A couple of people keep telling me that I should be doing my chainmailing or leather working as a side job. I keep saying that I do those things to enjoy them, not to hate them, so why would I add the pressure of making them work? Dealing with suppliers, deadlines, client tantrums.... They just don't seem to get it. All they see is a possible payday.
It’s a quick way to go from loving to hating something. Like you said.
Neither. To the best of my recollection it's a neutral term, referring to someone who's enthusiastic about and interested in understanding food, trying new things and restaurants, and generally in making the consumption of food a hobby. The kind where you develop certain tastes and a knowledge base that other folks don't bother to.
Tell them about the overjustification effect and intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards!
My quality of life is far better served by the stress reduction than it would be by any little amount of income I could derive from making a few custom pieces. When people can buy a butted ring chainmail shirt for US$60.00, that's made in India, why* would they pay $1K+ for something that I made?
I have spent ages…ages…making a modular foam dungeon that has been used a relatively few number of times (want to change that!) but the point is going to my game room and working on it and looking at its progress give me little hits of dopamine that give me positives to think about…when I am focusing on it I can put work and worry aside. I do it when I have time and it’s a time consuming labor of love
Not to mention those are niche skills that probably take time to do properly, so you get to listen to people complain about why you charge so much. My wife used to sell photo-realistic hand drawn portraits of people done in charcoal and pencil. When I first saw one across the room, I thought she was a black and white photographer they were that good. At the time she would charge $100 because for a single person it would take her 8-10 hours to do a job, which honestly isn’t worth her time given the time spent acquiring the skill to do that. First she learned the hard lesson of needing to ask for a deposit up front because people would conveniently forget the price until the work was done and then think it was time to negotiate. Then after getting the deposit, she'd deal with people changing their mind over and over on what they wanted and then complaining what they got wasn't what they wanted and expecting some of their money back. She eventually got tired of being insulted and stopped doing it because dealing with people just sucked the enjoyment out of it. She still does plenty of creative stuff for fun or gifts for family and friends, but refuses to do anything creative for money because of how crappy people can be.
If someone ever pulled that on me, post completion, I'd have a nice bonfire right in front of them. I have had a leather hat project for an actor friend sitting on my bench, in various states of completion, for 3 months now. Not a single complaint from him. He knows that it will be done when it's done and he'll like the results, because he had input on the process.
