Dear readers, I have been in the midst of an ADHD hyperfixation.
Poetry.
For the past three months, I have been utterly consumed—writing forty-plus poems in three months, which even I have to admit is a slightly absurd amount of poetry
Now, I shalln’t subject you to the entirety of the collection. However, I have shared a few with friends and family, who have begun to gently (and not so gently) encourage me to seek publication. After all, it seems such a shame that such a collection should simply languish on my desktop.
Suddenly, a list of journals sits before me, complete with deadlines looming and pressure quietly building. Some even come with significant cash prizes if the poems are selected.
Isn’t that just the way of hobbies?
The crocheter is asked when she’s opening an Etsy shop. The painter is asked if they’ve considered the local gallery. The yoga enthusiast is told they should teach. The baker is suddenly “volunteered” for every birthday cake in a five-mile radius. And the poet, inevitably, is encouraged to submit to journals.
And it sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?
We are constantly told to pursue our passions. To follow what we love. To “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” A beautiful idea. And also… a slightly suspicious one. Because somewhere along the way, we stopped asking whether turning everything we love into something productive might quietly change the thing itself.
There was once an experiment with children who loved to draw. They were divided into groups—one received an external reward for drawing, the other did not.
The result was surprisingly consistent: the group that drew without reward maintained their interest. The group that drew for the reward lost motivation over time. And the group that received an unexpected reward? They also maintained their enjoyment.
In other words: motivation thrives not on chasing reward, but on the absence of needing one. We are most creatively alive when we are not negotiating with outcomes.
Another study, this time with adults, found something equally odd. One group completed a deliberately dull task before being asked to solve creative problems. The group that had just done the “boring” task actually produced more creative solutions.
Which is funny, because some of my best poetry has never arrived at a desk. It arrives while driving. While walking. While weeding the garden or cleaning something I definitely didn’t want to clean. It arrives when the conscious mind is occupied just enough to step aside.
But that kind of mental spaciousness is hard to come by when every hour is accounted for, optimized, monetized, or squeezed into productivity. And that’s where hobbies quietly begin to change shape. Because turning a hobby into a side hustle sounds empowering—until it isn’t.
At first, it’s just sharing something you love. Then it becomes selling something you love. Then it becomes needing to sell something you love. Then it becomes needing to make something people will buy. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the question shifts from: “What do I want to make?” to “What will perform well?” The hobby is still there. But the play is not. And without play, something essential quietly drains out of the work. Not always immediately. Not dramatically. But steadily—like a color fading from fabric left in too much sun.
The uncomfortable truth is that most side hustles do not pay nearly as much as we imagine they will. Often, the return is small compared to the time invested. Sometimes it amounts to a few dollars an hour—or less—once everything is accounted for.
Which would be fine, if the primary goal was joy. But when the goal becomes income, validation, or traction… the relationship changes. We stop being in conversation with the thing we love. And start being evaluated by it. And I think that is the part we rarely say out loud: Not everything we love is meant to be optimized. Not everything we create is meant to scale. And not everything beautiful needs to become a business plan.
Sometimes the point is simply that it exists at all. Sometimes the point is that it made you feel alive while you were making it. And perhaps the real danger is not that we fail to monetize our passions… But that we succeed in doing so, and lose the ability to enjoy them without permission. So for now, I remain in my poetry hyperfixation. Not as a product. Not as a strategy. Just as a person who has been, for a while, deeply interested in making things that do not need to become anything else.
Oh do not get me wrong, dear reader, I will submit things to journals here and there, but not for any other reason than to put them out into the world. But mostly, I shall continue to focus on having fun.
Budget Bliss: Bucket List 