Lately I catch myself treating everything I like as a potential income stream: cooking videos, woodworking, learning Spanish all get measured by views, followers, or ‘marketable’ skills. I want hobbies that are messy, slow, and purely for pleasure, but guilt and the constant pressure to monetize make that feel wasteful.
Has anyone successfully unlearned the side hustle reflex? What concrete habits, boundaries, or tiny experiments helped you reclaim hobbies as play instead of projects? I could use suggestions that actually work when you also need money and social media keeps nudging you to optimize everything.
Make something unmarketsble.
My big hobby project was software for 30-year-old computers, not a big market.
I just think of it as chilling doing something fun. Doing your hobbies without your phone near should reduce the urge to “make content”. But also realizing that the juice is sometimes just not worth the squueze, I mean, you could try, but doing something for the sake of doing it out of enjoyment is what helps me do my hobbies.
Ask yourself when you pick up a hobby: Are you in the top 10% in the world with that skillset or do you have the time and energy to be good enough to do it for a living? No? Then it’s not worth it to do it for the money. And even then, as you said, it’s more about marketing (i.e. you’re not that great but can be successful if you get a big enough following). And marketing is a whole different beast.
You can also think about the potential income stream just as a bonus that you don’t care if you get it or not. I make non-mainstream music and don’t really have the energy to market it, so I just post it where I can and hope people see it. I’ve earned $350 from streaming in 4 years. That’s not life changing money, but it’s a nice thing to have that I wouldn’t really care if I didn’t get.
For one, using less social media. That’s where the grindset guilt is coming from.
Second, try to realize that life is happening to you right now, not something youre preparing for. Monetizing a hobby is LESS valuable than enjoying it, because the whole point of the money would be to buy more enjoyment for your life - only at a worse rate of return.
I love this:
try to realize that life is happening to you right now, not something you’re preparing for.
That’s an idea that I fight with all of the time, as I have a tendency to live for the future rather than the present.
This is such an insightful comment and it nails a couple points.
It can be so hard to simply enjoy the moment, especially when there is so much pressure to be productive. Comparison really is the thief of joy.
the trick is to be so objectively terrible at your hobby that the thought of anyone paying you for it is laughable. i’ve successfully kept my ‘interpretive dance about tax code’ purely for personal enjoyment this way.
interpretive dance about tax code
Go on…
I suspect even interpretive tax dance could find an audience these days if you filmed it with the right lighting
Mountain biking. It’s such a huge money hole that it could never possibly be a financial investment.
Idk. Over on Instagram you have fitness influencers and shit who will run up mountains for an advertisement. There are so many “teach your kids to dirt bike as soon as they shoot from the pussy” accounts on there it’s insane.
Like streaming, I’m sure someone could monetize it somehow.
I deeply believe that making money at someting is the fastest way to ruin it. That’s what my job is for, not the rest of my time. I love learning new things and having new experiences more than I love making money. As soon as I do that, it’s a chore.
I stop doing my hobby thing while I’m still having fun. Which keeps me motivated. Also. I’m shit at it, so no risk of monetizing.
Having a hobby with community helps a lot because it gives you the option of channeling that extra ambition into the community. For example, I do historical reenactment (Society for Creative Anacronism) and one if my hobbies is making coins. I’ve taken commissions, sure, but I get a lot more enjoyment out of learning and teaching about historical coin making and giving my coins away to people who don’t make their own (which is most people).
And of course there’s a smaller community of coin makers within the SCA, and we get to share our work with each other, talk shop, collaborate from time to time, etc.
Community really makes a big difference.
You’re probably just a soulless husk, I wouldn’t bother
You could have just not commented, but you woke up and decided that your gonna go out and just be a dick for no reason.
What a sad fucking life.
… Oh, .ml, that makes sense.
reddit’s leaking again
Ah you’re still hurting from that one are you? The petit boug mindset in OP is simply terminal, I’m being honest. Reddit loves this kind of guy, and presumably you since you also feel attacked
Joke’s on us, you’re only pretending to be a presumptuous asshole?
Hm? No I just clarified that I wasn’t joking. Can you read? There’s no point in trying to explain to OP how to do something he fundamentally doesn’t want to do. It’s not a matter of knowing how. He actually expects praise for this.
I give the same kind of scolding when people post their moldy rice cookers. You’re an adult please act like it
someone get a mop, it’s still going
As a reply guy account that spends all its time trying to make pithy comments on World you are more Reddit than average 2025 Reddit users, who have a chance of wandering in normal-style due to the site’s notoriety. You speech patterns, (sadly) your thoughts, and your taste are all spiritually on the level of cutpaste webcomics
