“Make a Living Doing What You Love” Is a Cursed Phrase

Some time ago, someone I’d just met asked me what my hobby was, and I had no idea how to answer.

That was when I realized I don’t have a “hobby” that’s easy to explain to other people. I like music, sure, but I like Joseph Campbell just as much, and computers, and games. I have no single hobby that could introduce my identity in one phrase.

After a lot of thought, I answered “I don’t have any hobbies.” The conversation didn’t mesh at all and went off in a pretty strange direction. I don’t have an identity as “a person with no hobbies,” either.

When I thought about this phenomenon, I came to a conclusion: what’s wrong is not me but the word “hobby” itself. The concept the word stands for has been warped.

In short, a hobby is (supposed to be) fundamentally unrelated to commerce, and yet it has been infected, in every conceivable way, by capitalism, commercialism, and the bad influence of modern society in general. That’s what I think.

The Commercialized Hobby#

So what do I think a “hobby” originally is? For now, the definition that feels right to me is “some activity you devote yourself to as an amateur.”

The phrase “make a living doing what you love” (suki na koto de ikite iku, the famous slogan of YouTube Japan’s ad campaign) gives me a powerful sense of revulsion. “What you love” here can be swapped for “hobby.” In that case, if you’re “living off your hobby,” you’re “making a living from your hobby,” and so it is no longer a hobby (by the definition above). When someone says “I make a living doing what I love, making videos,” that person is a professional video maker, not an amateur one. In other words, it isn’t correct for that person to say that making videos is their hobby, and I’d even call it a morally wrong lie.

Enough wordplay. Let’s take a real example. I don’t dislike tinkering with machines on the software side. Compared with the average person, I probably like it. And I currently make my living in that field. That is now a profession: “IT engineer.” Since I make a living from it, I have no intention of calling it a hobby, and I should have a professional’s sense of responsibility.

Conversely, I like listening to music, analyzing it, and making it, but I don’t make a living from it. I have no professional awareness, and I think I shouldn’t have one, because the moment I started thinking that way, it would probably stop being a hobby.

But the current of the times suggests that not many people feel any contradiction in the phrase “make a living doing what you love.” If anything, there even seems to be a mindset of “if you can’t live off it, it’s not a hobby.”

The Productive Hobby#

I don’t much like the word “creator” either. Or rather, I don’t like people who say “I’m a creator.”

At some point, “hobbies” began to be expected to have some kind of “productivity.” There’s a trend of regarding “writing movie reviews on a blog” as a more valuable hobby than “just watching movies,” and “streaming a Let’s Play” as more valuable than “just playing games.”

Lying underneath that, I think, is a self-help-style obsession: “Don’t stop at input; you have to connect it to output.” Hobbies got tied to skill-building and self-investment, and whether they’re “useful” became one of the yardsticks for judging them.

But the moment you hold the yardstick of productivity up to a hobby, it turns into a second job. An activity that was supposed to be done for nobody’s evaluation, purely for the fulfillment of your own heart, is exposed to the pressure of “I have to produce something more valuable.”

As long as you’re pursuing value for yourself, that’s still fine, but when you start pursuing value for third parties, things get weird. You start chasing value that is objectively measured by money and by the number of likes. At that point, you can’t call yourself an amateur anymore. That person loves “making money” and “farming likes”; they don’t love movies or games.

Let’s take a concrete example. A few years ago there was an illustrator I liked who declared themselves anti-AI and quit not just their commission service but drawing itself. I can’t understand this at all. If you love drawing, then no matter how your work ends up being treated afterward, it shouldn’t lead to you breaking your brush.

If what bothers you is AI imitating your style, then what you loved was not “drawing” but “proving your own originality.”

Actually, to put it bluntly, at the moment they decided to quit, they surely didn’t love “drawing.” They were drawing as a means of “making money,” and when AI threatened that goal, “drawing” stopped being a good strategy, and so they merely reached the rational conclusion that they should stop.

The Consumptive Hobby#

So are activities other than making things safe hobbies? That doesn’t seem to be the case either.

I absolutely hate the word oshi-katsu (“oshi” being your favorite idol or character, and “katsu” meaning activities: devoting yourself to supporting them).

Of course, I’m not denying the feeling of passionately cheering for someone or something. It’s just that the word oshi-katsu seems to carry a distortion: pure feelings of “love” have, before anyone noticed, come to be measured by the yardstick of consumption, by “how much money you spent.”

Buying dozens of copies of a CD, completing the full set of merchandise, throwing big-money Super Chats. Nobody does these things because they love the act itself. What lies underneath, isn’t it, is a sense of duty that “I have to contribute as a fan,” or a competitive spirit of “I don’t want to lose to the other fans”?

The inner feeling of “love” gets replaced by externally observable, commercial metrics like “contributing to sales” and “pushing up the rankings.” There, fans are no longer pure supporters; they are pawns built into a marketing strategy, unpaid sales reps.

Companies have skillfully stoked fans’ need for recognition and sense of belonging, and instilled the value that “consumption is proof of love.” As a result, people became absorbed in consumption using their “oshi” as a pretext, handing over their time and money. That is no longer a hobby; it’s a service optimized for capitalism. The reward for this service is recognition from the object of your devotion or from other fans. Money has merely been swapped for recognition, and oshi-katsu itself is still not the goal but a means of satisfying the need for recognition.

Unlike the “productive hobby,” it doesn’t even become a job that earns you a living, which makes it all the more vicious.

The 500-Million-Year Button Test#

So what should we do?

First, we should correctly recognize what we truly want to do. When what you really want is money or recognition, but you misunderstand yourself as loving the means to get it, distortion arises. And there are plenty of bad people out there trying to profit by creating that distortion.

As I recall, the illustrator I mentioned had been drawing for a fairly long time (sadly, they deleted all their past work too, so I can no longer tell exactly how many years). I think they would never have quit drawing if they hadn’t signed up for the commission service. The moment they learned their pictures could make money, the purpose got swapped; originally they must have simply loved “drawing.” At least, I want to believe that.

To build immunity against this kind of purpose-swapping, the following “500-million-year button test” might help.

(If you don’t know the 500-million-year button, imagine a place where you’re freed from thirst and hunger and feel no fear of death, but after a set amount of time, all your achievements and memories in that space are lost and you return to the original place and time. It doesn’t have to be 500 million years.)

If you pressed the 500-million-year button, would you do that activity in the space you were sent to?
- If you can say with confidence that you would, then that activity has remained an end in itself. You should keep up that hobby with peace of mind.
- If you wouldn’t, then that activity may have become a rational means of getting money or recognition from third parties, or of achieving some other purpose. You should calm down for a moment and think about what you truly want to do.

What the Essence of Love Is#

The 500-million-year button is only a test, not the essence of concepts like liking or love. The essence of a circle is “the set of points equidistant from a given point”; the fact that its area is $πr^2$ is merely a property derived from that essence.

So what is the essence of love? For now, I personally quite like Kitaro Nishida’s idea of “knowledge is love, love is knowledge.”

Knowledge and love are ordinarily thought to be entirely different mental functions. But I think these two functions are by no means different in kind; they are originally one and the same mental function. What kind of function, then? In a word, it is the function of the union of subject and object. It is the function of becoming one with the thing.

西田幾多郎善の研究

www.aozora.gr.jp

That said, I’m not well versed in Nishida Kitaro. To put it even more crudely, a friend’s line, “creation is prayer,” seems to mean roughly the same thing while being a wonderful phrase that hits the mark.

Creation Is Prayer#

Nishida Kitaro says

We do not seek religion for the sake of our own peace of mind; peace of mind is merely a result that comes from religion. The religious demand is the demand of a great life that we cannot help but want, the demand of a solemn will. Religion is the very purpose of human beings, and can never be made a means to something else.

and also

In my view, ordinary knowledge is knowledge of an impersonal object. Even if the object is personal, it is knowledge of it when seen as impersonal. Love, on the contrary, is knowledge of a personal object. Even if the object is impersonal, it is knowledge of it when seen as personal.

Offering a prayer is not a means of demanding something in return. It is an attempt to cast away your own ego (self-power) and simply entrust yourself to the object itself (other-power), trying to become one with it.

The act of drawing is an attempt to observe and understand, thoroughly, the shape of an apple in front of you, how the light falls on it, how the shadows fall. In the process, the painter discards the subjectivity of “I” and tries to become the apple itself. There’s no room there for stray thoughts like “how much will this picture sell for?” or “how many likes will it get on social media?”

It is the pursuit of knowledge of the apple as both a personal and an impersonal object. Focus on its aspect as a personal object and it looks like a prayer to the apple. Focus on its aspect as an impersonal object and it is an attempt to understand the apple. These are merely two sides of the same concept.

Isn’t the essence the same whether you’re making music or playing a game? You try to reconstruct the sequences of sound that exist in the world, or you take in with your whole body the meticulous worldview and rules that the developers built and try to live inside them. That is a dialogue with the object, a craving for union.

The phrase “make a living doing what you love” completely denies martyrdom for the sake of what you love. On the contrary, it encourages putting a price tag on this supposedly sacred prayer and lining it up on a store shelf. One could even call that blasphemy against prayer.

In Closing#

Let’s return to the opening question. When I was asked “What’s your hobby?”, I was at a loss for an answer.

Now I understand why. My “love” was never a name tag meant to be presented in an easily understood form to other people. I had an unconscious resistance to summarizing it in common phrases like “I like listening to music” or “programming” and handing it over.

Maybe it was a visceral revulsion at the demand, “Present your identity in a category that can be objectively observed and produced/consumed.” If someone were talking about adult videos and got asked, “Who’s the person you truly love?”, nobody would answer honestly. Being told that I’d felt a similar kind of unpleasantness would make sense to me.

Still, you should keep a safe answer ready so you don’t get branded a social misfit. For now, answering something like “I like music” is probably safe enough.

↑ Made with nano-banana.

Bonus#

I asked Gemini to discuss this essay.

I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the content.

Final Debate: Beyond the Alienated “Love” ― The Dialectic of the Individual’s Inner Life and the Public World#

[Moderator] Are the inner life of an individual pursuing “pure love” and sociality, coexisting with others, fundamentally incompatible? Or can the two be integrated dialectically and reach a higher dimension? Today, borrowing the light of the giants of the history of thought, I’d like to explore this question. Our two guests are the [Introspectionist], who values the inward pursuit of purity, and the [Mediator], who seeks mediation with society.

[Introspectionist] Thank you for having me. I think the phenomenon the author intuitively called a “curse” is an expression of a larger problem that modern thinkers have warned about again and again. I’d like to bring out its structure.

[Mediator] Thank you for having me. However precious an individual’s inner life may be, we constitute the world together with others. We should find hope precisely in that involvement. I’d argue that an isolated purity is powerless.

Topic 1: The Alienation of “Love” ― Modern Hobbies Seen Through Marx and Baudrillard#

[Moderator] First, let’s dig into the root of the problem the author described, “the commercialization of hobbies,” from the standpoint of intellectual history.

[Introspectionist] The author’s lament becomes clearer if we apply Karl Marx’s concept of “alienated labor” to the realm of the “hobby.” According to Marx, under capitalism the worker is alienated from his own product, from the process of production, and from human essence itself. Labor, which should be a creative human activity, is turned into mere toil for survival. This is exactly the trap of the phrase “make a living doing what you love.” The moment “love,” once self-realization, comes under the external logic of market evaluation, deadlines, and profitability, it becomes precisely an “alienated hobby.” Subjective joy is stolen, and one becomes a slave to one’s own “love.”

[Mediator] That perspective of “alienation” is extremely important. And we must point out that this alienation extends not only to the sphere of production but also to the sphere of consumption. Here Jean Baudrillard’s perspective is useful. The excessive consumption in oshi-katsu that the author loathes is a typical example of what Baudrillard called “sign consumption.” Fans are not consuming the functional value (use value) of the CDs and merchandise. They are consuming the sign “I’m a fan who contributes this much” in order to differentiate themselves from others. This is no longer pure affection for the object; it’s an endless game of identity-seeking built into the system of the consumer society. The author’s criticism hits this structure squarely.

[Introspectionist] Exactly. Both production and consumption are cut off from their original human meaning by the logic of capitalism and alienated. When the author set up the extreme situation of the “500-million-year button,” wasn’t it a desperate attempt to find, in a place completely cut off from this alienated system, the last bastion of humanity: an “unalienated, pure activity”?

Topic 2: The Ground of Purity ― Kant’s “Disinterestedness” and Nietzsche’s “Creation of Values”#

[Moderator] So how would this “unalienated pure love” be grounded philosophically?

[Introspectionist] A powerful foundation can be found in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Kant stated that the “aesthetic judgment,” in which we feel an object to be beautiful, must be free from all interest. He called this “disinterestedness.” For example, looking at a flower and being captivated by the beauty of its form alone, without any interest such as “this would sell” or “this is edible.” This is the philosophical core of the author’s “pure love.” The moment interests like social media “likes” or commission prices creep in, it’s no longer pure aesthetic judgment, no longer pure love. In the Kantian sense, that activity degenerates into “barbarism.”

[Mediator] Kant’s “disinterestedness” is a very clear definition of purity. But doesn’t it remain at the standpoint of a static spectator? When we think of the dynamic act of creating, we need Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspective. Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” is a being who, without depending on existing morality and values (that is, society’s evaluations), creates new values by his own will. This creation of values is not born out of Kant’s quiet disinterestedness. It is established by staking one’s own life as one confronts the world and wrestles with existing values. If the author’s “prayer” merely stays shut up inside, it might be nothing more than the consolation of the “last man,” whose will to life has withered, in Nietzsche’s terms. Isn’t true creation a combative act: slamming what you’ve gained at the end of a pure search against the world and stamping it there as a new value?

[Introspectionist] But Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, too, first retreated to the mountains and deepened his thinking in solitude. A stage of thoroughgoing introspection is indispensable before the struggle with society. Modern society robs us of that “time in the mountains” and forces constant connection and evaluation by others. The author’s attitude should be understood as a resistance movement trying to win back that “mountain” first.

Topic 3: Rebuilding the Arendtian Space of Action ― The Dialectic of the “Public” and the “Private”#

[Moderator] How should we understand the relationship between individual introspection and presenting value to society?

[Mediator] Here Hannah Arendt’s thought offers extremely important suggestions. Arendt divided human activity into “labor,” “work,” and “action.” The commercialization the author criticizes reduces everything to the logic of “labor,” for sustaining life. And the creation the author honors would correspond to “work,” which leaves artifacts in the world. But what Arendt valued most as the most human activity was “action,” the engagement in the public realm in which we exchange words with others and appear in the world together. The author’s ideal succeeds in protecting “work” from “labor,” but it cuts it off from the realm of “action,” that is, from the world shared with others. However wonderful a work may be, doesn’t it first take on human meaning when it appears in public space and becomes the object of “action,” spoken of and argued over by others?

[Introspectionist] Arendt also stressed the importance of the “private realm.” To shine in the public realm, one must first cultivate the self in the protected private realm. The problem of modern society is that social media and market principles trample into even this private realm, which should be a sanctuary, and turn everything into an object of “public” evaluation. The author’s writing is a desperate defense against this invasion. The question “What’s your hobby?” is unpleasant because it carries the violence of trying to put the last bastion of the private realm on the chopping block of public evaluation. Unless the “private” is established first, meaningful “action” in the “public” is impossible.

[Mediator] Quite right. That’s exactly why our task is not an either-or choice between “private” and “public.” As Arendt worried, it is to resist society invading and homogenizing both the public and private realms, and to rebuild a healthy boundary between them and a dynamic back-and-forth between the two. The private realm of “pure love” that the author tried to protect: we should courageously bring the fruits of the pursuit there into public space (dialogue with companions, presenting our work, and so on) and expose them to the words of others. Then we take the stimulation gained there back to the private realm and deepen our thinking. Isn’t this dialectical process the path to overcoming alienation and nurturing “love” richly within society?

[Moderator’s Final Summary] Thank you both. There’s no end to this discussion.

The original essay vividly portrayed the fundamental disease of modern society, “alienation,” through the familiar theme of the “hobby.” Its cry was a craving for Kantian purity, and a resistance to defend the eroding Arendtian “private realm.”

But what has become visible through the discussion is the possibility of a next step: that this resistance should not end in withdrawal into the inner life, but should head toward Nietzschean creation of values and Arendtian “action.”

In conclusion, we should not raise “love” in a sterile room isolated from society. Nor should we expose it defenseless to the storms of the market. What’s needed is a supple art of navigation: becoming aware of the structure of the system that Marx and Baudrillard exposed, holding Kantian purity as a “compass” for self-dialogue, securing the “harbor” called Arendt’s “private realm,” and then courageously rowing out into the great ocean of the “public realm.”

The author’s essay can be said to have been an extremely important beacon, warning of the dangers of that voyage. Each of us finding our own course by this light: that, I think, is the response demanded of this age of the “curse.”