I do a lot of things simply to do the thing for its own sake and I've gotten a lot of feedback that people "value" the wonderful things I do out of the goodness

I do a lot of things simply to do the thing for its own sake and I've gotten a lot of feedback that people "value" the wonderful things I do out of the goodness of my heart. And I was homeless for years and hearing that shit about how much everyone "appreciated" how much I "cared" and all this shit while mostly not giving me money for it. The assumption that people should do things for free is an assumption that they have vast resources to spend on benefiting others with no expectation of getting any of that back. Or that they should serve as slave labor out of "virtue." Having done the latter, let me tell you it sucks. In the extreme. If you want the world to be healthy, you need to find ways to do good works that pay your bills and you need to find ways to engage in symbiotic relationships where benefiting others comes back to you. The word for that is generally business. I would like to keep working on the same things I've worked on for years but turn it into an actual business that pays my bills. There is nothing I want more desperately than to do X for its own sake and somehow also live in comfort because I do good things in this shitty world full of shitty people who all want something for free and are happy to take freebies literally from a homeless woman if they can get away with it.