It seems a bit meta, maybe even hypocritical, for Ryan to satirize the idea of monetizing the thing you love to do. Don't they say that, if your work is the thing you love, then it's not really work? I don't know. I think Ryan's anticapitalist leftism is showing. Meanwhile, I imagine he's making bank with his videos.
A further point: Ryan's video specifically satirizes the soul-crushing pressures that come with monetization, commodification, or whatever you want to call it. I get that, and I don't deny that that can be one pitfall of capitalism: the market expects you to do that thing you do, to do it well, and to do it all the time until the market finally gets bored of you and leaves you a dried-up husk. But life isn't linear, nor is it lived in a single rut from which there is no escape. A person starts to feel burdened by the thing that brought him success, so he branches out and does something else. Crushing oppressiveness is not the end of the story.
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I only know this guy from the videos I've seen here. He's a talented comedy skit guy for sure, but I've not noticed a political agenda. At least in the ones I recall.
Man, I'd love to monetize my hobbies. Just imagine getting paid to drink beer every night!
If you watch some of the COVID sketches he's done, you'll see he's pro-mask and pro-vaxx.
Do we need to read this skit as an example of "anticapitalist leftism," though? I read it as him saying people need true hobbies--that is, things they do for fun without any financial motive--to give some meaning and joy to their lives. I think what he is doing is pushing back against the "hustle culture" that says you have to be making money in everything you do.
I obviously don't know Ryan personally, but I would bet that he doesn't consider his videos "hobbies," and probably never did--I would imagine that, being a comedian, his end goal was always to figure out some way to make money from his comedy. I'm sure that he has other things that he does just for fun.
Loving what you do for work is something different. I enjoy my job and get a lot from it personally--but it's still a job. I remember when I used to hang out with the homebrewers in Seoul, and I would contribute by baking bread. Quite a few people told me that I should open up a bakery. I imagine that most of these people looked at homebrewing as something that they might eventually turn into a job, but I felt rather differently about baking. I bake because it is fun and I like seeing people enjoy the fruits of my labor. If I were to open a bakery it would probably immediately start being a lot less fun simplybecause I would have to worry about the financial side of things. I might still enjoy it, and I might get meaning from it. Heck, I might even turn out to be a good professional baker. But I like having it as a hobby where there's no pressure and it's just something I can do to unwind.
Well, that turned into a longer comment than I expected. I'm thinking back now to a recent post (maybe yesterday?) where you mentioned your dislike of leftists who see everything through a political lens. Maybe we don't need to apply that lens to this particular skit?
That's certainly one way to read Ryan's skit, but if you look at the overall course of his videos, I don't think my reading is implausible at all.
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