Let It Stay a Hobby: The Case for Keeping Some Things Unmonetized
I know a guy who took up sourdough in 2020. By 2022 he had a logo, an LLC, and a spreadsheet tracking his cost per loaf. By 2023 he had stopped baking entirely. He told me it "wasn't fun anymore," which is the most predictable sentence in the English language when you sell something you used to love.
This is not a story about bread. It's a story about what happens when the internet convinces us that every single thing we enjoy is a latent revenue stream that we're simply too lazy to activate.
Everywhere you look, a funnel
Sewing becomes an Etsy shop. Running becomes a training plan you sell. Baking becomes content. Reading becomes a review account. Even rest gets productized — someone is always pitching a course on how to optimize your sleep.
The messaging is relentless and mostly well-intentioned: Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Which sounds lovely until you notice it's an argument for never having a break from work, ever, in any form.
And look, side hustles are fine. Extra income is genuinely useful in a country where everything costs eleven dollars. Entrepreneurial energy is admirable. I'm not here to tell anyone to quit a business they enjoy running.
I'm here to defend the other thing. The unpaid thing. The thing you do badly, on a Tuesday, with no intention of telling anyone about it.
What monetization quietly does to a thing you love
The moment you attach money to a hobby, a second set of questions arrives and none of them ever leave:
- Is this growing?
- Am I any good at it yet?
- Should I be posting this?
- Is this a waste of time if it makes no money?
That last one is the killer. Because it reframes joy as a resource that should be producing a return. And once that frame is in place, forty-five minutes of aimless watercolor painting starts to feel like leaving money on the table instead of, you know, living a life.
There's also the comparison effect. The instant your hobby is public, you're no longer measuring yourself against your own last attempt. You're measuring yourself against the best version of that craft that has ever existed, posted by someone with ten years of practice and good lighting. That's a fast track to quitting.
Healthy challenge versus optimization creep
I want to be careful here, because effort matters. Growth is good. Being a beginner who slowly gets less like a beginner is a genuine source of satisfaction, and it's part of what keeps hobbies alive past week three.
The distinction that's helped me:
Healthy challenge asks can I get a little better at this? You take a class. You learn a technique. You try something slightly beyond your current ability and you feel that specific beginner's thrill when it works.
Optimization creep asks can I get more out of this? More efficiency, more output, more reach, more return. You start tracking instead of practicing. You buy supplies in bulk. You notice you haven't made anything just for yourself in months.
Healthy challenge points inward. Optimization creep points outward, usually at a spreadsheet or an analytics dashboard. One fills you up. The other quietly clocks you in.
If you recognize the second one, you're not greedy or shallow — you're responding to a culture with extremely loud incentives. It just might be worth noticing.
A three-question test
When you're unsure whether to keep something purely for yourself, run it through this:
- Would I still do this if no one ever saw the result? If the answer is a comfortable yes, you've found something worth protecting.
- Does the version where I get paid take up more or less of my life than the version where I don't? If it's noticeably more — more planning, more admin, more messages — do the math on what you're trading away.
- When I think about this activity, is my first feeling anticipation or obligation? Anticipation means it's still feeding you. Obligation means it's become a job with worse pay.
Any test you can apply in thirty seconds is imperfect, and this one is no exception. But it's a lot more honest than the advice most of us heard growing up, which was essentially: if you're not making it profitable, why bother?
Being a beginner in public is overrated anyway
Not everything needs to be documented. Not everything needs a portfolio. The guitar doesn't need a channel. Your Sunday runs don't need splits posted anywhere. The painting that looks like a mushroom and is supposed to be a dog can live in a drawer and still have been worth the two hours.
There's a strange freedom in being genuinely unknown at a thing. No audience, no standards set by strangers, no pressure to translate your enjoyment into something a recruiter could understand. Just the activity itself and a few hours that belong to no one but you.
The bar for doing something can just be that you want to
Every so often I check in on my friend's sourdough guy. He's not baking for money anymore, but last month he sent me a photo of a loaf with a genuinely terrible crust and a text that said "came out weird, tasted great."
No logo. No spreadsheet. No post.
That's the whole goal, honestly. To like something enough to do it badly and not need it to be anything other than what it is.
