That was easy to do before 2008, because you could simply invest in Certificates of Deposit (or bonds) at essentially zero risk and receive 5%-8% in annual interest. Someone with $1 million could live comfortably earning $50k to $80k per year. That option has now disappeared as governments suppress market interest rates and steal from savers.
I asked myself the same question that you posed a decade ago. I self-educated myself in
economics and did over five years of research before making a decision. I concluded that the economic and financial systems were corrupt and broken because of massive debt (which was nothing at that time compared to today) and artificially low interest rates that drive up all assets prices and create price bubbles, which is why almost all assets are now correlated and practically useless as hedges.
Significantly, people do not understand the systemic risks inherent in the various stock markets, just as they did not understand them in 2008. Nothing has changed, only the greater amount of damage that will eventually occur when the next economic tsunami hits. Only serious government intervention has kept the markets from crashing at various times.
After five years of research, I concluded that only three types of
investments would produce a safe and mostly passive investment that produces income for life:
1) Managed agricultural property.
2) Managed rental properties.
3) A basket of real assets, such as rental property, agricultural shares, music royalties, real estate liens, fine whiskey, factoring, peer-to-peer
loans, etc.
Ten years later, I still hold the same view -- even more so today. People always need both food and housing, even in a crisis. They will do well in inflationary environments and are still relatively uncorrelated to paper assets. Real assets that are useful to people will hold their value. The last ingredient is to hold
precious metals as additional insurance.