Practice now! Now! NOW!

Someday, you’ll want that skill. Someday, it’ll pay off big. Get cracking. Get to work. It’s not going to develop itself and you don’t want to be caught out someday without it. Learn to cook. Learn to dance. Learn to ride a motorcycle.

Learn to relax, god damn it! Giddyup!

I think about skill creep every time I obtain a new interest. Recently, that interest has been photography, and yes you can look at my Instagram. I don’t have a camera, so I use my iPhone. That said, there’s a DSLR at work and I’m getting solidly OK with it.

And what’s the first thing that goes through my mind? Buy a camera, hone your skills, and become a REAL photographer! Get paid! Get famous!

This isn’t the most incredible rubbish in the universe because sometimes people do turn into photographers basically on a whim. If you have $1500 and a library card, you can buy a good camera and borrow a book that will tell you everything you need to know about how to take decent pictures. I spoke to someone recently who did exactly that and now supports herself handsomely by shooting weddings and sleeping babies.

The problem is that then I will have one less nice harmless hobby and one more crank I get to turn for money. When I get strung out on money and sick of grinding, I’ll need to get another relaxing hobby, which I will of course monetize immediately. This is variously called grindset, hustle, and simping for capitalism.

It is tantalizingly possible to make a lot of money simping for capitalism.

I know someone else (not the self-made photog) who says that making money is easy in America – you just have to be willing to do whatever it takes. And take it will. It’ll take everything you give it. If you give it your sense of fun, it’ll gobble that right down and shit out some coins. That ought to tell you something. Your happiness, creativity, joy, and fun are scarce commodities that can’t be farmed, but do have a market rate. The monster that shits money is starving for them and it is never satisfied, but it’s also financially rewarding if you shovel fodder into its gullet.

That brings us to the topic of AI “art.” You’ve seen lots of this, and maybe you, like me, have mixed feelings. I actually think that a lot of the output is pretty cool stuff on its face, but make no mistake: AI art is an attempt to close the loop for the monster that shits money. The money goes into the AI, the AI shits art. The art goes into the money-shitting monster, which shits money, which goes into the AI. The key is that the AI needs less money than you do, so the monster can just keep getting…more full of shit? Give me a break here, I like the metaphor and also I should have been in bed half an hour ago. You know what I mean.

Hustle culture already sucks the joy out of your hobbies and passions by putting a dollar value on them. What happens when you’re no longer necessary to that process? Does that completely devalue what you do, since a computer could meet the market need for your output just as well as you could, or does it free you to have a hobby again?

I’ll conclude with ambivalence. On one hand, hobbies are unstoppable – look at people who still play the guitar for fun. Open mics are lousy with them. On the other hand, what kind of drivel are we about to start accepting as Good Enough To Make Money? Feature-length Marvel movies scripted, acted, and edited fully by automation? The fine art market laundering its money with a vintage Dall-E?

Keep your hobby. When the AI creativity revolution comes around, as it probably will, divorce from the machine generated piss it’ll leak out as it fully expects us to invest for lack of other options. Your friends want to see your home movies, your photos, your watercolors. They don’t give a shit about how much money the robot makes compared to you and they don’t care if you’re famous.