DAY TWENTY FOUR

What is your purpose in creating or making things? 

 

Perhaps it's for the simple pleasure of doing it and needs no further explanation. Perhaps it's for the sense of 'flow', the intense concentration and engagement with something which can be deeply relaxing and satisfying at the same time. Maybe you like to learn new things, or you like a sense of achievement and accomplishment. For me it's about problem solving and practical, useful outcomes - a piece of furniture, something to wear, something fixed, life made easier in some way. 

Many people might say that they want to communicate something, they try to express and share an idea, a point of view, a moment in time, an image, an emotion. You might do things to give others pleasure, perhaps by making gifts and presents or something to simply entertain and delight. 

 

Though not everyone sees this as a good thing.

 

There's a trend for people to try and make money from what were previously considered hobbies, to 'monetise' them as a 'side-hustle'. Large corporations and self-appointed would be influencers aim to encourage us in this way of thinking. It is part of what I consider an unfortunate trend to monetise and commodify just about anything one can - not just one's hobbies and pastimes but one's home as a B&B, one's car as a taxi or delivery service. I'm in two minds about it; some people need the money, true, but the new world enabled by apps and online platforms has a tendency to turn even the nicest and politest people into a hustler, whether they want to be or not. 

 

There's a further problem. If you choose to play that game, you are also choosing to be measured by its metrics, its ideas of success, not your own. And you have to be enlightened and strong-willed not to fall for this Silicon Valley schtick. Venture capitalists invest vast sums in armies of clever people in order to keep us online, engaged with their platform, playing by the rules of the game they invented for their advancement, and not necessarily for ours whatever they say.

 

Perhaps the apogee of this kind of commodifed thinking resulted in the most soul-sucking slogan I think I've ever seen: "If it's not making money, it isn't a craft."

 

Now, this may just possibly have been an ironic comment by a craftsmen on the fact that most craftspeople do not make much money, but I don't think so. It strikes me more as the kind of boosterish, inane, crude, knowing and ill-informed stock in trade of hucksters down the ages. 

 

There are of course people who resist and reject this kind of thinking, and there are people who wholeheartedly embrace it. I have no problem with either. There is nothing wrong with an artist, maker or craftsperson who does it for money, does it as job. Good luck to them. 

 

My concerns are with the kind of person - let's call them a hobbyist - who might feel that they ought to be monetising their work because otherwise, somehow, it won't be quite as valuable or meaningful as it could be. It is in this way that money and commerce can be corrosive to the pleasures and satisfactions of everyday creativity. The issue isn't even about money necessarily. There could simply be the nagging sense that one should put pictures of one's work on some platform so it may be compared against other's work, the subtext being that you must put yourself up for judgment or you are not being serious about what you do.

Again, if people freely choose to do that I have no problem with it. They may have genuine pride in their work and want to share it with a wider audience. My criticism is for anything that hints at a compunction to do such things, any idea that wants to suggest that what one does must be shared, must be displayed, must be monetised in order for it to have meaning or value.

Onwards...impecuniously.

Picture credit: James Petts from London, England, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons