Everything Is Content, and I'm Exhausted: On Monetizing Hobbies

I almost bought Meta glasses so I could film myself playing Pokémon GO at a theme park.

I want to sit with that for a second, because it’s absurd, but underneath it’s something I can’t stop thinking about. The instinct wasn’t to enjoy the experience. It wasn’t even to document it for myself. It was to produce it. To turn a leisure activity into a deliverable. To make sure that if something fun was happening, it wasn’t just happening ... it was being captured, packaged, and handed to an algorithm.

I didn’t buy the glasses. But I thought about it long enough to look up the price, and that’s sort of the point.

Monetizing Hobbies Is The Pattern I Can't Escape

My theory is that I cannot have a hobby. I have interests that are just businesses I haven’t launched yet.

Photography turned into a local storytelling platform. Art turned into Killer Creative. A love of sticker books turned into a TikTok of time-lapses. At one point, I had three separate Substacks half-outlined in my notes app.

I've spent so long monetizing hobbies (turning every interest into an income stream) that I genuinely can't tell anymore where the interest ends, and the monetization strategy begins. This used to feel like initiative. Now it mostly feels like a reflex... not a healthy one.

I spent a long time thinking this was just how I was wired. That I had a business-focused brain that couldn’t help but spot the angle in everything. And maybe that’s part of it. But lately I’ve started to wonder how much of this is me, and how much of it is just… where we are. Everything costs more. The idea of having a hobby that’s purely a hobby (that costs money and time and gives nothing back) can feel almost irresponsible. Like a luxury that isn’t available to most of us right now.

So we monetize. We produce. We perform.

The Algorithm Was Never Your Friend

I want to be clear: this isn’t a post about shaming social media or the people who use it. Social media has genuinely changed lives for the better. It’s how small businesses find their people. It’s how communities that never had spaces before finally got them. It’s how I’ve connected with other artists, other creators, people who just get it. That’s real, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But it can also make your brain feel like it’s on fire.

There’s a difference between using social media and being used by it. And the TikTok situation (for those who aren’t caught up, TikTok’s U.S. operations were sold to an American-controlled joint venture, with the app’s algorithm and user data at the center of the whole debate), that’s what really made me stop and think. Not about TikTok specifically, because I’m not here to get political about it. But about what the situation put on the table for everyone to see: the algorithm is the business model. The data is the currency. And the content is the drug.

We are all, willingly or not, participants in a system that is designed to keep us as engaged as possible, for as long as possible, so that companies can learn everything about us and sell that knowledge to the highest bidder. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just how it works.

And none of this is new. If you haven’t come across the story of how Target reportedly knew a teenage girl was pregnant before her own father did (based purely on her shopping habits, things like unscented lotion and vitamin supplements), I’d encourage you to look it up. Whether every detail of that specific story holds up doesn’t really matter. What’s been documented and taught in marketing programs for over a decade is that Target built a pregnancy prediction model from purchase data, and it worked.... And that was 2012.

The salesman in 1970 had a Rolodex with handwritten notes about his customers. “John and Jane just had their first baby.” That was data collection, too. It’s just that now, instead of index cards, it’s machine learning models trained on every scroll, every pause, every search, every purchase. They don’t just know what you bought. They know what stopped your thumb.

Mine stopped on Pokémon cards. My Instagram feed is almost entirely Pokémon card sales now. They know. They always know.

The difference between then and now isn’t the intention... It’s the scale. We have gotten disturbingly good at this. So I decided the less I give, the better off I’ll be. I turned off my social media notifications. I dug into the settings and disabled as many targeted ad features as I could find... and they bury those on purpose, by the way. I started spending less time in the apps altogether.

I still get Pokémon card ads. The algorithm is fast. But I’m not spending hours in there anymore. I’m not doomscrolling. I’m not lying awake convinced the world is ending because of something I read in a comment section. The low-grade anxiety I’d come to think of as just… being alive… quieted down. Significantly.

It’s a small act of reclamation. A middle finger to a machine that profits from my attention. And it’s been one of the better things I’ve done for my mental health.

Performing vs. Experiencing

There is a camera in your brain even when there’s no camera in your hand.

That’s the thing no one really talks about. It’s not just that we film too much... It’s that the filming instinct rewires the experience itself. You’re composing the caption before the moment is over. You’re thinking about the hook before you’ve had the feeling. You’re already editing something that hasn’t finished happening yet.

What gets lost is the private, unwitnessed part of doing something. The part that was always just for you. The part where you could be bad at something, and it didn’t matter. Where you could love something quietly, without needing to prove it to anyone or extract value from it.

When everything is content, the experience isn’t the same. You’re not doing the thing anymore. You’re performing the thing. And after a while, you forget what it felt like to just do it.

The Quiet Pushback

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that younger generations are increasingly opting for less. Dumbphones. Analog cameras. Vinyl. Journaling. In-person everything. There’s a growing, quiet rejection of the idea that every experience needs to be digital, shareable, and optimized. People, especially people who have grown up entirely inside the content economy, are starting to feel what gets lost. They’re choosing friction. They’re choosing the version of the experience that belongs to them.

And I get it. Because the water hose never stops. It’s influencers, breaking news, things you can’t control, things you can’t look away from, and it just… keeps going. The feed doesn’t end. The algorithm doesn’t rest. And at some point, your nervous system starts to register that as the default state of being alive, and you forget that it doesn’t have to be.

Choosing less isn’t a rejection of connection. It’s a reclamation of attention.

The Unfilmed Things

I was playing a video game with my friends recently, and I realized, somewhere in the middle of it, that I wasn’t thinking about content. I wasn’t thinking about what I’d post or what angle I’d use or whether this moment had "reach" potential. I was just playing a game with people I love, and it was just that.

I painted pottery. I didn’t post it. The mug is lopsided, and it’s sitting on my desk, and I look at it and feel something uncomplicated ... which is actually kind of rare.

These aren’t revelations. I’m not going to package this up as a protocol for reclaiming your joy, because I don’t think that’s what any of us need right now. What I do think is that we’re allowed to notice the cost. We’re allowed to want some things back. We’re allowed to have experiences that belong entirely to us ... that don’t need an audience, a caption, or a return on investment.

You’re allowed to have a hobby that’s just a hobby.

I’m still learning how to believe that myself. But I think it starts with noticing how much we’ve quietly handed over, and deciding (even in small ways) to take a little of it back.