Right! Even where you can monetize your hobby, if you’re not in it for the sake of your own personal passion, what’s the point?

Great art comes from passion and artistic integrity, not from trying to slap together some garbage to make a buck. If you happen to make money in the process, awesome, but if that’s your whole motivation it’s going to come across in your work and put a bit of a stink on the whole endeavor.

There’s a world of difference between art being enabled by commerce and art being created for the money. The second is self-defeating.

It really does sometimes seem like a lot of people just go through life working and killing time. There are definitely people living their lives for themselves, but I think it’s a pretty foreign concept for some folks who’ve bought heavily into a commerce-focused culture.