You Don’t Have to Monetize The Things You Love
The push for endless growth and scalability comes from multiple places. There’s the capitalist imperative: anything worth doing should generate profit. There’s the social media amplification effect: if something isn’t documented and shared, did it really happen? Finally, there’s the efficiency trap: why do something for ten people when you could do it for ten thousand?
These forces combine to create a kind of growth obligation — a sense that remaining small or finite is somehow a moral failure. It’s a bullshit mindset that misses the whole nature of human experience and satisfaction…
Take the example of a neighborhood potluck dinner. You could theoretically “scale it up” into a massive food festival. You could create an app to coordinate similar events across cities. You could franchise the concept and create “authentic neighborhood dining experiences” for tourists.
But each step toward scale strips away the qualities that made the original valuable: the intimate knowledge of neighbors, the trust built over the years, the inside jokes, the familiar dishes, the comfortable silences. The scaled version might be successful by certain metrics, but it would be a fundamentally different thing…
These bounded endeavors serve another crucial function: they act as counterweights to the increasingly automated, optimized, and scaled nature of modern life. When algorithms curate our entertainment and AI systems handle customer service interaction, small-scale human activities take on a new kind of significance.