Stop turning every pleasure into work
Something you love doesn't have to become a service, a product range, and a sales target.
You made a good dinner. You enjoyed messing around with ingredients, experimenting, making mistakes, feeding friends. Everything was wonderful until someone said, “You should make money from this.”
Now a dinner is a missed business opportunity.
Thanks a fucking lot. I had something I enjoyed. You've already opened a sales department for me.
Every ability apparently owes the world an immediate economic justification. You take photographs: where are the bookings? You write: where's the audience? You make furniture: why aren't you selling it? You speak a language: why aren't you teaching evening lessons?
Because in the evening, perhaps I want to speak the language. Read a book. Talk to someone. Not fill another part of my day with obligations I'll need to recover from afterward.
Enjoyment somehow counts as an insufficient return on time. It absolutely has to become something you can put on an invoice.
Making money from something you love can be fucking great. If you enjoy the whole process, there's demand, and the conditions let you live well, wonderful. I'm not going to claim money necessarily ruins creativity.
But selling changes the arrangement. You no longer work only when you want to. Or only on what interests you. There are deadlines, revisions, negotiations, expectations, refunds, people who need the result by Friday.
Some people enjoy that part too. Others discover they loved making chairs but can't stand running a small furniture company.
Those aren't the same activity, even if the advertisement shows someone holding a plane in both cases.
Then there's the strange requirement to improve. Even an unpaid hobby has to develop according to plan. Running? Increase the distance. Drawing? Reach the next level. Playing music? Perform, record, post, compare.
Can I do roughly the same thing today and get roughly the same pleasure from it? Without proof of progress? Or does that invalidate the entire evening?
I'm tired of having to turn rest into another assessment of my usefulness. Especially when my regular work already provides plenty of those.
Sometimes I want a place where being average is allowed. Make a crooked cup. Play three familiar songs. Photograph the same courtyard. Without building an identity, career, or pitch for a potential partner around it.
You don't have to prove anything there. You can disappear for a month and return without explaining. Change your mind halfway through because nobody paid a deposit.
That freedom has value too. It's just hard to show in an income spreadsheet.
If you want to try selling, try it on a small scale. See whether you like the actual work that appears around the thing you love. You don't have to announce that you're a founder now and there's no going back.
If you don't want to, refusal needs no defense. “I enjoy doing this for myself” is already a complete thought. You don't need to promise that one day you'll come to your senses and launch a store.
You can have something good that serves nobody and isn't growing toward anything.
In a world where almost every hour is already promised to someone, leaving one without a buyer is a perfectly worthwhile use of time.