Hustle culture isn’t dead yet, it just got rebranded. As Gen Z turns away from the concept of working long hours in a toxic workplace, we instead turn towards the “side hustle” to earn supplementary income, often on a freelance basis. As of 2024, over 1 in 3 university students have a side hustle, and 42% said they started these businesses to monetize their passions. This is often lauded as a demonstration of our generation’s work ethic or entrepreneurial spirit, but that rosy view of things overlooks the fact that these businesses come at the expense of our hobbies.
Under the auspices of a new and improved hustle culture, fewer and fewer of us seem willing to pick up and stick with hobbies purely for our own enjoyment. I’m not knocking the grind or saying that pursuing your passion as a job is necessarily a bad thing, but there is something to be said about creation for the sake of creating. Putting a price on something done for oneself turns it into something done for a paycheck, thereby replacing an intrinsic value with an external reward.
Speaking from experience, article writing isn’t my hobby. It’s something I enjoy and something I have, in a sense, commercialized, but it isn’t entirely my own because it’s created to share with an audience. As a hobby, I knit. I create items for myself and gifts for my friends. I do not and will not sell my work because that would turn this fun little craft into something with a deadline, order forms and an account book. In short, it would turn into a business. If my goal was to cultivate my skills on how to run a business, that would be different. That business would be my goal, not my art. More than that, the craft would become a livelihood, and even if it became a job I loved, it wouldn’t be a mode of relaxation anymore. Creating the things I want to make would become less important than creating what a client would want to purchase. To be successful — i.e. turn enough of a profit to support myself, or at least break even on the cost of materials — I would have to find a way to develop my skills into an avenue that the market desires, following or anticipating trends– and that alone is a whole other job on top of everything else.
One may argue that by selling creations, they’re merely recouping the cost of supplies as well as their time, but I’d disagree with the very premise of ascribing monetary value to your free time in that manner. When we start thinking about intangibles as resources, everything has a price — your time, your energy, your body and your mind. Under this framework, they’re broken down and regimented, packaged and sold to the highest bidder. That’s not life affirming, that’s dystopian.
From a purely economic standpoint, we could factor in the “opportunity cost” of spending time doing a craft as opposed to getting a part-time job, but that thinking is even more chilling. A hobby is something done for fun in your downtime. If you start turning your downtime into work time by using it for a task that you’re monetizing, then the next logical step is evaluating the “productivity” of your remaining free time. You would basically be turning yourself into your own employee without the benefit of worker protections forcing you to take some time off. If all your time is evaluated on its productive potential, your downtime shrinks and shrinks until there’s next to nothing left.
In the short term, this might be a necessity to keep yourself afloat, but it’s not sustainable in the long term. Rest is a physical necessity. As stress from work and school gets compounded by a lack of decompression time, it can have physical repercussions including insomnia, digestive problems, chronic pain, anxiety and depression. If you consistently deny yourself the opportunity to rest, you are only setting the stage for a bigger crash down the line.
Additionally, the monetization of craft takes the joy out of the activity. Have you noticed how many academics don’t really read for fun anymore? If I turned creation into my day job, I wouldn’t want to do the same act as my “wind-down” too — it would be compartmentalized as “work!” And yet, even then, I would still need some way to relax, and the easiest way to do that is through mindlessly consuming content online, negatively impacting my attention span and willingness to stick to long-term projects.
Humans derive joy from creation, to see our labor pay off and turn into something we brought into the world. There’s a deep satisfaction there, even if the product isn’t up to a professional standard. The economic incentive to make a hobby “worth it” by reaching some arbitrary standard of quality — usually “good enough to sell” — is part of the same insidious values that push us toward monetizing our hobbies in the first place. The scraps of fabric, yarn, paint or wood are not wasted just because they haven’t been used to turn a profit or showcased in a museum. They have been immortalized in a testament to your own ability to create and enjoy the process of creation, unburdened by the pressure to make every bit of your time ultimately profitable.
Make a bead bracelet from a kit or watch a tutorial on how to draw a horse. You can spend an hour making something and then hold it in your hands and know you’re allowed to do whatever you want with it, just as you are free to do as you please with your downtime. In that sense, the choice to take an hour or two for yourself and only yourself is a reclamation of your abilities and your very humanity in a world of alienated labor.