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< | | | | Hustle Culture and the Creator Economy - Lay Your Hobbies to Rest
-- By KarsynArchambeau - 27 Apr 2022 | | | -- By KarsynArchambeau - 27 Apr 2022 | |
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< | My least favorite question is “what do you like to do in your free time?” It doesn’t matter what context in which the question is asked, I always hate being on the receiving end. My first thought is usually to respond “what free time,” but really, I have some. It’s not a lot, but it’s there. So what do I do with the moments I don’t have dedicated to class, or reading, or outlining? Usually, I dedicate them to having fact-to-face interactions with my friends and calling my family. I don’t think you can count that as a hobby though, just a healthy work-life balance. And the moments I don’t have scheduled? Those are pretty much guaranteed to be filled by nothing all that important. Odds are I am on my phone or watching a show. So my inevitable answer to that dreaded question is: I don’t really have any. | >
> | My least favorite question is “what are your hobbies?” My first thought is the typical law student response of having no free time but really, I have some. Usually, I dedicate it to having fact-to-face interactions with my friends and calling my family, but that is a less a hobby and more a healthy work-life balance. The other gaps in my calendar are as good as guaranteed to be filled by nothing all that important. Odds are I am on my phone or watching a show. So, my inevitable answer to that dreaded question is: I don’t really have any.
Prioritization: Productivity Over Personal Value Added
I used to have hobbies. In high school I loved spending hours with pencils and paper. If I wasn’t drawing, I was reading (usually a new book every week). But in college, I convinced myself that such hobbies weren’t productive, in the traditional sense, and I was too busy to waste time. After school, I was so busy and tired from working that the thought of dedicating time to anything but rest was unrealistic. By the time I got to law school, I was so used to dedicating all my energy to being productive or social that any time not committed to one of those two ends was time I just wanted to be still. At some point, I stopped picking up books of my own free will and forgot where I stored my art supplies. | | | | |
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< | Prioritization
I used to have hobbies. In high school I loved spending hours with pencils and paper, drawing my favorite artists or random faces that popped into my head. If I wasn’t drawing, I was reading. It was commonplace for me to read a new book every week, escaping into the worlds created by the authors. But eventually, I convinced myself that those things were not productive uses of time. I convinced myself that my college schedule didn’t allow me to spend time being unproductive because to do so would be to waste time. And by the time I got to law school, I was so used to spending my time being productive or social that any time not committed to one of those two ends was time I just wanted to be still. The best part of the hobbies I had was that they kept my mind engaged, and I had tired myself to the point where that was just too much. At some point, I stopped picking up books of my own free will and forgot where I stored my art supplies.
To put it simply, I didn’t prioritize my hobbies. So much of my life had been dedicated to moving that when I had a chance to be still, I took full advantage. And that hasn’t stopped. Even now, in law school, I spend so much of my day engaging my mind in an intensely difficult way. I had no idea thinking was so draining, but when I come home I cannot bring myself to do anything that feels productive. | >
> | To put it simply, I didn’t prioritize my hobbies. I didn’t see the personal value they held for me, societal blinders allowing only productivity and rest (in order to be more productive) in my line of sight. In truth, my hobbies would have rejuvenated me in ways rest simply couldn’t, but that understanding flies in the face of the message society throws at us by way of our educational system and the hustle culture that social media has indoctrinated my generation into. If we aren’t being bombarded with questions about what we want to be when we grow up or what our plans are post-graduation or retrieving that answer by way of an aptitude test, our would-be-escapist social media apps are assailing us with content creators, or even friends, that have too many side hustles to keep up with. If the pressure of having answers to the aforementioned questions isn’t enough to force constant productivity, the fear of falling behind certainly is. | | | | |
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< | Burnout
I had the chance to catch up with an old friend, an artist, a few weeks ago. In college, she turned her hobby into a business and began selling pieces on commission. When we caught up, I asked her if she was still drawing. There was no doubt in my mind, when I asked the question, that she was still doing something that she loved. But she said no. I expressed my shock, and she told me that drawing, creating art, didn’t bring her the same joy it used to. It had changed. | >
> | Burnout: Alienation of What Feeds Us
I had the chance to catch up with an old friend, an artist, a few weeks ago. In college, she turned her hobby into a business and began selling pieces on commission. I asked if she was still drawing, certain of a yes, but she said no, that the creation of art no longer brought her the joy it used to. | | | “Burnout?” I asked.
A sad nod, “burnout.” | |
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< | I told her I had put my pencils down as well, earning some surprise on her end. I told her I had stopped drawing when I got too busy for it, and no longer knew if I even had the talent. She nodded, knowing exactly what I meant. She said she was sure it would come back, but I don’t know if either of us believed her.
But my friend’s burnout was different from mine. Hers didn’t stem from poor prioritization like mine did. Hers came from the monetization of something she loved, which turned it into a job instead of a hobby. So instead of feeling rejuvenated by the art she wanted to create, she felt the burden of demand dictating what she had to make. And my friend isn’t alone. With the prevalence of social media and its low barriers to entry, anyone can go viral for anything. Many times, the person going viral is showcasing a particular talent (singing, painting, drawing, knitting, you name it), and the comments inevitably reflect one of two common refrains: “where can I buy this,” or, “you should sell this.” I can’t, and don’t, fault creators that follow those refrains and sell their content. I don’t fault the people commenting either. It has become increasingly popular to monetize hobbies as a side hustle for extra income. I fault hustle culture and a society driven by earning potential.
Result
Though the sources of our burnout differed, the reason for my friend and I’s mutual loss of our hobbies stemmed from the same central idea: if it’s not making money or something to put on your resume, then it is time better spent doing something else. For me, anything that wasn’t going on my resume or related to work was unproductive, and the only time I wanted to be unproductive was when I shut my brain off. My hobbies simply didn’t fit into that structure. For my friend, she was convinced that because her skill was marketable, she was obligated to market it, or she might as well not do it. At the end of the day, our hobbies no longer represented the leisure we loved them for. | >
> | My friend’s burnout was different from mine because it didn’t stem from poor prioritization. Hers came from the monetization of something she loved, which turned it into a job instead of a hobby. So instead of feeling rejuvenated by the art she wanted to create, she felt the burden of demand dictating what she had to make. And her actions are not surprising. With the prevalence of social media and its low barriers to entry, anyone can go viral for anything. Many times, the person going viral is showcasing a particular talent and the comments inevitably reflect one of two common refrains: “where can I buy this,” or, “you should sell this.” Eventually, when your hobby becomes your job, it stops feeding you the same joy that drew you to it in the first place. But I don’t fault creators that follow those refrains and sell their content. I don’t fault the people commenting either. It has become increasingly popular to monetize hobbies as a side hustle for extra income. I fault hustle culture and a society driven by earning potential. | | | | |
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< | To be fair, not all monetization of hobbies is a bad thing. For some, it’s an opportunity to exist in the intersection between what you love and how you make money. But it’s sad, to me, that often our first instinct when someone has a marketable skill that comes in the form of a hobby is to tell them they could make money off of it. And it’s sad that a creator might fall into the monetization of their passion for good reasons and end up not loving it anyway. Eventually, doing something purely for the sake of loving it starts to become a luxury and a privilege. | >
> | While my own loss of a hobby wasn’t caused by monetizing any skill, it was burnout just the same as my friend’s. Both of us had fallen into the trap of being so productive all the time that we simply couldn’t keep up. For me, that resulted in simply being too tired to keep up with a hobby. For her, it burned away any love she had for one. | | | | |
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Money is a psychoactive substance, I hear. | | | | |
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< | This draft needs the same editing approach as your two others, so we can begin to think not only about editing individual drafts, but about how to make your overall writing "workflow" more productive. Your first drafts are less linear, more like concentric spirals, than the reader needs the finished product to be. You need to isolate the idea behind each sentence, and decide how to order those points into a detailed outline, to make linear what your thought process drew first as overlapping. Then each sentence has to be reduced to its essence, with the shading removed to other clauses or sentences, and sparingly applied. | >
> | The Result: Feeding "It" Instead
The absence of hobbies in my friend and I’s lives is a result of that message ingrained in us from a young age: if it’s not making money or something to put on your resume, then it is time better spent doing one of those things. For my friend, she was convinced that because her skill was marketable, she was obligated to market it, or she might as well not do it. For me, my hobby wasn’t a marketable skill, so my energy was better dedicated to something else. At the end of the day, our hobbies no longer represented the leisure we loved them for; they no longer fed us the way they were meant to. | | | | |
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< | In this particular draft there are three basic ideas: (1) that a years-long process of "productivity disciplining" drove you away from personally-valuable activities because they weren't productive; (2) that young people have gotten used to the idea of "monetizing" life activities as though turning them into work through the cash nexus wouldn't result in alienation [presumably helped by the fact that reading Marx is thought for some reason unproductive in step 1); and (3) that all the productivity supposedly gained, and then some, winds up falling into the time hole of "social media," whose purpose is to feed the Parasite with the Mind of God all the human attention it requires, in return for nothing much. You spiral through these ideas, touching on them repeatedly. If you put them as you yourself understand them, in clear order and with a resulting conclusion, you would have a very much improved draft.
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> | The result is a mental fatigue so complete it feels physical. So it makes sense, then, that when we get tired of being productive all the time we reach for the most mindless of activities: social media. There’s an irony in it, considering social media harkened the advent of hustle culture. But still, we like, share, and comment until we see one too many posts showcasing another’s accomplishments and are overwhelmed by the need to be productive. And so the cycle goes. It will take a reorienting of the mind, I think, to break that cycle. It will take an understanding that productivity does not always equal work product; that it just means you’ve moved along towards a goal, even if that goal is something as simple as relaxing. Maybe then we can feed ourselves instead. | | | |
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