My Dilemma with Monetization
Arguably To My Own Detriment
I don’t want to make money.
I have to, against my will, and generally to my chagrin, but I’m adjusting my mindset about money.
Nobody wants to listen to (or be) a broke guy.
Admittedly, this may seem bizarre coming from a guy who works for a bank — trust me, I wish I didn’t.
I would love to be able to write full-time.
Frankly, I would rather still be drawing blood for a hospital to test people for diseases, but when I found out I was becoming a father, I panicked that I wouldn’t be able to provide adequately for my daughter’s future with my phlebotomist salary having no promising upward scaling. I make considerably more annually answering phones for a bank than I did sticking people with needles, testing them for cancer and HIV and swabbing noses for COVID.
Guess which job was harder in terms of skillset, physical strain, and risk factor?
Working for a bank gives me all too clear a picture of the wealth inequality that plagues our world, and how broken our concept of economic empowerment is. People quickly allow their identities to become consumed by what they do to make money, looking down on those with less, and admiring those with more, regardless of how unethically or dishonestly they came to have it.
Evidently, we would sooner reshape our morals than reevaluate how we compensate people for the work they do or our concepts of value. Even though I miss the purposefulness and value of my old job, when I left phlebotomy, I didn’t do so quietly, so going back to it would be a bit of a challenge.
Even though I’ve grown up as a relatively privileged American — with Internet, literacy, a roof over my head, access to water, and food in the fridge (usually), I’ve identified more with the “have-not’s” than the “have’s” for most of my life. My parents were in debt most, if not all, of my childhood, and it always felt like our family lagged behind those of my peers in the “Keeping up with the Joneses”. It’s harder to be grateful for your own blessings when it appears everyone around you is doing better.
The truth is…hardly anyone is. A 2023 survey from Payroll.org reported 78% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, creating difficulty in saving or investing for their future.
On the bright side, we are rapidly approaching an age in which fewer and fewer people will have to work menial jobs for which they don’t have any passion. The positions that won’t be able to be fulfilled by robots and AI is increasingly diminished by the trajectory of artificial intelligence developments. Less and less will we “have” to work, and increasingly we’ll get to be paid to do what we love.
We need to stop attempting to eclipse human creativity and innovation instead of minimizing the amount of time we have to spend doing all the shit we hate doing, and simplifying the shit we have to do. The jobs that technology can’t replace need to be compensated accordingly.
Number crunching and spreadsheet micromanaging should be the bread and butter of AI — not making art, writing songs, and becoming a conversational companion while we spend our waking lives confined to offices and cubicles, growing increasingly disconnected from one another and our shared humanity.
To borrow a phrase from Bill Nye, consider the following — how many industries would Jesus topple just by his healing miracles? Eyeglasses, hospitals, funeral services, medical devices…
And the wine industry? Pfft.
I understand God or Christ’s opinion of how they make their money may not be on everyone’s radar, and while I do respect that, I have absolutely no respect designing businesses around absorbing as much of people’s time, effort, and attention and compensating them as minimally as possible.
Writing has been my passion since middle school. I love words — playing with them, learning new meanings, the inherent poetry of language. The more I pursued a degree in writing, the more it felt like I was being funneled into using my love of language to help companies convince people to buy shit they don’t need, gaslight them into subscribing to email spam, or paying huge sums of money they don’t have for courses they could do without.
If I were to put my passion for language arts to use in this way, I might as well have said “Screw it,” and gone ahead with making an OnlyFans instead of a YouTube channel, since apparently, I don’t have that much of a problem prostituting myself and compromising my values.
I’m extremely reluctant to putting ads on my videos, or becoming a premium Medium member, because that’s just getting that much more out of line with making my content accessible and maintaining creative control over my channel.
I’m finding some level of peace with all of this, I guess.
All that said, if you do feel inclined to support financially:
Buy me a coffee :)
Any and all donations are greatly appreciated, and hopefully I can quit the bank soon.
