The inconvenient truth about passive income is how much money you have to front load before you can start living comfortably over passive income stream

Yeh. We've only just now started serious investing because we've only just now had the money to be able to do so. J was at least doing smaller amounts before but he wanted to be where we are now 10-15 years ago.

one could just retire from working throughout their life without doing anything meaningful while young

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with my cousins when I was 16/17 (the youngest of which was a year older than me), and they were complaining about their dad who was always insisting that when they were in school they had to study hard to get good grades so they could get into their uni course of choice and there would be plenty of time to have fun later, and then when they got to uni they should be focusing on their studies to get good grades to be able to land a good job and there would be plenty of time to party and have fun later, but when they got into their jobs they should hyperfocus on that so they could get promoted and got more money and they were like when the hell were they supposed/"allowed" to ever have any fun.

I think a lot of the "kids" (that are my kids' ages) feel exactly that too and this is why so many of them have got "bad work ethic".

I'd still try to own a piece of land and a house

Currently not the worst of ideas. What I hate are the economies like ours which are built around real estate so "everyone" basically "has" to not only own their own home but also hoover up as many investment properties as possible to rent out to other people and what's happened now is that a lot of young adults are now priced out of owning their own homes and the old people who already own their own homes and seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that house prices have skyrocketed since they bought are horrified that their kids are spending a "house deposit" on a computer or if they can scrape together the money buying in a "bad" suburb and claiming that prices are "ridiculous" and that people are "paying too much" (either pay too much or don't buy at all are your only options if you want to buy here, otherwise it's skip the country and deal with all the problems that brings).