Its a general problem of always thinking how to "level up".

Also a recent random view on this: https://nickang.substack.com/p/my-problem

Monetizing passions is essential these days... The music studio doesn't really improve unless you generate money to build it up, computers, guitars, mixing tools, studio monitors etc., all cost an enormous amount of money. A hobbyist is far different from an enthusiast, and I think thats the distinction that many of people who say "I don't need to make money for my work" simply don't get... By spending money generated elsewhere on passions, you threaten your ability to survive by reducing savings and survival funds. It's not egotistical at all to expect for passions to at least earn back their investment because most creatives aren't born rich. I work to dispute that toxic & low aiming mindset every day. no one should ever have to work for no expectation of returns.

> It's not egotistical at all to expect for passions to at least earn back their investment because most creatives aren't born rich.

Egotistical is the wrong word perhaps, but it's an absolutely degenerate trap to accept, and a path to personal destruction if continually embraced. You'll have little to no authentic substance as a human if everything you do is predicated on how you'll make money from it, but only in situations where realistically it's a choice. People who get into this trap end up as amorphous blobs or empty husks. People need things in their life that they do for the sake of it first, with money coming as an ancillary benefit if at all.

I've only spent money in the last year (no earned income), laid off a year ago, and I'm grateful to have saved enough to last some of the drought of work. I have to be careful to modulate how much I'm spending, but if I didn't, I'd be wildly worse off now that had I not at all. Spend as frugally as necessary, but have some hobbies or passtimes that you do just for you, selling the result if you like, but don't predicate your participation upon whether it's valuable to anyone else.

Monetizing kills passion in 99.999% of cases.

In the US, or many other developing countries (i.e., those without a robust social security mechanism), the only way most of us can afford to pursue our passions to a high degree of performance is through cross-subsidization with a "real job".

The benefits that passion provide to a rounded life, better mental health, sense of perspective and so on are far worth the price paid, assuming your day job can finance it appropriately.

It's either that or poverty, which works OK for some until they have or want a family, get sick, have to take care of their parents or worse.

Monetizing passion is a shitty Faustian Bargain imposed upon us by the time and place we live in, unfortunately.

Maybe this is what you mean by “hobbyist” vs “enthusiast”… I just call the thing that makes money a “job”. You do your job to make money. You can then do whatever you want with that money, including putting it into your passion. There’s no requirement that your job is your passion, nor that your passion generate money. If you do have a job that is your passion, that’s fantastic, but the vast majority of “creatives” (ooh, I dislike that term, if I’m creative but nobody pays me for it am I not “a creative”?) don’t have that luxury.

What you may be getting at is that somebody who is being creative as a job should be fairly paid for their work. Which I totally agree with, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about.

Most things are hard or impossible to monetize. It's much better to focus on monetizing things that are easy monetize to and bring in a lot of money (e.g. coding skills, via a full-time job), than trying to monetize writing, guitar playing, or whatever someone's hobby may be. There's just little to no money there.

Nothing if you feel it to be fulfilling but for a lot of people it raises the bar on what could be a fun hobby to something else and often includes a bunch of elements you'd normally not care about.

As a gamedev my brain is continually broken trying to make games in my own time because I'm so used to treating games as a product. There's a wide gulf between doing that as a hobby and doing it as a job. Particularly in motivation around the end result.

Often the activities to monetize something have little overlap with the activity itself or they change the way you do something so it’s no longer enjoyable.

There's nothing wrong with it, it was merely being pointed out that it's not an obligation or moral requirement.