Not every hobby has to become a side hustle

Say you are good at something outside work, and someone will tell you that you could sell it. Bake a decent sourdough and you could supply the café. Knit a jumper and you should open a shop. Take a nice photograph and you ought to be charging for prints. The compliment arrives dressed as advice, and the advice always points the same way: towards money.

I understand where it comes from. Wages have not kept pace with rent, and a second income can be the difference between managing and not. For plenty of people a side business is necessary, or chosen, or genuinely joyful. I have no argument with any of them.

My argument is with the assumption underneath the compliment: that a thing you do well and enjoy is somehow unfinished until it earns.

What a price does to a pleasure

There is a well-known piece of research on this, and it is not new. In 1973, the psychologists Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett watched nursery children who already liked drawing. Some were told they would get a certificate for drawing; some got the same certificate unexpectedly; some got nothing. A week or two later, the children who had drawn for a promised reward spent less of their free time drawing than the others. The reward had turned something they did for its own sake into something they did for a reason, and once the reason went, so did much of the interest.

A large review of this research published in 1999 found the same pattern across many studies: expected, tangible rewards tended to reduce people’s intrinsic motivation for tasks they had found interesting, while positive feedback tended to increase it. The finding has been argued over since, and it is not a law of nature, and it does not mean nobody should be paid for what they love. But it is a reasonable warning. Putting a price on a pleasure can change the pleasure.

Anyone who has tried to sell what they make will recognise the mechanism. The sourdough is no longer the loaf you bake on a slow Saturday; it is twelve loaves by Thursday, costed, labelled and photographed. The knitting becomes a production line with a margin. The photographs become content, and content needs a schedule. None of that is shameful. It is simply a job, and it is a different thing from the hobby it replaced.

The hours that belong to nobody

What a hobby offers that a job cannot is hours that belong to nobody else. There is no customer in them, no audience and no measure of whether they were well spent. That is exactly why they restore people, and exactly why they sit so awkwardly in a culture that treats every hour as something to optimise.

I suspect this is why the question “Could you sell that?” can feel faintly accusing. It implies that time spent on something unpaid is time slightly wasted, and that the proper response to enjoying something is to make it productive. We have learned to defend rest in the same apologetic terms, which is why it still needs saying that softness is not laziness. A hobby needs the same defence. It is allowed to be for nothing.

Women, in my view, feel this pressure with a particular edge, because so much of the unpaid time women have ever had was already spoken for. An afternoon that is neither work nor care is not a gap waiting to be filled with a small business. It may be the only part of the week that is entirely yours. Sunday afternoons can belong to you, and so can the thing you do in them.

Being allowed to be average

There is another freedom in a hobby that selling removes: the freedom to be mediocre at it. You can sing in a choir without being good enough to be paid. You can paint badly for twenty years and enjoy every hour. You can abandon a novel halfway, because some books are not meant to be finished, and abandon a half-knitted sleeve for the same reason. Nobody is waiting for the order.

Once something is for sale, quality becomes a duty, and the question shifts from “Do I enjoy this?” to “Is this good enough?” Many people find that second question corrosive to the very thing that made them start.

A better compliment

None of this means the people who say “You should sell these” are doing anything wrong. They are usually trying to say that they admire what you made. It is worth hearing the admiration and letting the business advice pass.

And it may be worth offering a different compliment ourselves. Not “You could sell that”, but “You obviously love doing this.” It notices the same skill, and, if the research is any guide, it is the kind of attention that feeds a pleasure rather than taxing it. It leaves the pleasure where it was.

Sources

• Lepper MR, Greene D, Nisbett RE. Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: a test of the “overjustification” hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973.
• Deci EL, Koestner R, Ryan RM. A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 1999.