Then wake up each day for the rest of your life trying to learn as much as possible. Keep going to wherever interests take you.
You might never be able to make money from your interests. And that’s okay. Because having many interests serves the much greater practical purpose of benefiting your mind and achieving your own potential.
Making money from a hobby is a good thing to achieve, but consider what you are expecting if you are expecting to be paid for engaging with art alone.
4 millions books are produced each year and the trend of perennial selling authors is showing declines in sales. Therefore, to even expect an income from the art alone is like deciding to win lotto. Chances are: you won’t.
What you do then needs to come from a different place other than money. Hobbies are extremely important. For the mind, and therefore to life. For if one has no hobbies, boredom will be met with sex, drugs, alcohol and other addictive distractions to try and stave off the uncomfortable feeling of reality.
These distractions are always short lived however and will only increase these feelings of apathy after they’re over. Satisfaction cannot be achieved in the moment, if seeking external distractions is a constant in each moment. If one can never be satisfied with themselves, by themselves, then distraction will always be the means of escape. But one can’t truely escape a mind forever stuck in a frenzied state.
This need to be engaged is something we all always seem now to need to be. It’s what that engagement involves though that makes the difference to the quality of your life. One can be extremely engaged with scrolling through endless media, but this will only ever lead more to anxiety, therefore diminishing the quality of inner experience and even a decline within the mental facilities.
Or one can be engaged with the greatest of tasks, problem finding for difficult problems worth solving, always seeking out deeper levels of complexity. And that will actually achieve quite a different quality state of mind as it is much more creative. It involves being active with your mind and it will increase your intellect. The passive mind will always regress. Whereas the active mind is always in a state of making progress with itself.
In other words, these things that are used as a means to fill time or empty voids do nothing to add any sort of real benefit to your psychic wellbeing. Entertainment is fine. Even enjoyable. But once you’ve managed to transform education into entertainment, that’s when there will never be time to experience boredom ever again.
When a hobby stops feeling like a hobby and feels more like a life mission, it becomes hard to have the time to even think about money, even though you probably should. But you can’t. Because that will only get in the way and stop you whilst engaged.
You have to shun this idea of thinking about how it can make you money and think more about how you can ‘make enough money’ in order to free yourself to continue doing what feels like to you your most important work.
If you choose to do it on the hope that the effort will one day lead to money, realistically, it may not. If that’s what your aim in life is here, there’s far easier ways for you to make money and you should strongly consider alternatives.
There is only one reason, which is the main and only reason why you should continue at your craft: to experience feeling alive. It’s important to have something to be excited about, something that you care about, something that consumes all of your free time and attention to get lost in. We could go ahead and give this kind of activity a new name now:
POSITIVE DISTRACTIONS: SEEK OUT THE ACTIVITIES THAT EVOLVE COMPLEXITY WITHIN THE SELF
Because challenge is fun.
Complexity is fun.
Learning in order to try and find interesting connections in new and unusual places, is fun.
Growth of the mind is good for you.
And being able to never experience boredom is always enjoyable.