I don’t monetize my hobbies. This is not to shame people who do and do it well! There is a bustling industry of monetizing one’s hobbies from Etsy to Twitch and everything in between. Honestly, given the current state of the US economy and my ongoing state of unemployment, I should consider monetizing my hobbies. And yet, I don’t.
There’s a common saying, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Supposedly, this is attributed to either Marc Anthony or Confucius, but the attribution seems to come from LinkedIn, which is arguably a poor source for any kind of accuracy in quotations. It’s supposed to be inspiring. I’ve never found it inspiring. It gives the impression that the ultimate goal in life is to find a type of labor that allows us to delude ourselves into believing that we are not performing labor. We’re doing what we love. And what we love is work.
Mark Twain provides a slightly less egregious quote: “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” On one hand, it’s not claiming that you must “love” your job, but there’s still that assumption that “if you like it, it won’t feel like work.”
Work… is work. Sometimes it’s enjoyable, sometimes it’s not. If it’s something you enjoy, it can get you through the rough spots of your role/the discrepancy in pay/lack of respect from upper management/etc but at the end of the day? It’s still work. There’s no need to romanticize it.
Hobbies, at least for me, are what I do to restore my sense of self from work. It’s things that remind me that I am more than an ultimately replaceable entity– and I promise, you are replaceable in some way, shape, or form– within the slowly shambling capitalistic machine. Hobbies are a source of community with folks outside of my immediate lived experience. Hobbies also remind me of why I work, because yarn and TTRPG books get expensive, y’all.
Hobbies are a part of me that, in this time of commodification of entire selves for “content” either willingly or due to the surveillance state, I can control access to. I can choose to share what I love (or not), and that does not impact my marketability.
Maybe this is a naive and delusional train of thought that is no longer compatible with today’s economy. But for now, my hobbies are for me.