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Most of the dissonance comes from the fact that a job is much more than the core activity.

When we speak of pottery as a hobby, we think of handling clay, sitting in front of a pottery wheel, choosing a fitting glaze, then admiring our finished work. The focus is on exploring and enjoying the process. You have complete control over the process and you can do as much or as little as you like because there is no delivery pressure. Sounds fun!

But a pottery business is a different beast. Now, the act of making the pottery is a much smaller part of the overall workload. You have to deal with marketing, sales, payments, inventory, and communications. Your pottery time is no longer about exploring, but about replenishing inventory or handling custom orders in time to avoid bad reviews. You can't just make a piece and be done with it, you have to carefully pack it, handling shipping, drop it off, and hope that nothing goes wrong. If it does go wrong, you now have to deal with the fallout and handle angry customers. Most customers are fine, but it only takes 1 irrationally outraged customer to ruin your day.

Hobbies, by definition, can't be a job. You can try to make a job or business that includes your hobby, but it's a superset of the hobby with numerous other activities that you may or may not enjoy.

I do actually know a lot of people who enjoy running businesses. You might say that businesses are their hobby and delivering results to customers is their passion. Not surprisingly, they're doing quite well in both business and the mental health department. Lucky.

Very well said. A friend of mine worked at a winery and he was very enthusiastic about his work -- he loved making the best wine he possibly could.

He recently bought his own winery and, to his (and my) surprise, maybe 5% of his job involves interacting with the winemaking process. The vast majority of his job concerns compliance with regulation, bookkeeping, and communicating with vendors/suppliers.

I think it's good to have a holistic view of an industry before you dive into it. There are a ton of "housekeeping" things to be done in every industry, but in a sufficiently large company, you're often shielded from the things that aren't your direct concern.

I have turned two of my hobbies into businesses that are now full-time work for myself and part time work for two others (my wife and an employee we hired a couple of months back).

For me, the fact that you have to sell/market something isn't what makes it a stressful; I enjoy that aspect of it too.

Instead, I find most of the stress coming from the high stakes (if I make mistakes or work slowly, my business will fail and my children will grow up without a present father) and need to hyper-optimise (every single action is about maximising the amount of dollars earned per hour spent working).

I've found immense peace in the last few months in cleaning, of all things. It's not a traditional hobby, but the fact that I can make mistakes (or just not do it at all if I'm tired) with minimal consequences makes it so much less stressful than my businesses which do revolve around "traditional" hobbies.

This was the breakthrough my wife had when we were discussing this: there was no way she could do that for a living. She likes experimenting, and that's not part of a chef, except for some very high rated people.

I am one of the lucky people that love its profession (software development) and it is also my hobby. I'm not sure how to identify the non-coding parts, I enjoy those in the profession too, but more because I like to do very well and being good at those other parts is an integral part of it. To be fair, making a team more effective goes also to my benefit, where I can do more interesting work.

One of my hobby is board gaming. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen decide that they love board games so much that they open their own FLGS (friendly local game store). I’ve learned that the quickest way to come to hate board games is opening your own board game store. If you want to start hating your hobby, make it into a business.
What you say is somewhat true but I also know plenty of people who love what they do. I suspect famous examples are say Brad Bird or Steven Spielberg. I have a feeling they loved directing.

I know Sid Meier, when he was still at Microprose, he made a deal with his partner, Bill Stealey, to give up he direct business interest in the company so he could focus on game dev. They'd pay him $$$$$$$$ for each game and he no longer had to deal with the business decisions.

The point is you can find a way to delegate the parts you don't like.

I have plenty of friends that run their own game dev companies. They love it. One has 150 employees, one has 10, another 20, one has 3, another has 10. They're are still doing dev, not just managing, even the one with 150 people and they love it.

So much this. I tried starting a business doing something I love and I found out I don’t love doing accounts and supply chain management for it. I canned it and a £20k investment within a year.

Now I do something I dislike that I’m good at. This is the best balance I have found as the contrast from work is vast when I do the things I love and that is important. Also it forces your motivations to be efficient and decisions to be in favour of things you love which inevitably ends up with more time to do them.

I saw an artist friend comment on a "how to freelance" article that "that sounds like running a business, not being an artist." And therein lies the rub - the actual value-creation part of running a consulting business is a tiny part of the work required.

I'm slowly starting to find that the business stuff is becoming a hobby as well, which is good because I'm resenting it far less than I used to.

Yep. I would never have guessed how little time I would spend coding some weeks.
In the same vein, I followed a few hobbyist beer brewers on a local home brewing forum go pro and the came to the same conclusion - making it your job takes all the fun out brewing.

You’re no longer experimenting or putting taste first, you want to convert grains into bottled beer as fast and cheap as possible so you can make a profit.

The moment you start accepting paymeny your hobby is no longer. You are now engaged in a business transaction. You now have deadlines and expectation aka responsibility. The beauty of a hobby is there is none.
Well said. There are substantial business related activities related to the product/hobby that you may not love to do.

I used to worked part-time in a ballet school. My boss and her business partner are highly trained ballet dancers. On top of teaching the classes, they do marketing, bookkeeping, dealing with difficult students/parents, hiring and cleaning in the very early days of the school. After the business took off, my boss hired administrative help so that she could take on more students.

I think one trick to get around this is by delegating and if possible automating the parts you don't like.

Unfortunately its much easier said than done because it takes meticulous planning and long time to set it up. But it can be done and after that you can spend a good amount of time doing what you love and get a lot of help with the parts you don't enjoy.

As a matter of fact if you are able to successfully delegate the parts you don't enjoy the overall result is much much better.

Yes, when I hire new people in Machine Learning they are uniformly surprised by how little time they spend modelling and how much time is spent gathering business requirements, refining what needs to be optimized, cleaning the incoming data, thinking about edge cases and so on.
Totally agree. I found out myself when I started a software business. It was doing well, I employed a number of people, we were making nice profits, but I decided to shut it down. Because it was destroying my joy of developing software.
The first half of the article resonates with me. I didn't use to have hobbies and I used to feel like a machine just going to work, coming back, sleep, rinse and repeat. I love programming but after writing nth CRUD app in flavor of the month framework / technology, it just isn't that fulfilling anymore. I picked up couple of hobbies - teaching Sanskrit and playing guitar and my life has improved drastically. I no longer derive meaning only from work. Both hobbies are just hobbies and I do it for fun only with no intention of monetizing them. In fact, I couldn't monetize them even if I wanted to. Sanskrit is too esoteric to have any commercial value of any kind. And I truly suck at guitar. Nobody's ever gonna pay me to play guitar. But whatever I can play, gives me pleasure, so I do it. My dad asks me why I waste so much time in useless hobbies when I could be investing that time working towards next promotion and pay raise. I reply to him, they are not useless if they make me happy and content.
> My dad asks me why I waste so much time in useless hobbies when I could be investing that time working towards next promotion and pay raise

There’s something to be said about a narrow focus on “tangible” benefits. Life is meant to be… lived. Such a comment can be made by someone who lives on the assumption that they have figured out all there is to be figured out in life - so much so that they are qualified to call anything that doesn’t yield an immediately tangible benefit as a “waste”.

My hobbies play a strange role in my day job - one that would never have made sense in hindsight. They keep me content too, of course. But they also help me understand the subject matter in strange new ways (through the lens of the hobby).

" My dad asks me why I waste so much time in useless hobbies when I could be investing that time working towards next promotion and pay raise. "

I am never sure how to think about these people. It's probably great if you can find fulfillment in work and don't need other things to happy. But not too many people are wired that way.

> didn't use to have hobbies and I used to feel like a machine just going to work, coming back, sleep, rinse and repeat

This hits home for me. The last year has been hard because I haven’t been able to do any of my usual hobbies—snowboard, travel, concerts, baseball, etc. and it’s really taken the spice out of life.

I'd argue, they are also improving your mental health and making your decisions better, therefore helping you climb that ladder quicker.
> And I truly suck at guitar.

And I do as well. Absolutely love it.

And over time I have come to suck at a lot of other things as well. Drumming I now particularly enjoy.

"Doing what you love" is a total new-age garbage scam, only possible because we (most of us on HN) collectively live in the wealthiest, most powerful empire the world has ever seen, and nearly all of the important work (food, defense, fuel, manufacturing, etc.) is done by lower class citizens who don't know what an API is. Sure, the management of the empire requires critically talented minds, but how many roughnecks know what C++ is, and how many executive vice presidents know how to operate an oil rig?

Don't do what you love, do something that allows you and your family (or you and your community if you're not up to the task of having a family) to build resilience, and then love your life outside of the work you do to provide for it. If that's making 200 Gs per year for 10 years slinging Javascript and then getting out of debt with the bank, do that. Don't worry so much about "loving your career", I promise you no migrant farm workers harvesting your berries love their career, and yet I doubt they wake up with internal mental crises because they haven't achieved self-actualization at work.

I recently had a... weird... realization.

It was that for most of my career I wasn't passionate about programming computers. I was passionate about becoming successful; obtaining a highly marketable skill, making money, and gaining the respect of my peers. Programming computers was just a tool to get me there.

Perhaps this is why I never got hung up on fads. Languages, frameworks, platforms, and even industries. It didn't matter to me. All that mattered was success.

I should also point out that I had an extremely rigid ethical compass. It feels nice to have treated people well while doing work I was proud of.

Not sure why I typed that out, but there it is.

For me: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it :(

I loved writing fiction- novels, short stories, interactive fiction. At first, I would just self publish them on Amazon, no care whether anyone bought them.

Then I joined a few writer groups, and they were all like "You need to market your work".

And so I spent hours every week building my email list, running ads, asking for reviews (as you need them to sell books), blogs/podcasts.

And pretty soon, started hating it all. Quit 2 years ago, after 7 years of writing.

Have tried to restart many times, but each time, quit.

My advice is: If you love someone, do it for love, dont always try to make money from it.

Yeah, not a popular opinion; as soon as you show anything to people (your books, pottery, calligraphy ) the first question is "This is good, why dont you make money from it?"

As if the only value anything has is by how much dollars it makes. It doesnt help with all these online "gurus" who claim you can make the big $$$ by selling anything (yes sir, ANYTHING!) online, if only you buy their expensive course. (and yes, I bought the course. And no, it did f*ck all)

Sorry if a bit cynical. Hope there was a happy ending to this story....

When a programming project starts to become this endless chore that I progressively look less forward to the more I work on it, that's when I know it's time to take a step back and ask myself why I am even doing this in the first place.

Am I making this app just so I can try to make money on it, for something to put on my resume? Or am I doing it as a nice way to spend my evening? What's the point of free time if you don't enjoy it?

Not every project needs to be some kind of profitable SaaS or wildly popular open source tool. It's fun to research and experiment and take a step back every once in a while and ask yourself why you're even doing this.

Once it turns into a business, sure that can be fun, but you have to ask yourself -- do I even look forward to this? Is this even enjoyable? This is my free time, after all.

I write code for both work and for fun. It's important for me to like my job. I don't want to spend most of my waking life toiling away at something I don't at least like to do. I also want to like my creative pursuits in my free time. If you don't enjoy doing something, why do it at all? Especially when you have the choice to do other, more enjoyable things.

I won a very prestigious award for directing animation, which up until then had been a hobby. I rose so fast up to that point that I never learned how to animate to a production standard.

On top of that, to get the show into production I had to work crazy hours for two years solid. I burned out, didn't know how to capitalise on the award, and decided to go back to entry level jobs, ostensibly to learn my craft but really I couldn't handle the pressure of the sudden acclaim. I was in a very small industry full of technically more accomplished peers and there was no room for my punky attitude towards doing things the established way. My confidence and career took a huge nosedive, and the enthusiasm was knocked out of me completely.

I've managed to gain back my enthusiasm for animation but only after doing a lot of soul-searching over what I love about it and keeping that sort of stuff strictly out of hours, not expecting it to be involved in my bread-and-butter work. I still animate for fun but had to establish a very hard boundary and let go of my ideals about loving the job.

I am not doing what I love. I stopped painting because of commercial success and never ending pressure to exceed expectations. I stopped painting because I decided that I paint only for myself. Period.

I am interested in design and code. I like the feeling and the process of building something useful first, and beautiful after. I like my work. I don't need to be in love with it. I like being payed for delivering results. There is no need in my view of romance and emotion towards ones work. Craftsmanship comes from emotional balance and discipline. There are thousand things and experiences reserved for love. Love your children. Love your life. Love life itself. Make art for the sake of it. For the joy of creating something driven from inside. Like a kid who can enjoy meaningless wandering and play happily hour after hour. It is liberating and therapeutic.

Few people have the luxury of doing what they love.

I used to love programming. But now, I love germinating interesting seeds more. Getting my hands into the soil. Recently I bought some potting soil from a store and put my hand it it -- wow! It was so soft and pure and beautiful.

But I can't do that for a living, maybe not now, maybe when I retire from coding and saved up enough money to live the rest of my life.

There is a quote that I think about a lot - I think it goes...

"Aren't we lucky that we get to do something we used to love for a living?" - I think it was Colin Quinn talking about standup but I can't find it anywhere.

I find myself drifting back and forth between loving every second of working in technology and hating every second immensely, but overall, the positives outweigh the negatives, I still love everyday I get to learn something new.

Living abroad and/or spending time in the "developing" world can and probably will change your perspective on work and happiness.

From my experience abroad, I've come to realize:

1. Learning to appreciate and be content with what you do is usually a lot easier than "doing what you love" and getting paid for it.

2. People in the first world invest way too much time and emotional energy in this subject. If you don't elevate work into something that is expected to fulfill not just your need for money/sustenance but your desire for fame, fortune, happiness, etc., and you instead just treat it as one of life's daily activities, it doesn't become a monster that can consume you.

All of this is very much IMO: Work sucks. The happiest at work I've ever been is working with people I like, almost (but not quite) regardless of the work. Sometimes I get to do interesting and fun projects, but it's a lot of annoying meetings and stupid bugs and projects I don't give a shit about. I'm grateful for my gig, don't get me wrong, but I have to remind myself that I'm not living for this. In a perfect world I'd be living in a small community of family and friends and working in ways that directly support and aid them.
I sort of disagree that a hobby can’t be doing the same thing over and over. I know because it sure is for me. I was diagnosed with ADHD around 36 when I had my first child and simultaneously was getting in to higher management, never before realising that my coping-mechanism had been going to be early. I mean, I knew it was a stress coping mechanism, but I only had to do it in really intense weeks, which was maybe 6-10 times a year, so it was just part of life.

Anyway, having a child destroyed that as well as my need for solitude to re-energise (another thing I wasn’t too aware or). Long story short I ended up with a diagnosis and a suggestion that I found myself a hobby, much like the author. I picked Blood Bowl which is Warhammer American football, and as such is a miniature hobby where you buy and glue together and then paint little plastic dolls.

One of the things I enjoy the most is actually putting the miniatures together, and while I do kitbash (creativity) some of them, the real mindfulness comes from the cleaning, the preparing and the painting the same red on 16 figures.

Years later I know that this is exactly why I mostly stopped programming professionally and got into management. I actually really enjoy programming, even if it’s the same stupid for loop over and over, what I don’t enjoy is co-operating with project managers and clients, constantly making creative changes rather than just implementing something. That sort of programming burned me out and that eventually pushes me into architecture and later when my bosses saw potential in me into management.

I can see how taking commissions for clay cups would be similar to that. But I don’t think that always making cups would not make it a hobby just because there is less creativity in it.

My current job is what I love. But I have to describe it to people this way:

You love ice cream, right? Now eat an 18-wheeler full of ice cream every day. That's what "doing what you love" for a career is like.

I think there is a lack of research here because so few people do "what they love" for a living. The downsides haven't been qualified; everyone assumes there are none since so few people have the luxury.

"Find a way to do what you love for a living, and you'll never relax a day in your life because your passion now feels like work."
I still love programming, and engineering and tinkering in general.

It does not mean I always love what I do for money. Not all programming is the same, like, well, not all music is the same. The particular kind you exercise very much matters.

So I do tiny side projects I enjoy, stuff like home automation, tiny utilities to simplify chores, web pages, tiny games. It's still enjoyable.

If I did not have to work for money, I won't quit programming.

On the other hand, balancing the likeability of a job (which formally is in your "also a hobby" field) and the money it brings is a delicate act. Usually they are inversely related: the high compensation, well, compensates for the tiring job. But, unless you live alone and have no other aspirations, you got to bring home more, to keep the family up.

Going to the extreme end of high pay and low satisfaction brings in burnout and depression, ultimately limiting the length and utility of such stints. Going to the extreme end of satisfaction despite low / no pay may leave you broke.

That’s basically my experience. Being a professional glassblower gave me enough time on the torch to grow my skills, but changed everything about my relationship with blowing glass. I’ve avoided playing music professionally for that reason. I don’t want my creativity to be impacted by commercial concerns. I want music to stay fun and pure.
This resonates with me. I've been developing web sites since the late 90s. It was a passion/hobby of mine at the time. I monitized my hobby as a career in 2004. Since then I've come across many new hobbies. Woodworking has been my favorite. I've learned like any professional athlete that the more practice you put in the better you get. With that metaphor in mind this is something I'm trying to distill this into my children. My children are young now so it goes no further than the more you do something the better you get. They try a wide range of things understanding that they will get better with time. I don't push them on anything. I'm happy at the moment if it's just trying to get better playing Mario. Anything I can use with them to look back on as proof that putting in time will show progress. I hope to use this mentality in the future when acedemics matter.
I believe there's an important distinction between doing what you love and doing something with love. I also believe that overall happiness is more linked to the latter than to the former. You may love coding but if you don't try to approach your daily tasks with an open heart, you may end up hating your day anyway.
Nice article, but I can't decide if the person is happy or unhappy about the decision to turn the hobby into a job. The moment when she started doing commissioned work felt like a bad idea, but she seems to be managing it. That's the worse part of skilled work to me -- having to do ideas of other people, as if you're just a tool.

This mug is green and yellow because that's what I like. No, I can't make it blue.

One thing that stands out to me is that the author has been selling herself -- her core self -- for a very long time, perhaps her entire career. She tells us this from the very start, explaining that cooking can't be her hobby any more now that it's her job. Now the new hobby is her job! I think this is a reflection of the professional pressures placed on writers trying to make a living online. Confessional writing requires sharing some sort of personal journey of growth, but it also requires building networks of people interested in you. Why are her Instagram followers ready to buy the things she makes? Why does selling seem like such a natural choice? Who wants to start an informal business? Why make it formal? Because she's already created a business platform, and that is her life. She tries to elevate her experience by fitting her experience in a broader narrative about the role of hobbies, but this rings hollow because the hobby itself is not her problem (also, note that the second pair of Gelber quotations contradict each other - hobbies are both a call to the pre-industrial, and bringing the factory into the home). The true subtext is that she's always sold herself and the monetization of her hobby was almost inevitable because of the mental habits she has cultivated throughout her life. Yes she's jealous of the artist RC, but to the author "do your own thing" is just another imperative to cultivate for a more marketable self.

Why am I engaging with this article at all? Well, we all have to mold ourselves to the environments around us. I've consciously avoided monetizing my hobbies, but I've made immense efforts to cultivate a self that functions effectively in my profession. Is that a sacrifice? I'm not sure how to think about it. I wish the author would speak to what seems to me the real story here. It's not that her hobby has turned into a job through some universal process, but that she has turned her life into her work and the two cannot be separated.

Now that I'm making money and am 'successful' doing what I love, I have realized that nothing could have prepared me for the contradictory reality of the making a living off of something that is deeply personal/inward directed.

Even if I find myself holding together what often feels like two antithetical parts, the rewards (for now) of being able to pursue the fulfillment of my 'life activity' and what I am naturally oriented towards outweigh the dissonance.

However, a pitfall is if your life activity is altered so much by capital that its creative function ceases to exist except to generate more capital; perpetuate its system - the best outcome is where capital accelerates your 'life's activity' transformative potential instead of neutralizing it.

My personal solution is to turn my back on a lot of the expectations and niceties of my work and instead focus most of my energy on creation.

*edited for grammar

I see so many fellow digital artists (webcomic creators especially, minority ones doubly so) fall into this trap especially with patreon and who visibly resent the pressure but find it very hard to get out of the monetization loop.

I wrote a little more about my experiences here, if anyone's interested from a creative side: "Carceral Content Creation" https://walonvaus.dreamwidth.org/128334.html (also valuable context: I used to create a published webcomic but left that world for reasons that become obvious in the blog post.)

A big part of the issue is that we romanticize on the idea of making money while doing something we love. But like all fantasies, reality is always more disappointing due to the nature of human tendencies.
Not that long ago I had to deal with anxieties and finding hobby was remedium for that. But it was not perfect, because thoughts about its meaningless become stronger and stronger. Then I found out that there is really important to find some audience which can boost up your productivity and give that little spark of meaning to any thing that we do in our lifes. Reddit, HN, github were my starters (fun fact is, that I started with amigurumi knitting and deep learning side projects, simultanoeusly).
And still, making an honest living doing decent work you don't necessarily love, to support a family, is honorable and noble. Many have been beloved by their posterity for doing just that. And it is often necessary. And families are well worth it. :)
There's an interview of Robert kyosaki, a business guy, he said something like:

Young people often want to do what the love, but it's avidity. While finding a purpose is larger it involves other people. I find the general idea quite true.

I think a good start is to not do what you hate. If you can avoid that at least, then I think you are headed in the right direction.
Any correlation to innovation and doing what you love?
If you can make a business out of writing software, or anything you truly enjoy, then you uncomplicate it. I'm working on a SaaS to help people do exactly that, CxO Industries [1].

[1]: https://cxo.industries