What happens to life when basic needs, like housing, becomes an investment vehicle? How does you life change when the joy of watching sports is tied up with the idolization of gambling? What do we do with our leisure time when so much of the push around us asks us to monetize our hobbies calling them side-hustles?
This financialization of life steals places to live, increases addiction, and robs us of much-needed downtime in our lives.
If you like this then you can support my writing by buying Analogue Productivity or becoming a member.
How We Monetized Shelter and Made Housing Unaffordable
According to an article found in the September 2025 issue of Maclean’s magazine, the unsold completed condos in Toronto numbered 2000 with 11,000 under construction. A further 11,000 units are unsold in pre-construction projects. In Vancouver there are currently 2000 units sitting empty with that number going up to 3500 by the end of the year if current trends continue1.
That’s a lot of housing units unused in a world where we have a lot of homelessness which makes me think maybe we don’t so much have a lack of living spaces, we just don’t have affordable spaces. The Maclean’s article details how the condo market continued to shrink spaces so that some of these unsold units are barely above 300 square feet which makes mortgages hard in Canada2. While the market shrunk spaces on condos to get more in a smaller footprint prices also ballooned because condo’s were touted as investment vehicles where you could purchase one and then sell it before it was even finished for more money than it was purchased for. As the market collapsed people got into a position where they had leveraged their life savings to purchase a condo that they couldn’t afford and then couldn’t sell.
The lie of how much you earn on investing in houses is just that a lie. This RBC report from 2024 shows that even in hot markets like Vancouver and Toronto the stock market outperformed investing in housing by almost a full percentage point. This lie that seems so appealing has retirees purchasing homes to then rent out, not to regular renters, but to seasonal renters and tourists through AirBNB. In BC a law was recently passed that requires short term rentals to be registered and your principal residence.
But it seems that people have been conned into short term rentals as a cash cow when they aren’t as lucrative as one may think. You have cleaning fees, or time spent cleaning, mortgages on places that may not be worth nearly as much as you purchased them at, plus in the case linked above you leveraged most of your savings into these units intended for rental hoping they will pay you for years to come.
I think the real question is, should housing be viewed as in investment vehicle? I’d have to agree with this UBC report which concludes no it shouldn’t be. Housing should be a primary residence not an investment vehicle, and viewing it as an investment has increased prices so that many can’t afford to live in a home they own, or even rent due to increasing rental costs.
I don’t have a solution, but I do think it’s time to kill the idea that purchasing a house is an investment. We need to find ways to make housing available at reasonable rates to all.
How We Monetized Play and Normalized Gambling
I’m not a huge sports watcher. Sure if someone invites me to watch a game I go and have a good time, but what strikes me now is all the sports betting crap in the broadcast. Before COVID I could go and just watch a game, see some commercials and eat some food. Now I get inundated with ads to bet on every aspect of the game.
Single event sports betting was allowed in Canada as of 2021, and the US led the way on sports betting with a Supreme Court decision in 2018. So what have been the consequences of normalizing gambling?
Unsurprisingly making sports gambling legal has increased its prevalence, with States like Virginia seeing a 973% increase in betting. While most Provinces in Canada opted to run sports betting via Crown Corporations3, Ontario let in online betting firms like Bet365 and DraftKings. While there are no good statistics in Canada for the increase in betting, between April 2, 2022 and March 31, 2023, $35.5 billion was wagered via online sites in Ontario alone. This rose to $63 billion in the second year of online gambling operations in Ontario. Given previous statistics, if we assumed the same amount of people are gambling now as were before regulations were opened up that would say that every single person was wagering $200,000 dollars a year. This number doesn’t seem believable so it’s fair to assume that more people are wagering under the new regime of legalized online betting in Ontario.
Following this legalization studies are seeing a surge in gambling addiction which makes sense since it’s much easier to do now and the advertising is in your face while watching sports. But it doesn’t seem to just be the legalization of online sports betting that’s the issue, video game lootboxes are contributing to the problem as well.
Video game lootboxes have been linked to problematic gambling, with more spending on lootboxes being correlated with gambling addictions. This doesn’t just involve adults either with streamers getting paid and youth watching them gamble which normalizes the activity. Since these streamers are paid though, they’re not really risking anything financially.
The gambling companies know that they’ll make far more money than sponsoring streamers costs them as they normalize gambling and youth become adults who then gamble away their paychecks. Video game companies know that lootboxes are just legalized gambling for kids, but it pays both the companies and the lobbyists that keep government from passing laws against the practice.
Gambling is everywhere now, from digital lootboxes to physical lootboxes in the form of toys, Labubu being the latest in a long list of toys that are half a step away from gambling.
How We Monetized Fun and Killed the Hobby
Finally, let’s assume that you’re not doomscrolling all the time and thus don’t have time for hobbies. You’ve got something you do for fun, in former eras it would have been called a hobby, but now you need to turn it into a side-hustle.
The internet is full of articles about how to turn your hobby into a side-hustle, but should you?
No, you probably shouldn’t.
Even if you find a hobby it can quickly become a guilt ridden practice because you could be earning money instead of doing something for “fun”. I ride bikes and I do take my GoPro on some rides. I’ve been offered sponsorship for videos but the truth is, I don’t want to have to go riding to make a video. Sometimes I just want to ride without the need to take a video of it and publish it on a schedule to meet some contract and make a little tiny bit of money.
I also enjoy making furniture for around my house, which I could put a bunch of work into and turn into a business, but again I like doing it sometimes and other times I have no desire to spend time in the shop. Why would I turn my hobby into a money-making endeavour that requires marketing and “work”.
Most people do it because they feel guilty for not making money at every moment. This comes from protestant work ethic and the myth of the self-made person prevalent in Western culture. It also stems from the quote attributed to Mark Twain:
Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
That sounds like a dream, but it’s not true. I enjoy programming but it’s still a job. I enjoy writing, but I still have to sit down sometimes and force myself to write. I have to work hard to comb through ideas and find connections.
I’d much rather sit on the deck with coffee and do nothing.
Turning your hobby into work, is just that…having a job but in this case you used to do it for fun. You can lose your creativity to the job so that you never want to touch it outside of work. But since everything is financialized now, you better buy those books about how to start a business and turn your hobby into something profitable so that you don’t “waste” time.