When these words left the lips of Heath Ledger’s Joker in 2008, it seems the world listened all too intently. Suddenly we were bombarded with monetised pages on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Each one of your neighbours asking you to share their Facebook page selling cakes, crochet, or crafts. Articles and recipes concealed behind paywalls. Each day becoming an implicit competition.
Open your phone and you are greeted by grinning faces. My dog is cuter than yours, I cook better than you, and look — I can do this niche sport you’ve never even heard of. If all that wasn’t enough, they’re getting paid for it too.
Once upon a time, a hobby was something used to escape the pressures and stresses of working life. A relaxing outlet for personal cultivation and mental relief. Yet with the cost of living higher than ever and a cultural obsession with constant productivity, many people no longer have the time, space, money, or motivation to do anything purely for free.
These individuals are hardly to blame. If you can make beautiful cakes but cannot afford the ingredients without selling your creations, you are left with two options: start a small business or give up the hobby you love. If you want to share your talent with the world through social media, that can be inspiring. If you work hard to create knitting patterns, what’s the harm in charging a small fee to share them?
The issue is that in late-stage capitalism it often feels as though nothing can be simply enjoyed for its own sake — l’art pour l’art. Monetising a hobby slowly begins to suck the sanctity out of it. Suddenly, what was your escape becomes flooded with the worries you were trying to keep at bay. Questions echo through your downtime:Am I doing this well enough? Are customers going to want this? Am I charging too much? Am I charging too little? Will this get me more followers?
Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that happiness can be found in activities pursued for their own sake, rather than as a means to some further end. This is the difference, say, between painting because you find satisfaction in the process and the finished work, and painting because you must sell it to make ends meet.
For Aristotle, hobbies and leisure were the ideal space for philosophical contemplation, reflection, creativity, and self-cultivation. Yet for many people today, that space is being appropriated. If every pastime must justify itself through productivity milestones or commission rates, then something crucial is lost. Without the freedom to create, play, and explore without economic pressure, we risk losing an important way of nurturing our inner lives.
Modern psychology supports this idea. Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory and research on intrinsic motivation show that when activities become tied to external rewards, enjoyment and creativity often decline.
The solution is not simple. People need to make money. Families must be provided for. Who can blame someone for trying to earn through something they love?
Yet people deserve more than constant productivity. For our wellbeing, we need interests we can pursue for our own simple enjoyment, not for approval, followers, or profit; enrichment without the pressure of achievement. It is good to pause and fill a moment with quiet joy.
Pick up that sport you loved in childhood, or try something new. Take ten minutes to read a book that has nothing to do with your studies. If you’d like, draw a picture. Even if you aren’t “good” at these things, you will learn and you will grow. You will come to appreciate these moments that are for you. It is not selfish to do something simply because you enjoy it. In a world that increasingly treats us as productivity machines, it may even be necessary to reclaim our personhood.