Don’t pin the butterfly: not all hobbies need to become hustles

Here is the point that stands out for me in this article -- The lower your self-complexity, the more fragile you are. Let’s say you’re a man who thinks about his life mainly in terms of work and family. If your manager gives you harsh feedback, that’s 50% of your sense of self taking a hit. But if your self-complexity is higher—let’s say you have a couple of hobbies, personal goals outside of work, and relationships outside of your family members—the impact will be lessened.

People will often define themselves by what they do, this has been true since the stone age when people named themselves after their profession. The more things you do, the less impact there is on your opinion of yourself if someone says that one of the things you do is substandard.

Having hobbies will help avoid the trap that people get into when they take a job "because it pays well" and not because they are interested in it. The trap is sprung because it is harder to work at a job you're not invested in, and you don't generally do as well as people who are invested. So you can end up taking time away from other fulfilling activities to get told your doing badly at the thing you are spending all your time trying to do. That is a horrible place to be mentally.

I started doing astrophotography ~5 years ago because I found the mysterious beauty of the incomprehensibly large cosmos a rejuvenating, wondrous thing. In the course of my fun I built a star tracking mount that people seemed to like, so I refined the design, built 10 and sold them on Etsy to test the waters of entrepreneurship. Today, I sell 20-30/mth via a dedicated store.

How often do I do astrophotography these days? Never. In fact my camera broke and I haven't bothered to replace it. I don't have the time.

Has the entrepreneurship been worth it? Probably. But I do miss looking at the stars.

Good article, I get it.

I've had 3-4 different hobbies over the past 20 years that have stuck. Bicycling/Motorcycling, Photography, and Music.

They all have semi-obvious side hustles that are pretty poor business opportunities that suck people in and ruin the hobby.

Bicycling - Was on a team, sucked up a lot of time, racing was fun, team members in charge of finance embezzled the team finances. We ran a weekly race series so the amount of money was pretty shockingly large. Ruined it for a lot of us. Racing is massive effort and was never that fulfilling. At no level do the prizes start to make any sense.

Bicycling/Motorcycling - I would say less so for these hobbies but there are some traps around making/producing accessories & trinkets.

Photography - The side hustle you see people get into is small time sales, wedding/event photography, etc.. the problem being most of this stuff is a really expensive way to not make much money and take almost all the artistic fun out of it.

Music - people get into bands and try to get paid to play concerts, etc.. pay is crap, it's hard work, gotta have a lot of equipment, etc..

I definitely think this is a useful perspective, but if you're creating something, it can be nice to turn your hobby into a hustle in order to increase the amount that you can create.

If you're getting into glass blowing, you can only have so many vases (or bongs, whatever) in your house, so selling them is a good way to cover the cost of your materials while letting you continue to engage in your hobby. The key is to remember the purpose of selling them - it's not to make a bunch of money, it's just to enable you to blow more glass. Don't give refunds, discounts, or anything else - just price your stuff so it sells and move on after each sale.

I love building speakers, and I've been doing it off and on for almost 20 years.

Here's the thing: I can't build speakers very often, because it's expensive, they take up space, and I really don't need multiple sets of speakers for every room in my house.

Furthermore, if I built speakers for money, I'd have to charge thousands of dollars for a set just to justify my time; or I'd have to figure out how to grow volume to get anywhere near the low cost and high quality of factory-built speakers. In both cases, that means spending a lot of time "hustling."

So, I just build a new set of speakers whenever I want a new set. I don't try to turn it into a business.

(For the curious: This page is from 2003: https://andrewrondeau.com/Voight%20Pipes/index.html)

There's an old saying in the amateur radio hobby. If you want to make a small fortune in ham radio, start out with a large fortune.

My highest self-complexity is in my work and main goals. Like composing an orchestra there any many moving parts that need to come together. Hobbies and sports are generally less complex and more simple.

I don't think dropshipping chinese tea counts as a passion or method of self-expression for her and she's articulating that across the whole category. She's clearly more interested in consuming and learning about Chinese tea than expressing an inner desire to be a drop-shipping tycoon, that's cool. Responding to money stress by forcing your hobby into a job is not a great idea, I agree.

As I once read here on HN:

Don't ruin a perfectly good hobby by making it a job.

I agree with this. The problem with monetizing your hobby is that it turns your hobby into a business. That eliminates a whole lot of the benefit and joy of having the hobby.

I wholly agree. I’ve been programming for about 20 years professionally and I’ve always been juggling too many hobbies to count until I stumbled on one to two that stayed. About 10 years ago I started to paint and draw and that gave me so much satisfaction and filled a whole in my life that to this day I continue to do this almost daily. I’ve had epiphanies, realizations or simply enjoyed quietly how drawings unravelled in front of me. I have learned and perfected the craft over the years and even though the ‘stream of creativity’ continues to this day I am happy this is just a hobby. I would not like to deal with the art world in any way. I think that if I went to art school I’d be quietly pursue computer science or computers or something like that. Hobbies have the potential to be something in which you have complete freedom and don’t need to justify to anyone or compete with anyone.

There is a corollary to this as well, where people say they are starting a business, where actually they are trying to start a hobby.

A business exists to make money, and usually is not particularly enjoyable (with some exceptions of course).

Whenever someone tells me about their business idea I internally rank it on a hobby<->business scale, although I usually try to hold my judgements to myself.

It's great advice, but if I'm not sometimes tempted to skip a day for a hobby (hello running) it doesn't feel as fulfilling to me.

I'm under no illusions that I will ever be a great runner, for example, but pushing my boundaries is really important to me.