Many years ago when I was still a full-time homemaker, I was sometimes stuck watching daytime TV. On some talk show or other, they had two guests that day and one was a famous author. I think it was Jackie Collins.
The other unfortunate guest was a peddler of kitchen gadgets. Every single time he would explain a new gadget, Jackie would casually bust him, saying something along the lines of "Why would anyone do that? For less time and effort, you could just do blah and it would be better for thus and such reasons."
The only example I recall is the guy had a gadget for measuring how many spaghetti noodles you should cook to serve X number of people. I recall it being some bit of plastic with different sized holes in it and you were supposed to put enough noodles through the opening to fill the hole in question.
And Jackie was like "Why would anyone do that? Just cook the entire bag of spaghetti noodles. Leftover spaghetti noodles are wonderful."
That example stuck with me because the device did look like it would be terribly hard to use and I also agreed with Jackie that the smart, time efficient thing to do is just toss the entire bag of noodles into the pot because that's exactly what I did when I made spaghetti. And I did so even though I normally avoid having leftovers.
I get food poisoning more easily than most people and it hits me harder than other people. So I typically am pretty persnickity about cooking only as much as we will eat at meal time with no leftovers.
But as a child my oldest son loved eating cold noodles as a hearty snack and I would keep romano or parmesan in the house so he could add protein to it.
When he was older he learned to use some womderful little apple slicing gadget I bought, so he would have fresh apple slices with his noodles and cheese. Voila! A complete cold meal and he didn't need to hassle mom about it.
So I'm not against kitchen gadgets. Some kitchen gadgets are absolutely wonderful additions to the kitchen, though which ones are wonderful depends in part on the needs and eating habits of the household members.
However, some gadgets are just bad gadgets with no real upside, and this plastic spaghetti-measuring doohickie seemed to be exactly that. It seemed to be a pointless mini Rube Goldberg device for making it unnecessarily hard, complicated and time consuming to cook spaghetti noodles.
I don't think Jackie Collins was trying to be a pill or ruin this guy's presentation. I think she was just blurting out what came to mind and it was just a really unfortunate case of demonstrating how hard it is to monetize wisdom.
It's simply an unfortunate reality that it's much easier to sell stuff and make an adequate income than to sell wisdom.
Sure, you can sell knowledge or information and plenty of people make a living at that. Colleges, universty professors, book authors (often selling physical books) and so forth are more or less in the information business.
But what I have in mind is specifically what Jackie Collins was doing: A small tidbit of information -- a blurb of some sort -- that is basically game changing and that no one would pay for. You can't make a career off of telling people "Skip the gadgets and the hassles trying to measure spaghetti. Just cook the whole bag. Leftover spaghetti is wonderful."
One of the things this world needs to actually mitigate climate change is we need wisdom that will drastically shrink our carbon footprint and the reality is that even if you call yourself, say, an efficiency expert and sell your expertise as some kind of in person consultant, if you prevent people from spending a large sum of money, you probably won't get much of a cut of that.
I have seen people online say things along the lines of "I saved the company (some crazy large figure) and I got a three percent raise the following year. I promptly QUIT."
I saw people at some point complaining that Marie Kondo, famous for her videos of how to fold things beautifully and efficiently, was a "sell out" because she had been de facto promoting minimalism this whole time and now she has a product line.
Well, that's probably where the money is. I didn't investigate it, but I imagine she is making little or nothing from the popularity of her videos. Products tend to be easier to sell than subscriptions or ads.
People also protest online ads. They sometimes also protest affiliate links and various other means to monetize an information source and their criticisms are not without merit.
One of the criticisms is that the easiest way to make money from affiliate links is to actively enourage people to buy the product. This means that "product reviews" are often really a means to advertise the products and this means reviews are often not an honest assessment. Instead, they are very much spun to try to paint a rosy picture.
Consumers want to be warned of bad products, defects and other issues that might negatively impact them. They don't want to read a review that may be intentionally leaving out any negatives because the goal is to sell you the product.
So those sorts of things are all too common on the internet because people need to eat.
For my purposes, making a mint selling products seems like a way to win the battle to solve my financial problems while losing the war I am trying to wage.
I am a bon vivante. I believe in enjoying life.
But I think we are in the pickle we are in with climate change in part because it's much easier to make money at things that make our climate problems worse than to make money at telling people how to live well while living lighter on the land. Telling people how to live on a fraction of that or trying to sell people a product that genuinely uses fewer resources while getting them what they really need seems be a much harder means to support yourself comfortably than the mantra of "Buy my (physical) product!"
I think that is a factor in why I continue to struggle to make ends meet: I do not want to sell a bunch of stuff online and actively encourage the tendency towards North American Affluenza when my actual goal is to tell people "Minimalism is good. You don't need so much stuff. Living without a car is good. You can have a good life without having a giant home, multiple vehicles, taking a plane to a hot vacation spot on a regular basis and so forth."
I think The Good Life can be lived without ruining the world for our grandchildren. I just haven't yet figured out how to get The Good Life for myself while trying to faithfully promote that message and not hypocritically saying "And now pay my bills by filling your closets with this junk you don't actually need!"
I may yet learn to use affiliate links in a way that makes me money and also makes me happy with what I am selling to people and not feeling like I am actively undermining my real goals in order to pursue the almighty dollar, but so far that's not a nut I have managed to crack.
I am often very frustrated with how challenging it has been to monetize my work. I persist in part because I see great potential here for the internet to be a means to help balance those different needs.
I don't actually need TONS of money. If I could get enough of an audience, I feel very strongly this is a potential means to genuinely promote solutions in spite of the inherent conflict of interest in trying to do so.
Trying to do so is generally not a great means to line your own pockets. I think this is a fundamental driving factor in the problems we have: It is quite difficult to monetize a less is more message (especially in a manner that is not hypocritical), people who have enough resources to not need the money for doing so are often living large and may be unable to live smaller, and someone like me who walks the walk may very much need an earned income.
The other unfortunate guest was a peddler of kitchen gadgets. Every single time he would explain a new gadget, Jackie would casually bust him, saying something along the lines of "Why would anyone do that? For less time and effort, you could just do blah and it would be better for thus and such reasons."
The only example I recall is the guy had a gadget for measuring how many spaghetti noodles you should cook to serve X number of people. I recall it being some bit of plastic with different sized holes in it and you were supposed to put enough noodles through the opening to fill the hole in question.
And Jackie was like "Why would anyone do that? Just cook the entire bag of spaghetti noodles. Leftover spaghetti noodles are wonderful."
That example stuck with me because the device did look like it would be terribly hard to use and I also agreed with Jackie that the smart, time efficient thing to do is just toss the entire bag of noodles into the pot because that's exactly what I did when I made spaghetti. And I did so even though I normally avoid having leftovers.
I get food poisoning more easily than most people and it hits me harder than other people. So I typically am pretty persnickity about cooking only as much as we will eat at meal time with no leftovers.
But as a child my oldest son loved eating cold noodles as a hearty snack and I would keep romano or parmesan in the house so he could add protein to it.
When he was older he learned to use some womderful little apple slicing gadget I bought, so he would have fresh apple slices with his noodles and cheese. Voila! A complete cold meal and he didn't need to hassle mom about it.
So I'm not against kitchen gadgets. Some kitchen gadgets are absolutely wonderful additions to the kitchen, though which ones are wonderful depends in part on the needs and eating habits of the household members.
However, some gadgets are just bad gadgets with no real upside, and this plastic spaghetti-measuring doohickie seemed to be exactly that. It seemed to be a pointless mini Rube Goldberg device for making it unnecessarily hard, complicated and time consuming to cook spaghetti noodles.
I don't think Jackie Collins was trying to be a pill or ruin this guy's presentation. I think she was just blurting out what came to mind and it was just a really unfortunate case of demonstrating how hard it is to monetize wisdom.
It's simply an unfortunate reality that it's much easier to sell stuff and make an adequate income than to sell wisdom.
Sure, you can sell knowledge or information and plenty of people make a living at that. Colleges, universty professors, book authors (often selling physical books) and so forth are more or less in the information business.
But what I have in mind is specifically what Jackie Collins was doing: A small tidbit of information -- a blurb of some sort -- that is basically game changing and that no one would pay for. You can't make a career off of telling people "Skip the gadgets and the hassles trying to measure spaghetti. Just cook the whole bag. Leftover spaghetti is wonderful."
One of the things this world needs to actually mitigate climate change is we need wisdom that will drastically shrink our carbon footprint and the reality is that even if you call yourself, say, an efficiency expert and sell your expertise as some kind of in person consultant, if you prevent people from spending a large sum of money, you probably won't get much of a cut of that.
I have seen people online say things along the lines of "I saved the company (some crazy large figure) and I got a three percent raise the following year. I promptly QUIT."
I saw people at some point complaining that Marie Kondo, famous for her videos of how to fold things beautifully and efficiently, was a "sell out" because she had been de facto promoting minimalism this whole time and now she has a product line.
Well, that's probably where the money is. I didn't investigate it, but I imagine she is making little or nothing from the popularity of her videos. Products tend to be easier to sell than subscriptions or ads.
People also protest online ads. They sometimes also protest affiliate links and various other means to monetize an information source and their criticisms are not without merit.
One of the criticisms is that the easiest way to make money from affiliate links is to actively enourage people to buy the product. This means that "product reviews" are often really a means to advertise the products and this means reviews are often not an honest assessment. Instead, they are very much spun to try to paint a rosy picture.
Consumers want to be warned of bad products, defects and other issues that might negatively impact them. They don't want to read a review that may be intentionally leaving out any negatives because the goal is to sell you the product.
So those sorts of things are all too common on the internet because people need to eat.
For my purposes, making a mint selling products seems like a way to win the battle to solve my financial problems while losing the war I am trying to wage.
I am a bon vivante. I believe in enjoying life.
But I think we are in the pickle we are in with climate change in part because it's much easier to make money at things that make our climate problems worse than to make money at telling people how to live well while living lighter on the land. Telling people how to live on a fraction of that or trying to sell people a product that genuinely uses fewer resources while getting them what they really need seems be a much harder means to support yourself comfortably than the mantra of "Buy my (physical) product!"
I think that is a factor in why I continue to struggle to make ends meet: I do not want to sell a bunch of stuff online and actively encourage the tendency towards North American Affluenza when my actual goal is to tell people "Minimalism is good. You don't need so much stuff. Living without a car is good. You can have a good life without having a giant home, multiple vehicles, taking a plane to a hot vacation spot on a regular basis and so forth."
I think The Good Life can be lived without ruining the world for our grandchildren. I just haven't yet figured out how to get The Good Life for myself while trying to faithfully promote that message and not hypocritically saying "And now pay my bills by filling your closets with this junk you don't actually need!"
I may yet learn to use affiliate links in a way that makes me money and also makes me happy with what I am selling to people and not feeling like I am actively undermining my real goals in order to pursue the almighty dollar, but so far that's not a nut I have managed to crack.
I am often very frustrated with how challenging it has been to monetize my work. I persist in part because I see great potential here for the internet to be a means to help balance those different needs.
I don't actually need TONS of money. If I could get enough of an audience, I feel very strongly this is a potential means to genuinely promote solutions in spite of the inherent conflict of interest in trying to do so.
Trying to do so is generally not a great means to line your own pockets. I think this is a fundamental driving factor in the problems we have: It is quite difficult to monetize a less is more message (especially in a manner that is not hypocritical), people who have enough resources to not need the money for doing so are often living large and may be unable to live smaller, and someone like me who walks the walk may very much need an earned income.