There was a time when people spoke about writing as a ‘labour of love’, with journalists, writers, and reporters passing off the phrase with pride. You wrote because you had something to say, because words mattered, because somewhere out there was a reader who would care.
Thin rewards
Payment, when it came, was modest but real; opportunities existed; editors valued your effort and contribution. Today, the phrase feels less romantic and more like quiet desperation. Loving the work is no longer optional – it’s the only thing that keeps many writers going, because the practical rewards have thinned to almost nothing.
The economics of media have shifted beneath our feet. Publications shrink, budgets disappear, and commissions are replaced with “exposure.” We writers are familiar with the phrase “dying of over-exposure”.
Speed over thought
Algorithms now decide what swims and what sinks, favouring speed over thought, volume over voice. Writers find themselves competing not only with each other but with machines that can produce passable text in seconds. The result is a strange paradox: more words are being published than ever before, yet fewer writers can actually make a living from them.
Passion doesn’t pay bills
What makes it harder is that the expectation of passion remains. Writers are still told to do it “for the love of it,” as if affection for the craft can pay the electricity bill or justify the hours spent on rewrite after rewrite. Passion is powerful, but it has limits. When the industry begins to rely on passion as a substitute for fair compensation, the phrase “labour of love” stops sounding inspirational and starts sounding like a way to justify payment avoidance.
Burning the midnight oil
And yet the urge to write refuses to disappear. Even frustrated writers continue to scribble notes, chase ideas, and argue with sentences late at night. The instinct to shape thoughts into language is stubborn that way. But many are now asking a harder question: who gets to keep writing under these conditions? Increasingly, it is those who can afford to treat writing as a hobby rather than a profession.
That is the quiet tragedy of the current media landscape. A labour of love used to mean devotion to craft. Now it risks becoming a privilege – something only the financially secure can indulge.
Cutting your coat may lead to cold knees and fewer cups of coffee: Idioms
