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When I started sending newsletters three years back, it was a fun experiment. I saw others sending random things in the email regularly and I wanted to try it too.
Among my hobbies, this is the only one that is still a random fun thing that I do. Probably because not many people in my real life know about it and hence don't comment on it.
I had an Instagram account where I reposted bullet journal posts to curate and promote bullet journal posts. It gathered a following quickly. I was asked if I make money out of it so many times that I finally did—and lost any interest in it.
My blog was my passion for so long and added fun to my days. It made my days better. When people saw that I did a good job, they said that I should monetize it. I didn't want to but being told that I should so many times led me to do it. Monetization was fun for a while... and soon killed the fun of it.
For the last year or so, I've been struggling with blogging. I have ideas but nothing sounds good. I don't feel like trying new things because they might become failures. How did sharing my thoughts on what I like/dislike become stressful?
As I started to make money off my passions, they stopped being my passions. The very things that lifted my days and helped reduce my stress from other things became stressful things themselves.
I become more stressed, so I find a new hobby to reduce stress, which in turn becomes a cause of stress. And so the loop goes on.
We used to have hobbies; now we have “side hustles.”
If you don't allow hobbies to remain hobbies, you will constantly add to your plate of "jobs" and will eventually burn out. While it's completely okay to monetize your hobbies, you don't have to. The minute you associate something with money, it turns into something else.
We base our self-worth on our outputs. Our time is only worth it if we create or make something during it. The biggest sign of worthiness is increasing the bank balance.
Every time I tell someone that I have a blog, they ask what I blog about and whether I make money out of it. Always. It feels great to say that I earn a good amount through it but at what cost? It's not an exciting hobby anymore because it's not my playground to have fun anymore.
For so long, I wondered why I could effortlessly write these monthly newsletters but struggled to write one blog post a month. Only recently did I realize the answer.
The above is a long-winded way of saying: I'm going to stop monetizing my hobbies. I don't need to do it—I earn enough through my actual job—and I need my hobbies to be stress-free.
I'm working on ending my contract with my ad provider. I'm thinking of new things to share or new ways to write posts. I won't say no if anyone wants to support me but I won't think about it. It's time to bring fun back into my favourite hobby.
Speaking of my blog, here are a few new posts you should check out!
The Para Method by Tiago Forte disappointed me and I finally wrote a post on why it's not worth it.
In The Language of Remembering by Aanchal Malhotra was everything I expected it to be and more so of course I had to write a detailed review of it.