I Can't Do Anything for Fun Anymore; Every Hobby Is an Attempt to Make Money

I&#x27;m doing the opposite - doing unpaid work for a local hackspace like caring about the local non-profit mesh network and doing it-stuff for a local university group.<p>People just don&#x27;t seem to grasp the concept at all: a lot ask why we run the mesh network and how we finance it - if you explain them it&#x27;s run for free and there is no profit motive they think you are crazy. It&#x27;s also surprisingly popular to assume for free = useless - some declined running a node due to this.<p>On the other hand working for free in uni context is basically self-slaverly - lot&#x27;s of work, lot&#x27;s of stuff breaks constantly if you run your typical FOSS stuff and nobody is seeing the work and most don&#x27;t care or at worst you are blamed and new people advocating their favorite commercial cloud services.<p>It&#x27;s still fun and I can learn a lot, run some infrastructure for free where I can test stuff but you really need to be careful to not foul yourself and depending on the org you are in to not just work for free.<p>The saddest thing about the university thing is: If you advocate to pay that position a lot of - I&#x27;m just blunt here: &quot;rich kids&quot; advocate against it because you are at uni anyway and they tell you it&#x27;s an honour to do this... however if they don&#x27;t get refund for partly insane travel costs for their university pet project hell breaks loose...

Social pressure on this is also ridiculous. Every time you start doing things, even if you actually stick to it as a hobby to make you happy, people, inc. family, will go &quot;but you could make money out of this&quot;.<p>Don&#x27;t fall for it. Most of us will not be able to do money from art, from photography, from aikido. Enjoy it, do it for your own sake, to balance your life.

As you grow older your time becomes more valuable.<p>But I think the author should take a break from reading sites such as HN, IH, etc. Because in this crowd, everybody seems to be obsessed with having a successful side-business making hundreds or even thousands a month.<p>I take days off from work to work as a mechanic on race cars. I do it for free and enjoy doing it. I have friends who are professional mechanics who think I am crazy for doing their job for free. But it&#x27;s not all about money, it&#x27;s about how you enjoy to spend your time.

I started embracing and justifying spending time on hobbies when I realized they give me something to talk about with non-IT people, and that is valuable. If your hobbies are IT work, and your work is IT work, there aren&#x27;t many aspects of your life to which people outside of that domain can relate, in fact it can all seem quite boring and you end up with, &quot;I&#x27;m doing well, work is going well.&quot; But if you can mention you went hiking somewhere and took a new lens for your camera, there are several things in there to which most people can relate and then maintain an interesting conversation.

This is a common issue, but most do not recognize it. Fewer do anything about it.<p>My feeling is that the author&#x27;s definition of what is needed, and what is normal, is out of whack. The author has apparently made an income that allows for survival, but along the way has become conditioned to only work for profit. When you feel profit is survival, this makes sense. In the United States for example, you are given this message all day, every day.<p>But once you get past survival needs, and want to turn back to things that give life meaning, you can find you are wired to only evaluate the profit potential.<p>What helped me in the past when I was in this trap was volunteering for a 2 week &quot;vacation&quot; helping people much worse than me. I like to travel, so I would volunteer for 2 weeks at someplace like La Joya orphanage in Mexico. The founder needs help teaching and building sustainable homes for children that can&#x27;t even imagine the good life. Give some of yourself to them, and see how fulfilling it can be.<p>When you get back suddenly just enjoying music, reading poetry, or doing something else for personal satisfaction will seem much more worthwhile.

I would highly encourage everyone to watch Kent Beck&#x27;s 2015 RubyConf talk (which has nothing to do with Ruby):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=aApmOZwdPqA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=aApmOZwdPqA</a><p>In the talk, he discusses a few things, but one thing he discusses in the importance in doing things periodically for which we are beginners. If you are getting paid to do something, you&#x27;re probably not a beginner. One way to practice not making money is take up a hobby in which you are a beginner. I don&#x27;t mean like: I&#x27;m a programmer by day, and I YouTube about programming by night (that&#x27;s still about programming). Find something completely unrelated to what you&#x27;re doing.

I feel this too. It&#x27;s perverse and it makes it feel like nothing is worthwhile unless it scales and earns a profit. I get that it&#x27;s all in my head, but it&#x27;s a real undercurrent in the west, particularly in tech. I&#x27;m not quite sure how to free myself of it...

I brew mead. There&#x27;s no way I could make money from it. However I can make enough to get myself and everyone around me blind drunk. Free mead quickly stops a lot of arguments.

As I oft remind my friends and family, money is merely the means to acquire things you want.<p>Money for money&#x27;s sake isn&#x27;t worth anything (unless you get your jollies seeing a big bank statement).<p>So, does having money in your pocket make you happy?

OPs friend Kevin has it right. Make a hobby out of something that you cannot even fathom how to make money out of. Sports is ideal since you will obviously be super bad compared to the worst guy that makes money of it. My old coach is now World Champion in the Duathlon. The money she makes off that would not make my cut for a new dev project.<p>Duathlon is thus a very safe choice for a hobby uncontaminated by monetary concerns. But for most of us the triathlon or running is safe. The risk of becoming world champion are overstated.

For me, as soon as I think of monetizing something I just lose my interest in it straight away.<p>I don&#x27;t know why it happens. I love programming, and I just put it all up on GH for free. I&#x27;ve actually got a few &#x27;side-projects&#x27; which actively burn money instead of making money.<p>I do them purely for fun and learning, and every time I think of making money from it, it turns into a job and obligations. Now if people don&#x27;t like something I build - I feel no obligation to fix it. :)

I&#x27;ve been doing this for about 20 years myself. Everything I do, that I enjoy, I think to myself &quot;I love this. I want to do this all the time. So now I have to make a business of it?&quot;<p>It was just in the last 3-4 months that I realized - if I love something, keep doing it in such a way that I can enjoy it, but let WORK be WORK, don&#x27;t let the things I enjoy become my work.<p>Every &quot;fun&quot; thing I&#x27;ve tried to turn into the business has made me eventually hate that thing.<p>I created video games. Had financial success. But eventually hated the game-dev world. It turned out that creating interesting new games was only a small part of that business. Marketing, bug fixing, customer service, taxes, etc, became my life. Then having my hard work get pirated, stolen, and even re-sold by scammers without my permission ended up ruining that business and I couldn&#x27;t keep it financially afloat.<p>Same thing happened with my escape room business. The escape room business turned into a customer service, marketing, taxes, insurance, safety, and human resources business. Dealing with employees for part time, kind-of on-call, customer service work was nearly impossible. Finding them, training them, firing them, trying to keep them hired, dealing with their problems, dealing with them calling in sick. It took all my time. I ended up trying to do it all myself and that didn&#x27;t work at all. Then the costs involved crushed me because I didn&#x27;t realize how expensive it would be.<p>I also love board games. I tried turning that into a business, but have stopped short as I realize it will become the same damn thing.<p>Anyway, I am just going to play escape rooms, video games, and board games now. I&#x27;m going to enjoy them. If I create something, it won&#x27;t have to be for profit, but for family and friends to try. We&#x27;ll enjoy a Saturday afternoon, I&#x27;ll have an outlet for my creativity, then Monday I&#x27;ll get back to my web dev job and make money. I&#x27;m not going to love sitting here coding, but that&#x27;s my job, and if I focus on this job, I&#x27;ll make good money - enough money to be able to thoroughly enjoy gaming, and even create some fun personal stuff along the way.

I was going to suggest that raising children was something enjoyable that resisted monetization. But upon further reflection, I would be wrong.

I&#x27;ve noticed a similar trend for myself but a bit broader. It&#x27;s more that anything I do, I have to somehow see as an achievement or purposeful. I&#x27;ve been considering new hobbies as of late, but my mental model dismisses them quickly if I can&#x27;t answer &quot;what would this accomplish?&quot; Unless it&#x27;s a baseline activity requiring no mental energy (think food, drink, tv, socializing) it&#x27;s hard for me to consider it without the previous question answered. Example, for the longest time I never read any fiction as I couldn&#x27;t see the point. Reading some HN comments over the years and hearing reasons like &quot;you read fiction in order to tell better stories&quot;, led me to see the &quot;value&#x2F;accomplishment&quot; in reading fiction. So now, I read a little fiction in addition to all my self-development books, not because I enjoy it but because it&#x27;s supposedly good for me. I then wonder why all my &quot;hobbies&quot; seem to be draining and not rejuvenating.

One of my hobbies is fixing broken phones &#x2F; tablets. Many times people have told me I could make decent money if I charged more for my services. That’s probably true, but I don’t <i>want</i> to. I ask cost of parts + $5-10 to afford new tools. That plus the fact it’s fun and I’m helping out a friend is plenty. I don’t want the headaches of turning it into a business.

I write software, both professionally and as a &quot;side gig&quot;. I spend a decent amount of time behind my house doing yard work and general maintenance. I don&#x27;t really look forward to those (non-IT?) activities, but when I am doing them I have realized how nice it is to be doing something other than staring at a screen and be able to look back at a physical object (new plant, fixed deck railing, etc) and say &quot;I did that&quot;. It&#x27;s an unintentional hobby, but it does serve the purpose of taking a break from the keyboard.

What I found missing in my life was the routine part of money management. I now wish I had studied money management first, then found my first &quot;job.&quot;<p>I now have a life plan that I oversee that takes extra income (earned, investment, gift, etc.) and saves it up until it reaches another lump sum amount to continue acquiring cash-flowing assets (I settled on real estate, specifically multi-family rentals).<p>As my semi-passive income increases, it supplants the required earned income to keep the whole system going.<p>And for me that means more time researching things &quot;because I&#x27;d like to know how they work.&quot;<p>Sometimes I research something and test&#x2F;play around with it, until I suddenly realize (I am not always that quick, so my sudden takes awhile) that some of my solutions are valuable to others - Then I consider how to spin out that specific service or product to others for their benefit, and the financial (or other - I have been paid in fresh eggs, animal products, vegetables, tools, etc.) reward covers the costs and any extra financial reward adds to the aforementioned savings goals.<p>Rinse and repeat.<p>It lets my mind wander onto new topics that I find interesting first, the possible remuneration comes second, if at all.<p>And until I am completely independently wealthy, I keep a service business going that provides the safety net of making sure all my expenses are paid for.<p>This also frees up my time to work with experts (attorneys, CPAs) to figure out how to treat the US tax code (I am a US citizen) like a game - If I do something (I want to do it anyway) in THIS fashion, I get an incentive&#x2F;break from my government...<p>This has removed the &quot;I have to make a profit!&quot; stress I was feeling previously.<p>And if this works for me, it seems like it would probably work for others...

I have a friend who is a skilled woodworker. I asked if she ever thought about selling her work, and she replied, &quot;Then it would be a job.&quot; Wise words...<p>On the other hand, my wife was volunteering, and the organization offered to pay her for a day or so a week. It let her be more involved in the functioning of the organization, so the (nominal) pay let her contribute more effectively. They&#x27;d like her to move toward full-time, but as with my friend, &quot;Then it would be a job.&quot;

Unless money is needed for bare survival, it&#x27;s almost always a proxy &#x2F; an abstraction for social&#x2F;peer recognition.<p>There are fields where you can get plenty of social recognition directly without making money. For example arts and performances or anything where you express yourself in a way that is accessible to others (for me personally it&#x27;s making and playing music).<p>Software &#x2F; Hardware unfortunately isn&#x27;t one of these fields because chances are that either your new project is so niche that only very few people get it or because the people who <i>do</i> get it are not the types you are seeking recognition from.<p>So there&#x27;s nothing wrong with looking for monetization strategies for new side projects. It&#x27;s just a way to know if others appreciate what you&#x27;ve built, especially in fields where social recognition outside of monetization is a difficult affair.

The post sums up why so much of the &quot;early Internet&quot; seems to have disappeared, and why the content on so many websites feels like it&#x27;s designed for lead gen only.<p>&gt;&quot;I should do market research and see what’s trending and build off that. Self-help is big, let’s try to focus on that, even though I personally hate self-help books.&quot;<p>This type of keyword and topic research is why the front page of your search results are nearly always some throwaway blog post from some company trying to sell you something. These results just barely resemble what you&#x27;re looking for, among a sea of similar &quot;close enough&quot; results.

For me, I&#x27;m not necessarily thinking about monetization, but about finding an audience. I would like for as many people to enjoy my work as possible. But finding an audience basically requires you to have a successful product (unless you&#x27;re doing it for free), so the mindset it nearly the same, I&#x27;m thinking of how I can get as many people as possible to check out my art, which means I might sand off some edges here or there, or think about marketing or whatever, and then I&#x27;m not just doing the thing and enjoying it anyway, much like the person who&#x27;s trying to sell it.<p>I used to just make stuff and throw it out there in the earlier days of the internet, and it somehow found a decent audience. It seems like it&#x27;s actually harder to do that now, though, as so many more people are doing the same thing, so it&#x27;s much harder to stick out from the pack. Also, less and less people check personal websites or blogs, and pretty much only look at instagrams and twitters and facebooks, so if you&#x27;re not spending serious time on putting yourself out there on social media, you&#x27;re just not going to get that visibility you&#x27;re wanting. Which kinda sucks, because I&#x27;m kinda bad at the social media part, and doing that feels a lot like a job.

DIVYA And you invented something in high school, right?<p>MARK An app for an MP3 player that recognizes your taste in music.<p>DIVYA Anybody try to buy it?<p>MARK Microsoft.<p>DIVYA How much?<p>MARK I didn’t sell it. I uploaded it for free.<p>DIVYA For free?<p>MARK Yeah.<p>DIVYA Why?

Have a hobby that is notoriously a money sinkhole, so that there&#x27;s no excuse for not making money, and no one will ever ask about it.

I had a mindset that everything I do should bring in money and if it doesn&#x27;t it&#x27;s not worth doing.<p>It ended when after years of freelancing and occasionally working at&#x2F;for small companies I got hired by a corporation.<p>Suddenly I was being paid more than I could hope for, for doing barely anything. I felt so relaxed and I never again considered my hobbies to be potential money makers.

Ezra Klein recently interviewed Anne Helen Petersen (Buzzfeed) and Derek Thompson (The Atlantic) about this topic. I think they hit on a lot of the things I&#x27;ve been feeling and some of the struggles I have trying to think through a fix — we need to shift both structural and personal thinking on this topic.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;megaphone.link&#x2F;VMP7590220227" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;megaphone.link&#x2F;VMP7590220227</a><p>These are the two articles these authors are known for:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buzzfeednews.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;annehelenpetersen&#x2F;millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buzzfeednews.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;annehelenpetersen&#x2F;mille...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;ideas&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;religion-workism-making-americans-miserable&#x2F;583441&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;ideas&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;religion-w...</a>

If this is a new idea to you, I&#x27;d suggest diving into the more left-wing parts of YouTube, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sKeqMJGnVyQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sKeqMJGnVyQ</a><p>Basically the problem with capitalism is that it assigns financial values to everything. This becomes readily apparent if you become self-employed as a freelancer or entrepreneur, especially if you follow the advice to &quot;do what you know best&quot; (which often means turning a hobby into a job).<p>Are you reading that article because you enjoy it or are you learning to become better at your job? Are you showing off or are you maintaining your personal brand? Is this a holiday trip or are you staking out new business opportunities? Are you mindlessly immersing yourself in art and entertainment or are you looking for inspiration to fuel your job as a creative? Is that chat with an old friend leisure time or are you networking? You&#x27;ve already been watching Game of Thrones for two hours -- you&#x27;re actively losing money because you could be charging people for that time if you did something work-related instead.<p>Everything becomes a financial tradeoff, everything is assigned a monetary value until all remaining intrinsic motivation is lost.<p>And unless you&#x27;re lucky enough to be born into massive wealth or lucked out by being in the right place at the right time with the right skills and identity, you have no other choice than to constantly worry about financial values because your life literally depends on it. Even if you consider yourself somewhat safe and financially stable it doesn&#x27;t take much to throw you right back into this grind.

I build guitar amps and effects pedals as a hobby, and trying to monetize it sucked all the joy out of it so badly that I ended up leaving it completely for about 18 months. I&#x27;ve only just gotten back into it and I&#x27;m starting over by just building what I want to build for myself and not worrying about whether anyone else would want to buy it. If I end up with a couple extra pedals or PCBs I can put up on my Reverb store, that&#x27;s fine. If someone buys them, great! But I&#x27;m not putting any more energy into trying to sell them.

I&#x27;ve had the same attitude for a long time, and I&#x27;ve filed away lots of fun project ideas because I didn&#x27;t see any way to monetize them. My goal has been to get back to those fun projects and hobbies once I have enough income from SaaS apps or investments. If go back to a full-time job, then I would probably start working on them during the evenings and weekends.<p>I&#x27;ve also been tempted to try making a career out of those fun projects, with YouTube, Twitch, Patreon, etc. I&#x27;m a huge fan of Colin Furze, Simone Giertz, Abhishek Singh, and Mark Rober, to name a few. Sometimes you can also leverage your following into a successful Kickstarter campaign. I think it would be possible, but I don&#x27;t really have the right personality for it, and it&#x27;s also really hard to make a decent income from YouTube.<p>If I didn&#x27;t have to worry about money, I&#x27;d probably do it anyway and upload some videos. But only when inspiration strikes, and I would ignore any pressure to keep making videos if I didn&#x27;t feel like it.<p>I should also mention that it&#x27;s awesome when people are willing to pay for some software that solves a real problem. Sometimes you can get more meaning and satisfaction from serving customers and solving a pain point (and earning real money), instead of making a silly project that entertains people for a few minutes. So I&#x27;m actually not feeling a strong desire to go back to these silly project ideas, and I find it very interesting and rewarding to build monetized SaaS apps.

It might be worth a few sessions with a professional counselor just to figure out where this fixation is coming from, and what other people have found successful for breaking out of it.

Call me jaded, but this article is pure click bait.<p>Everything is an attempt to make money for the other, including writing click bait content. (monetized by increased brand exposure)

Wow didn’t expect to see other people struggling with this line of thought. I’m still capable of having fun, but what’s disturbed me is the question of whether I’ll ever be able to just lay around and relax again like I could when I was a child. On one had we need to be purpose driven, but 100% all the time? Definitely not. And I find it hard to shake that.

Near the very end of the blogpost:<p>&gt; I should mention that I am a software engineer who makes a decent salary, so it’s not like I absolutely need extra money.<p>If he had started with that I probably wouldn&#x27;t have read any further. It kind of makes a rather large difference as to what their personal journal post is actually about.<p>In this case, a luxury problem.<p>Listen up, recognize the problem (check), then .. just try to <i>not</i> do it. You&#x27;ll find out whether it&#x27;s an obsessive compulsive disorder, or just a lack of perspective. The latter, having recognized the problem (again, check), ... is easier to correct than changing a habit (like fitness, or meditating, etc). Truly. If your mind still keeps running back to money if you don&#x27;t need it, that&#x27;s an obsession. If you find you just don&#x27;t like it, take up a new thing that doesn&#x27;t make money. Since you&#x27;re not doing it for the money, it&#x27;s fine to drop it, too.

This is literally me. I am slowly breaking free from this feeling by just doing the things that I put off because I think they won&#x27;t make me money.<p>I didn&#x27;t think up the idea and have an urge to do the thing because I initially thought it would make me money, it was because I knew I would find it fun.

Try helping someone else. You could discover joy in that. I have a developer friend who is acting as a CTO to a disabled person - taking care of hands-free communication, smart home stuff, etc. It doesn&#x27;t seem to take a lot of his time and he always seems happy when we ask him.

My coding side-project <i>Video Hub App</i> (MIT open source) is for sale for $3.50 but $3.50 of every sale goes to my favorite charity: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;whyboris&#x2F;Video-Hub-App" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;whyboris&#x2F;Video-Hub-App</a><p>If you look at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.globalrichlist.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.globalrichlist.com&#x2F;</a> you&#x27;ll discover that earning even $30k&#x2F;year places you in the richest 1% of world&#x27;s income earners. I think it&#x27;s very much worth to give back in cost-effective ways -- at least 10% if you ask me: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.givingwhatwecan.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.givingwhatwecan.org&#x2F;</a>

This is the downside of extreme levels of capitalism. We&#x27;ve been trained to seek one goal - and while that goal served well as a proxy for progress, it now does us a disservice. Knowledge, advancement, health, safety, longevity ... these are the goals we should be incentivized for. Compounding those into a single abstract makes it easy to get lost from what is truly valuable in this world, and a side effect is that it&#x27;s destroying our planet. We are the paper clip machines.

If your doing something intending to make money, then it&#x27;s not a hobby.<p>I learned a long time ago that (for me, anyway) the idea that you should make your recreational activity into something that earns money is a horribly flawed one. All doing that does is to turn your recreational activity into a job. Part of the joys of a hobby are things like not having to engage in it if you don&#x27;t feel like it, the lack of deadline pressures, etc. All that goes away when you want it to make money for you.<p>This is why I have a number of &quot;side projects&quot;, but I clearly delineate between the ones I do for fun -- which I intentionally avoid deriving an income stream from -- and those that are intended to provide supplemental income.

I was very much like that. Then by coincidence, I got into RC-car racing. Not only is it fun, a community, and a way to see yourself improve - it is my first non-programming-hobby-activity since being a teenager, and most importantly a money sinkhole - I love it!

I&#x27;m surprised so many people in the comments actually recognise themselves here. Is it a cultural thing, is it american ? Most of my European friends, including myself, just use hobbies to relax from work, the point is not to monetize anything.

Try to find other ways to justify spending time on it. I often justify spending time on stuff because I know I will learn a new skill. Or spend time on stuff where there is a social aspect, where others depend on you.

I&#x27;ve spent the past two years remaking my first game from 2013. I know that even though it has come a LONG way since the original, it probably won&#x27;t sell, but I do it anyway simply because the original was a pile of hot garbage with a terrible engine and I wanted to do better.<p>Sure, bringing in some extra cash would be nice, but at the end of the day, I get precious few hours to myself at night and on the weekends, so if I didn&#x27;t take some joy in my hobbies, I&#x27;m not sure how I&#x27;d stay sane.

Find a hobby that is highly unlikely for you to make any significant amount of money from and it will eventually make you change your mindset.<p>I&#x27;m never going to become the next Avicii but I like to produce music and DJ and while I do make some money from it, it&#x27;s far from enough to live on and there is no way for me to to go full time on it.<p>So I stick to it as a hobby because it&#x27;s fun and a therapeutic way to cope with everyday life, stress etc.

I think there is a sweet spot to that kind of thinking; start projects for fun, but keep profit in mind and relax the strict rules of starting a project, so making money becomes a nice bonus, but you can do it anyway. So something like this: start something if it MIGTH make money, work on it until you get bored or turns out it cannot. Move on to the next project. This way you can have fun AND profit ^.^

I don’t know how to articulate this well, but “money is god” is not hyperbole. When there is anomie, goodness becomes the pretext for wealth.

I seem to not enjoy any activity period, at this point. This does remind me of the youtube channel `frankieonpc1080p`. He has&#x2F;had over a million subscriber and he used to make dayz stuff for fun. But he decided never to go full time on it because he knew it would burn him out and he would start hating it. I used to think that was silly but have since changed my mind.

Heh, I am on a completely different orbit - I pay others so that I can do my hobbies, e.g. studying electronic music production (with an M.A. from a US university), paying AirBnB hosts and airlines to travel around the world, making drone&#x2F;hyperlapse&#x2F;documentary movies; paying make-up artists, stylists and models to do fashion photography etc.

I don&#x27;t have anything to add to many of the comments already posted but I&#x27;m reminded of Cyanide and Happiness very poignantly making a similar point: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fAKQ7ouQqgA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fAKQ7ouQqgA</a>.

Quite sad honestly. I understand what the author is feeling. I too have thoughts about how to make money from X hobby I enjoy doing. I&#x27;m trying to fight those thoughts. What I am doing with my free time doesn&#x27;t have to be worth anything!!

I carefully avoid getting paid for things I enjoy, in case that takes the fun out of them.<p>Programming open-source software? Strictly for fun. (Programming is not my day job.)<p>Volunteer trail building? For fun. (and for the workout)<p>Photography? For me. If someone offers to hire me, I turn them down.

My favorite hobby is playing video games. And programming could be 2~5th position on the hobbies list.<p>Every time I think about this, I would be so glad I chose to be a programmer, instead of a pro gamer.<p>Now I can imagine how I would literally hate my life if I chose another path.

I didn&#x27;t really believe the post was truthful but then I saw &quot;Adsense&quot; ads at end of the post.<p>On a serious note, there&#x27;s social pressure in monetizing everything you do - the common assumption is you either have ulterior motives or are a fool

I think it&#x27;s quite ironic that even below that short note I can see an ad.

Ditto, it&#x27;s great. It makes me do things with extra polish and put thought on delivery.<p>It&#x27;s by no means no longer fun, in facts its more so. It&#x27;s like playing a tycoon sim. The project has to finance itself or die.

&gt; I developed this hostile view of activities where everything is a calculated risk of how much time I need to put in versus what I am getting in return.<p>There is nothing wrong with providing value to society.

This is because you have an entrepreneurial spirit, or at the very minimum you have a dollar value that you place on your time&#x2F;effort. I&#x27;ve been there, It&#x27;s a curse in many ways.

Give your time away... volunteer at a shelter, a church, or a charity.

I find it sorta funny that the article ends with an ad : )

It&#x27;s worth reading up a little on self determination theory and how they think about intrinsic VS extrinsic motivation if you&#x27;ve never heard of it

I have the same thing. However, it turned out that almost none of the things is a financial success, so I went back to just having fun.

I just ask myself if something will make me happy, maybe I need to grow up and monetize that.

I think most everything checked into github refutes this argument.

It could be worse, imagine the inverse: You can’t do anything to make money; Every hobby is an attempt to have fun.

I sympathise, so much of today’s world caters solely to consumers and there seems a definite lack of things that cater to those who want to produce (in the economic or monetary value sense).<p>I don’t know what the solution is - but for me personally I try to focus on creating things that people will either enjoy using or need.<p>Peak capitalism might be about running out of ways to produce value (in the economic sense)

Do you need this much money? Can&#x27;t making money be experienced as a game?

Ahhh. The glory of capitalism. The reason you ask yourself how much I can make off of X thing is because society tells itself that having X billions of dollars = success.

This has happened to me. I was learning Haskell until finally the pressure of &quot;how will this help me pay bills&quot; persuaded me to stop and learn Python instead. Even with Python there&#x27;s the pressure of &quot;I can&#x27;t make an online sideproject by it&quot; which has tempted me at times to switch to JS, but I&#x27;ve resisted that so far.

Internalized capitalism.

Is this some kind of joke? As soon as your workday ends everything becomes leisure. If you think that humans shouldn&#x27;t do anything without economic value then why don&#x27;t you just work a 120 hour week? Watching Netflix is just as much of a leisure activity as creating art, restorating vintage machines or making free software.