambient screentime glow as your follower count steadily rises and rises. You’ve made it. You’ve now got enough followers to sell Forex tips to the financially desperate. You’ll never need a real job again.

The people featured in this story are not associated with and do not endorse MR PORTER or the products shown