The Side Hustle Myth: When Passion Projects Drain Us

The side hustle is everywhere. The crafts turned to Etsy shops. The baking hobbies turned to Instagram businesses. The notion that every passion should be monetized, every interest optimized for income. The relentless message is clear: your job isn't enough; your free time should be generating too.

I fell for it completely. My love of writing became a freelance business. My interest in photography became paid shoots. By the time I recognized what had happened, I had no hobbies left—only small businesses that demanded more than they returned. The passion had been extracted and replaced by obligation.

The economics rarely work. For every success story broadcast on social media, thousands of side hustles barely break even after accounting for time. The romance of being your own boss obscures the reality of unpaid hours, self-employment taxes, and the psychological weight of always being on.

More insidious is the loss of pure leisure. Hobbies exist for their own sake—for pleasure, for rest, for the parts of ourselves that work cannot reach. When every activity must justify itself economically, we lose the ability to simply enjoy. Play becomes labor. Recreation becomes production.

The cultural context matters. Side hustle culture flourishes when primary jobs don't pay enough, when the social contract has frayed, when hustle is required for survival. For some, it's not a choice but a necessity. But the celebration of side hustles obscures the underlying problem: jobs should pay living wages.

I quit the side hustles. The writing returned to my journal. The photography returned to my own walls. The reclamation wasn't easy—I'd internalized the belief that rest was laziness, that unproductive time was wasted time. Relearning how to simply be took longer than building the businesses had.

This is not an argument against entrepreneurship or secondary income when genuinely needed. It's an argument for honesty about costs. The hours have to come from somewhere—usually from rest, from relationships, from health. Before starting, ask: what am I trading?

Some activities should remain hobbies forever. The thing you do for joy, that has no audience, that generates nothing except pleasure—protect this. In a culture of monetization, the uncommercial pursuit becomes precious. Your worth is not your productivity. Your interests don't need to earn.

Permission granted: do something just because you love it. Let the painting be bad. Let the garden produce nothing but satisfaction. Let the music go unrecorded. Some of the most important things we do are things that produce nothing except ourselves, more fully alive.