How the Obsession with Monetizing Hurts Us

I can only confidently speak to this in American culture, though perhaps you’ll find it elsewhere.

Once you pick up an activity that you love, that compels you through interest and passion to invest energy, time, attention—precious resources, if not our most precious—people will suggest you “monetize it.”

They mean that you should take this activity and find a way to get paid to do it.

This comes up for me regularly with yoga (“you should teach!”), with my blog (“you should sell ads or rent your mailing list or get people to give you stuff for reviews or mention products and services and destinations for commissions!”), with the advice and mentoring I’ve given and continue to give people in business (“you should charge an hourly fee for sharing your hard-earned experience!”)

In some cases, “monetization” could make a good deal of sense. If someone loves baking, for example, and people love what they bake and ask them to bake for parties and events on a weekly or even monthly basis—pushing them to undertake the activity more from obligation than out of pure love and enjoyment—then perhaps at least finding a way to recover costs for materials makes sense, if not asking for time compensation as well.

However, if you undertake something as much for you as for anyone else—even if other people love what you do—and if you find it interesting and exciting and compelling and intrinsically rewarding, then monetizing it more often than not reduces it.

Suddenly, what you did out of enjoyment must be marketable—and you must market it. You need to calculate the time and the energy and the out-of-pocket costs and ensure that you gain as much—or, you hope, more—than you give. You need to promote it, even in the simplest ways, to bring in enough customers to will cover the operations costs involved in the set-up and marketing and accounting. And so forth.

Suddenly, an activity undertaken for pure personal fulfillment becomes work. A job.

Maybe it still fulfills you—and maybe work fulfills you in general, at some level—but making your hobbies profit or even break-even centers alters them. Doing so subtracts the purity.

In fact, even the suggestion that you should not undertake an activity or a hobby for pure enjoyment or that you should not spend your time and energy on something without monetizing it significantly reduces the value of the activity.

It sullies it with the notion that you’re wasting your time if you don’t. Being silly. Dilly-dallying rather than doing something of value.

Culturally, society has shaped us to think of our “time as money.” (A disturbing perspective, when you muse on it.)

Therefore, people making this suggestion genuinely think, due to cultural training, that their suggestion will help you see another way you can “diversify your revenue streams” and turn your time into financial gain or at least financial break-even—rather than realizing that you can profit from an activity in other ways than financially.

Turning everything into money, turning everything into work, takes out the play. The fun. The discovery. The pure, unadulterated, uninhibited joy of it. The sheer doing of something for yourself or for the world out of altruism or both (after all, even with purportedly altruistic activities, we get something in return, don’t we?).

And so I write this note to anyone who happens upon it as a call to play.

We encourage children to play. We see the value and the growth of play for children, right?

The value and growth of play doesn’t stop just because someone’s reached a certain age. Adults learn, experience, try, succeed, fail, explore, encounter new people and places, discover themselves and the world, and grow through play, too.

By playing, the you who expands and evolves ends up with new capacities to bring back into the world. The you expanded through play is so much more than the you of before. When everything was work.

Including to things like your “monetized work,” whatever that is for you. The you that you bring to your monetized work, the “financial gain” part of your life equation, will have more intellectual and emotional capability, hardiness, and flexibility than the you who does not or did not play.

We have such limited time and attention in our lives. Use at least a little of it, if you can, to play.