‘You think it’s going to be a money making machine’: How modern life killed the hobby

In 2014, Mattel released the latest doll in their “I Can Be” career collection: “Entrepreneur Barbie”. This Barbie was marketed as a self-starter, someone “ready to make a bold business move and strike out on her own to achieve her career dreams”. She was, like every Barbie product, designed to capture the zeitgeist and, specifically, a relatively new cultural ideal at the time: the enterprising self. Unlike her astronaut, doctor and interior designer sisters, this Barbie wasn’t defined by a single job role, but by a general approach to work. She was flexible. Autonomous. In control. She was a girlboss – a 11.5-inch tall distillation of burgeoning hustle culture.

It’s easy to mock Mattel’s blatant attempts to sell cultural trends back to us in miniature. But with Entrepreneur Barbie they certainly sensed which way the wind was blowing. For the last decade, culture has been ruled by two figures: the entrepreneur and the influencer. These figures – who are really two sides of the same coin – have come to represent “success”. Careers are over. Now, the “career dream” is to make your job up yourself. Make a hobby a side hustle. Have multiple side hustles. Quit your day job and be your own boss. Get paid to do what you love.

This is a seductive ideology – one that declares that anyone and everyone can free themselves from the shackles of wage labour if they are “bold” enough, or put in enough effort. It declares that acts of labour and acts of love can look and feel the same. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this ideology has taken hold, especially among younger generations.

A 2019 report revealed that 51 per cent of British people aged 14-25 have thought about starting, or have already started a business. A further third reported being open to the idea and just 15 per cent ruled it out altogether. Because it all sounds so easy, right? Just pick something you like doing in your spare time already, then, harnessing the almighty powers of the internet, market it and monetise it.

What this resounding cultural siren call to “be your own boss” and “get paid to do what you love” really amounts to, though, is a pervasive pressure to pump “leisure time” for profit. Get off work and pick up your knitting needles, make a slick TikTok, update your website, get on Etsy, package and post and polish your “personal brand”. Perhaps some people truly relish this side hustle lifestyle. Yet, in an ever-expanding sea of Etsy-preneurs, blogger-preneurs and your standard “like-and-subscribe” content careerists, I can’t help returning to one question: what’s happened to hobbies? Or creative outlets and activities that are purely for pleasure? Increasingly, it seems like side hustle culture has killed them off. One woman I spoke to, who describes herself as a writer, podcaster and “extreme hobbyist,” admitted she “can’t even start a hobby or craft without registering a domain name”. So, are hobbies a thing of the past? And, if they are, why does it matter?

Eloise Skinner is an author and psychotherapist specialising in existential therapy. “If we think of hobbies as activities we voluntarily undertake during our free time,” she says, “hobbies can be seen as an important part of our identity.” Some people might be lucky enough to work in jobs that fill them with a sense of purpose and fulfilment, but, Skinner stresses, this certainly isn’t the case for many. “And so, when it comes to the time we spend outside work, hobbies can be an important part of reminding ourselves who we are, what we enjoy doing, and what makes us feel truly fulfilled.”

She suggests this can help people’s sense of “work-life balance”, particularly at a time when work is increasingly digitally driven. “In a digital-first working environment, where we can often feel like we’re never really separated from our working lives, hobbies can allow us to step outside of our everyday routines and engage in something that provides a different experience.” Monetising a hobby can change this utterly, though. “One of the benefits of a hobby, from a personal level, is the ability to be flexible,” she adds, “and to switch things up when you feel appropriate.” Having a profit-motive, however, introduces obligation and formality. “Instead of purely enjoying the activity in itself, you might experience a sense of detachment from it,” she says. “When you begin to look at the hobby as delivering a certain outcome, you become less immersed in the experience and more focused on the eventual output.” Monetising a hobby can quickly result in feelings of pressure: to make it more successful, or simply to keep it going.

This is something Kirsty Holden knows all too well. She used to be a baker. “I’ve always loved baking and the thought of being able to make money from what I thoroughly enjoyed was a dream come true,” she tells me. Until, that is, she found herself too exhausted to make her kids birthday cakes. “That’s when I realised I’d fallen out of love with my hobby. The pressure of it being a business meant that I now saw it as a chore.”

Crucially, Holden’s decision to monetise her hobby didn’t just stem from a desire to get paid for doing something she loved, but from the specific work and income conditions she found herself in. “I’d reduced my hours at work after coming back from maternity,” she explains. “I wanted to top up my wage effectively but do something from home and around the kids.” Yet, rather than achieving “work-life balance,” the challenges of running an at-home business left her feeling drained. She began to resent what had previously been a passion. Now, having quit the baking business, she thinks “mentally it’s extremely valuable” to have a hobby that is purely for pleasure, rather than profit. “But it’s very easy, especially in this day and age, to have someone plant a seed and let you think it’s going to be this big money making machine.”

The internet and culture at large are, after all, saturated with success stories – aspirational “get-rich-quick” narratives that make it seem like everyone with a skill could be raking it in. English teacher Hannah Philp suggests this contributes to warped notions of value. “It’s the highest compliment that people pay me about my drawings,” she says. “Everyone is like, ‘you should sell those’.” This is a compliment, on some level, she says, “but also it’s interesting that the highest compliment we can think of for people is, ‘this should be monetised’.” So far, she has resisted any push to sell her work, partly because she takes joy in making things for the people she loves. And, she says, “in all honesty, they’re my therapy. They’re my refuge. And I think the fear of monetising them would be that they would stop being that. I think I’m a bit afraid that if I did, it would stop feeling nice.”

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Yet, platforms like Etsy and Not on the High Street pop up almost every day, claiming to make it easier than ever to monetise hobbies, and implying you’d be a sucker not to give it a try. But, how many people are actually turning a profit? Laura Turner is the founder of Thrifty Londoner, but before she became a financial educator and content creator, she ran an Etsy store. She embroidered a T-shirt and wore it to work and her colleague asked if she did commissions. “I said yes and it all started from there,” she says. Like Holden, tangible financial conditions were also part of Turner’s side hustle equation. “I needed a bit of extra cash as I was on a low salary in London at the time,” she says. She quickly found herself overwhelmed. “I was embroidering at every opportunity – on the tube, watching TV, even at my desk during my lunch break. It took over and I stopped enjoying it.” Eventually, she decided to close the store, after realising “there were only so many T-shirts I could embroider in one day”.

This is an element of side hustle culture that social media manager Hannah Manton highlights, too. “People are constantly telling me to monetise my crafts, but I don’t think they fully understand how long things actually take and how high I would have to cost them to even make minimum wage.” In her case, a small bag could take her upwards of 10 hours to make. “So with minimum wage at £11, let’s say, that’s £110 before you even consider yarn and packaging costs.” Once, when Manton was in a nail bar, the girl next to her saw that she was crocheting. “She told me that she thinks the crochet pieces they sell on Pretty Little Thing are too expensive, at £30 an item. I was shocked! I don’t think people realise that a ‘crochet machine’ literally doesn’t exist.” She adds that if something is genuinely crocheted, it has to be handmade. Yet, she points out that genuine crochet is up for grabs on fast fashion sites all the time. “It really makes you consider what conditions the people making them are subjected to if they can sell a handmade item so cheaply and still turn a profit.”

When hobbies become side hustles, labour is meant to feel like love. Yet, in the end, everything becomes about the bottom line – about turning a profit. Scratch the surface of the much-hyped ideals of flexibility and autonomy, and you’ve got precarity and rabid individualism. “I’ve always felt not quite brave enough to take the jump into going freelance making and selling stuff,” Phoebe* tells me, “and I’ve been thinking about why. As much as it’s not wanting to kill the thing I love, it’s also kind of self-sabotaging to do a job that takes up most of your time if it’s not the thing that obsesses you. But then I remembered that artists and writers in the past could actually live off making art and being on the dole.”

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Turner states plainly that she thinks “part of the pressure to monetise hobbies comes with financial pressure from the cost of living crisis, and wanting to generate some extra income.” Philp puts it in similar terms: “It all feels to me so intimately connected to burnout and the impossible state of the system in which we live.”

This all demonstrates the real truth of the matter – that many people turning their hobbies into side hustles are not merely trying to escape the banality of their “day jobs”, or find a “work-life balance”, or become the next millionaire maker. Rather, they are trying to earn extra incomes from their “passion projects” because the current labour market is insecure and unrewarding. After 15 years of austerity and unprecedented wage stagnation, traditional employment often simply doesn’t pay enough for someone to live a decent life, or even pay the bills. Just as “cabin porn” and the “tiny house trend” romanticise housing insecurity, side hustle culture romanticises work, just as its conditions are becoming more precarious and time-intensive. You’re not working multiple jobs to make ends meet, you’re Entrepreneur Barbie.

“The idea that something beautiful only has value once it’s been sold really makes you question your own worth as a creator,” Manton says. Philp seems to agree: “I think there has to be a middle ground, surely, where we can not rely on money as the only way of valuing things that we do, but we can still respect it as a kind of labour.” Phoebe* takes it one step further: “Basically I’d like to do what I love and not monetise it, but full time.”

Under current economic conditions, this might seem like a wildly utopian fantasy. But, as we are all increasingly encouraged to pump our “free time” for profit, or indeed just to get by, it feels important not only to advocate for decent wages, cheap utilities and housing security, but also for unprofitable, unproductive pursuits: leisure, pleasure, and fantasy. Personally, I’m hoping the zeitgeist for hustling enterprise will shift. Come on Mattel, give us Universal Basic Income Barbie.

* names have been changed