Also just as an observation: monotony is boring and I think aversion to boredom is a big reason people seek different things (maybe even things that require more skill to perform). Who wants to dance the same dance their whole life?

I feel like people in the past were as susceptible to being bored that we are – maybe even more because there were a lot fewer things to actually do back then.

I don’t think that’s right. What portion of these activities actually is for sale, though?

I sing songs with my kids, and maybe to pass the time alone in a car, but nobody would ever be able to pay me enough to want to do that in public. Nor should anyone want to pay to see my mediocrity on display.

I played different sports when I was younger, mostly playing in unorganized pickup games with no formal teams or uniforms or referees or schedules. I still run and bike, and I still lift weights, but have no desire to enter any formal competitions with any of those activities. But I still work on the skills and the progressions on those activities, and track my performance in my notes/logs.

None of this is commodified. It’s not for sale, and someone else’s experience doing these things can’t be traded for what I get out of doing them myself. Even if there are people who do all of these things professionally, full time, the “commoditized” product has basically nothing to do with what I’m doing. Nor does the fact that people do those things professionally somehow detract from the enjoyment I get out of doing those things myself.

One of the most fundamental human experiences, of cooking food for people to eat, is actually a full time job I’ve had in the past. But the fact that I have cooked many meals for strangers for money doesn’t actually detract from my ability to still cook meals at home for my family, or host dinner parties where I cook for my friends. The value of that activity is more than what can simply be purchased with money, even if I personally have done it for money in the past.

Human experience is for experiencing, and nobody can take that away from me.

Commodification is part of it. But the idea of patronage of the arts goes back to antiquity. It isn’t a capitalist innovation so much as Pop Art, which is a pure manifestation of commodity fetishism.

What’s really changed in the art world over the last twenty years is the obfuscation of Master Artists as a productive force. You no longer have this popular understanding of Van Gogh as a guy who does paintings or Stan Lee as a guy who writes comic books or Hayao Miyazaki as a guy who makes movies. Now you just have these commercial juggernauts that simply churn out generic slop. When you see a drawing of Mickey Mouse we no longer really ask who drew it. When we see some CGI-'d Marvel eye-ball gouger, we barely even recognize the studio that did the graphical designs. Netflix releases anime and we barely know if its Trigger or Madhouse or MAPPA that’s produced it (nevermind the actual individual artists who made the original images), because those credits are cut short to push you into the next episode.

I think OP’s image misses the essential desire for a hobbyist to chase improvement and distinction from peers. Making Art has historically been a cultivated skill with a real lineage of professionals, schools, and mediums. This isn’t just birds singing, on instinct or bees hiving for survival. It is humans attempting to influence one another through passionate expression and collaborating to create works that will outlive them. That’s necessarily going to require skill.

But the people who make the art are fundamental to the art’s creation. The modern capitalist drive is to remove the art from the artist and turn the medium into a fungible unit of exchange rather than a tool of communication.

Professionalization binds the artists to their works by making it exceptional and distinct from peer works. Capital moves us in the other direction, homogenizing and anonymizing the labor to make it easier to price and more saleable in distribution.

I would argue that Capitalism wants us to be bees. To be these mindless workers who do the same job reflexively, over and over, until we die. All so the capitalists can obtain cheap uniform honey.

Then why do birds sing quietly to themselves?

The birds singing is basically the same as some lads pumped full of testosterone yelling “hey sweetie, wanna hang out?” In high street…

This post has had me thinking for most of a day. I kind of love the phrase that these are things that humans just do.

But I think that learning and improving and sharing ideas and methods are perhaps even more a thing that people do. So, practicing and studying e.g. music or dance should be peak human activity.

Making it a business is… let’s say an opportunistic option. Definitely should not be a necessity or a default, but possibly an option.

(40+ years of music practice for me, too. I’ll never be professional, but I also won’t voluntarily ever stop.)

I think you missed the point. It’s not about income at all, it’s about expression. Not speech, expression. It’s about how today most forms of human expression are viewed as only valid if that activity can support a person by making money. Rather than expression being valid because a person expressed it.

Now there has always been people who were particularly talented at expressing themselves and were valued because of it. OP’s point is that as today society says that no one should bother expressing themselves unless they’re one of the talented people who were fortunate enough to turn it into a career. Which is bullshit, express yourself.

People need to have enough time and be calm enough to be able to do things for the sake of doing them instead of for money.

thought i was on linkedin for a sec

maybe they could learn to whistle? Does that require a larynx? For that matter, does whistle count as singing? Now I have so many questions.