You Don't Have to Monetize The Things You Love

My office is overrun with indie comics. Small press runs, hand-stapled zines, hardbound collections, beautifully risographed art books from creators who might never make another comic again. I buy them at small conventions, from Gumroad pages, from artists’ websites, and through Instagram DMs. Each represents a moment in time, a creative burst from someone with something to say.

When some folks discover this collection, they suggest ways to “maximize” it. 

Have I considered becoming a comics reviewer? 

Starting a TikTok channel showcasing indie gems? 

Creating a database for other collectors? 

The questions always orbit around the same gravity well: how can this hobby be optimized, monetized, and transformed into content? 

It’s like they can’t understand why I’d invest time and money into something that won’t “lead anywhere.”

But that’s exactly the point.

We live in an age where everything has to have a trajectory. Every hobby needs a corresponding side hustle. Every interest must be optimized, packaged, and presented for maximum reach. Paint beautiful landscapes? Better start an Etsy shop. Love baking sourdough? Time to launch a baking YouTube channel. Write poetry? Get on Medium and build your brand.

The relentless pressure to scale turns every passion into a potential business opportunity, every creative pursuit into a stepping stone toward some greater “success.”

When did we forget how to do something purely for its own sake?

Consider the local book club that’s met every Thursday for twenty years, discussing novels over wine and cheese. They have no plans to expand, no desire to franchise their format, and no intention of turning their discussions into a podcast. Their impact is bounded by the walls of whoever’s living room hosts that week’s meeting.

And that’s perfectly fine.

Or take the hobbyist who spends his days attempting to solve an obscure mathematical proof. He knows the problem has already been solved through other methods. His approach might be a dead end. But he continues because the journey itself holds meaning for him.

I call these “bounded endeavors” — pursuits intentionally limited in scope, scale, or duration. They’re the antithesis of the “scale or die” mentality that dominates our cultural conversation about success and meaning.

The push for endless growth and scalability comes from multiple places. There’s the capitalist imperative: anything worth doing should generate profit. There’s the social media amplification effect: if something isn’t documented and shared, did it really happen? Finally, there’s the efficiency trap: why do something for ten people when you could do it for ten thousand?

These forces combine to create a kind of growth obligation — a sense that remaining small or finite is somehow a moral failure. It’s a bullshit mindset that misses the whole nature of human experience and satisfaction.

Think about a conversation with a close friend. Would it be “better” if that conversation reached millions? Would its value increase if it were scaled up into a TED talk? Of course it fucking wouldn’t. Some experiences derive meaning precisely from their intimacy, privacy and bounded nature.

The same applies to creative and intellectual pursuits. A zine printed in 100 copies and distributed at local coffee shops might create a more meaningful impact than a viral blog post read by millions but forgotten in days. A community art project that brings together thirty neighbors will almost certainly generate more lasting value than an NFT collection worth millions. But even if they don’t — it wouldn’t make them any less worthy as a human pursuit.

What about the argument that scaling up allows more people to benefit from something good? This reasoning seems noble, but it misses something important.

Take the example of a neighborhood potluck dinner. You could theoretically “scale it up” into a massive food festival. You could create an app to coordinate similar events across cities. You could franchise the concept and create “authentic neighborhood dining experiences” for tourists.

But each step toward scale strips away the qualities that made the original valuable: the intimate knowledge of neighbors, the trust built over the years, the inside jokes, the familiar dishes, the comfortable silences. The scaled version might be successful by certain metrics, but it would be a fundamentally different thing.

This isn’t an argument against growth or scale in all contexts. Some things should scale. Medical breakthroughs should reach as many people as possible. Educational innovations should spread widely. Technologies that make life better should be widely available. If we ever get back to building any, that is.

But not everything needs to — or should — follow this path.

There’s a parallel here with ecology. In natural systems, not every organism aims to dominate its environment. Some species remain in narrow niches, perfectly adapted to specific conditions. They thrive, not despite their limitations, but because of them.

Human creative and social endeavors don’t all need to compete for maximum reach. A writing group that’s met in the same coffee shop for a decade might be exactly as big as it should be. A small-batch pottery studio producing just enough to sustain its owner’s modest needs might be operating at its optimal scale.

These bounded endeavors serve another crucial function: they act as counterweights to the increasingly automated, optimized, and scaled nature of modern life. When algorithms curate our entertainment and AI systems handle customer service interaction, small-scale human activities take on a new kind of significance.

Not everything needs to be efficient. Not everything needs to be optimized. Not everything needs to reach millions of people to matter.

The worth of a bounded endeavor isn’t measured by growth, reach, or profit. It’s measured by the depth of engagement, the quality of experience, and the meaning generated for those involved. Sometimes, the optimal outcome is to have done something well, created something meaningful, and then let it go.

It’s like my indie comics collection.

I could have turned it into content. I could have filmed reviews, written collector’s guides, and started a Patreon. I could have tried to get followers, engagement, and scale.

Instead, I have and will continue to let it be what it is: a personal collection that brings me joy. Its value isn’t diminished by its privacy — if anything, its intimate nature makes it more precious.

To me, at least.

We need to create space in our culture for "dead ends", finite projects, and small things. We need to recognize that “scaling up” often means “scaling away” from what made something meaningful in the first place.

What would happen if we stopped asking, “How can this grow?” and started asking, “What is this thing’s natural size?” What if we evaluated projects not by their potential for expansion but their depth of impact within their chosen bounds?

Choosing to stay small, focused, and finite can be a radical act. It’s a declaration that some things are valuable precisely because they resist the illogic of endless growth.

Collect whatever your version of comic books is for you. Write your poetry. Host your dinner parties. Run your tiny book club. Do it because you love it, because it matters to you and the small circle of people it touches. Do it without any plan for scaling, monetizing, or optimizing for growth.

And when it’s time, let go. Let it be what it was: a beautiful dead end, a path that led exactly where it needed to.