Our culture is out of balance in all kinds of ways. One breakdown I don’t think is talked about enough: extrinsic motivation has completely overtaken intrinsic motivation.
This might seem irrelevant right now. Fascism is on the rise, a recession is looming, and (checks notes) there’s a nonzero chance the USA is going to invade Canada. Yes: there’s a lot going on in the world, but I promise you: motivation touches everything that’s happening right now, online and off.
To oversimplify: extrinsic motivation is doing something in order to get something out of it—money, fame, or avoiding punishment. Intrinsic motivation is doing something because you love doing it. Now, no one can be entirely intrinsically motivated. Food, for example, costs money, and for most people working is the only reliable way to get money. My contention is that we’ve tipped way off to the extrinsic side of the scale right now, and it’s making us miserable.
There are obvious symptoms of this. Take the idea that any hobby you have should become a side hustle. There’s nothing inherently wrong with making a few bucks selling your art at the farmer’s market, if you can pull it off. But you don’t need to sell your crafts in order to benefit from them. The act of creation, itself, can provide satisfaction. People like to play instruments even though you could just listen to music on Spotify; people like to bake bread even though you could just buy a loaf at the grocery store. Why? Because there is meaning and joy to be had in the act of developing skills and creating things.
That meaning is underemphasized right now. Throughout our culture we’ve valorized extrinsic motivation and, in some ways, made clear that it’s the only thing that matters. Take the internet (no, really—take it away from me).
At the risk of looking at the past through millennial-shaded glasses, the early days of the internet were built around experimentation and shared interests. People built blogs and posted on them regularly not out of any expectation of becoming famous or getting paid but because it was an interesting thing to do. Some of the most popular early websites, articles, and viral videos were people just messing around with a new artform for the fun of it. There was a vitality to that.
The advent of social media changed this dynamic. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok all prominently tell you how many people have seen a post, turning posting into a kind of competition Eventually there started to be real money at stake—having a post or video go viral could lead to a career. This inevitably led to the internet professionalizing. The cringy attention grabbing thumbnails on YouTube, the websites full of AI-generated re-writes of articles found elsewhere, and the trolling posts that are intentionally upsetting people to increase engagement are all symptoms of this.
Now, there are plenty of people who still post things online for no other reason than they love it. And there were certainly people posting in the pre-social internet because they wanted to build influence or start a career. And there is nothing wrong with wanting people to see the things you create. My contention isn’t that intrinsic motivation is good and extrinsic motivation is bad, only that the balance in our culture is tilted too strongly right now.
This becomes more evident if we look at sectors of the online economy that provide no creative output or tangible benefits to the world. Take sports gambling, which at this point is impossible to avoid learning about if you even occasionally watch a sport. Gambling apps take watching sports—something traditionally done for intrinsic reasons like pleasure, relaxation, and community—and add the extrinsic promise of profit. Gambling ads preach that it is not enough to watch the game for fun—you should be trying to make money at it. And the message is working: American sports gambling netted $13.71 billion in 2024, according to ESPN.
Or, taken even further, let’s talk about cryptocurrency, which is the most extrinsically motivated thing I can think of. Seventeen years after Bitcoin’s launch and these currencies still aren’t used to buy and sell goods on a regular basis. The value of these currencies is entirely tied up in the fact that they might be used for legitimate trade someday, and somehow this idea means crypto assets are worth $2.86 trillion according to Forbes. People don’t buy cryptocurrencies to use them as currencies—they buy cryptocurrencies because they think the price will go up, and the price goes up because people buy the currencies, who buy them because they think the price will go up. It’s an entire “sector” of the economy built on nothing but extrinsic motivation.
The same pattern is playing throughout society right now. It’s happening in arts. Walt Disney reportedly once said “We don’t make movies to make money—we make money to make more movies.” It’s hard to think of a sentence that less accurately describes the company named after him, which these days mostly makes sequels and “live action” remakes. In politics the people who care about actual issues, and want to take concrete steps to address those issues, are drowned out by those who are motivated instead to acquire and hold power for its own sake (or in order to avoid prosecution and/or acquire money). And it’s happening in the media business, as private equity firms acquire newspapers and digital publications only to gut their editorial staffs.
I could keep going. It’s one of those patterns you can’t stop noticing once you think about it. And it’s not something we can fix overnight. What I will say is this: the more time I spend doing things for their own sake the happier I am.
Leave a Reply