I'm not a Businessman, I'm a Business, Man

I am ambivalent about the lionization of the entrepreneur which has been a growing feature of British society since as long as I can remember. I am half-persuaded by the view that the end state of modern neo-liberal capitalism is a society in which all of the behaviour of homo economicus becomes subjected to market rationalities and theories of exchange until there is nothing left except rational (or irrational) actors existing in atomised isolation - a society in which everybody is an entrepreneur because human social contact is only competition and exchange and nothing else.

But I am also half-persuaded by the idea that it would be great to write RPGs for a living. What would I need to be able to do this?

I stress that this post is not serious. I like the "proper" job which I have and I'm not about to quit it. And I think a life of sitting alone at a keyboard trying to create things would quickly turn me into some sort of long-bearded, filthy weirdo. Human company and variety are important.

However, the freedom to just do something you enjoy, free from the constraints of management or control, sounds very fulfilling. I have worked out that I would probably need to produce a Yoon-Suin every two months in order to be able to live in the manner "to which I have become accustomed" based on prior performance. If I got better with pricing, budgeting, marketing and all of that jazz, then who knows? Could be every three or four months.

Could I do that? Perhaps I could. Free from all other time constraints, I might be able to write things that quickly. On the other hand, the model is based on the heroic assumptions that I could write things that are consistently as good, that the market could bear a new thing by me every three months or so, and that my financial circumstances wouldn't change. Perhaps the most heroic assumption of all is that the pressure to produce wouldn't play on my mind until I was living like a crazed rat. And I want to be a crazed rat even less than a long-bearded filthy weirdo.

We think about money a lot. The requirement to make it limits our freedom. But at the same time, freedom and money are inextricably linked - the more you have of the latter, the more you have of the former. It is because I have money, at least a reasonable salary, that I do not feel the pressures and worries that might very well cripple and restrict me from doing anything creative at all. It is because I have the freedom that comes with money that I can create. By some strange perversity, if I had more freedom my capacity to create might be critically undermined.

"I listen to money singing. It's like looking down from long french windows at a provincial town, the slums, the canals, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad."