Patreon, CrowdFunding, and “E-Begging” – It’s Time for an Honest Discussion

Post updated May 18, 2018

If you were to ask me 5 years ago what I thought about “crowdfunding” campaigns, I would have told you that I thought they were totally cheesy and that any campaign worth its salt wouldn’t need to hold out the virtual cup; people would be naturally supportive of quality products, endeavours, music, etc.

Particularly as a musician, I quickly grew tired of bands asking for people to pay for their new album production. I would say, “man, just work and save up enough to pay for your own studio time… and if your music doesn’t suck, people will buy it!! That’s how you make money!!”

Old School Work Ethics

I just recently had a phone call with my mom who lives in Ontario, and I was discussing with her our upbringing; how we were raised with that “old school” work ethic, by parents with “old school” work ethics. I was raised to believe, not unlike the wealthy barber, that success means working harder and longer than your peers. Grinning and bearing, not groaning and moaning, and eventually you’ll earn enough clout within your employment to get that pay raise, and then eventually the money would get better… and eventually, you’d retire in your 60’s with a decent savings. Hopefully, you’d be healthy enough to enjoy whatever wealth you’d traded for those hard earned years.

What I was too young and stubbornly conditioned to understand is, time gives no shits about how hard you’ve worked and this life is not to be taken for granted.

You see, when you’re young, you have boundless energy and you’ll live forever while outpacing everyone around you… until you get a little older. With a decade of hard earned and too few dollars under my belt, and my 20’s blown away with over-time, long weekends and holidays spent in the office striving to have the edge over “the competition”, it began to dawn on me that my “quality of life” was not mutually exclusive to my increased earnings; that younger and hungrier, smarter and better looking people would always be nipping at my heels, as I’d been and done to climb the corporate ladder.

I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t satisfied, the “challenges” were meaningless in every real way, to the advantage of someone else’s bottom line. While I fell in line. And slowly waited in line for my time… in a distant future, decades from now.