A Case for Joy in a Monetized World

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” ~William Bruce Cameron

My gardener and I were talking the other day—his English broken, my Spanish worse—but we found a way to connect.

He told me about his eight-year-old son, a bright, joyful kid who loves baseball. The boy wants to play. His mother wants him in tutoring. And somewhere in that gap, a bigger question emerged: what matters more—discipline or joy?

I didn’t plan to give advice, but it came out anyway. “Let him play ball,” I said. “Let him be part of a team, fall in love with something, feel what it’s like to give yourself to a game you care about.” Maybe there’s room for both—tutoring on weekends or part-time. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that too often, we push kids toward what’s useful before they know what they love.

That conversation stayed with me because it reflects something bigger and more troubling: almost everything in life now feels monetized.

From birth to death, we are priced and processed. Pregnancy is a billing code. Daycare is a business. College is debt. Even death has been streamlined into packages—premium, standard, economy.

Want to talk to a therapist? That’ll cost you. Want clean food? That’s extra. A safe place to live? Depends on your credit score. Even our time with loved ones feels rationed by work schedules and productivity apps. There’s a price tag on presence.

The monetization of everything is more than just an economic system—it’s a cultural atmosphere. It creeps in quietly, turning art into content, friendships into followers, and values into branding strategies. We trade attention for advertising, care for convenience. And as the world becomes more globalized, centralized, and digitized, this way of thinking spreads—efficient, scalable, and soul-numbing.

But there’s something that can’t be priced or faked: flow.

Flow is that immersive state where effort disappears, time softens, and we’re fully absorbed in what we’re doing. It’s the feeling of being completely alive and focused—not because we’re chasing a reward, but because we’re in tune with the task itself.

I remember pitching in Little League when I was ten. I wasn’t the best, but for one brief inning, everything clicked. I stopped thinking. The ball moved like it was part of me. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone—I was just there, inside the game. That was flow. And I’ve spent much of my life chasing that feeling through music, writing, teaching.

I’ve spent most of my life as a teacher, filmmaker, and writer. Not because it made me rich—it didn’t—but because it gave me something to live for. Now, at seventy, I help care for my 96-year-old mother, still trying to finish my life’s work with little to show for it in the bank. But the work still matters. So does she.

My mother’s caregivers—mostly women of color—show up every day. They help her eat, dress, and smile. They aren’t paid nearly enough, but they move through their days with compassion, grace, and humor. Their labor doesn’t fit into a tidy spreadsheet of profit. And yet it holds the world together.

I wonder: What happens to a society that forgets how to value the things that can’t be monetized?

We know something’s wrong, but we don’t know what to do. We still need to pay rent, buy groceries, find a way to survive in a system that rewards efficiency over depth, image over presence. There’s no clear answer. Just tension, quiet resistance, and sometimes—if we’re lucky—a moment of clarity.

So I say again: let the boy play. Not to win, or to be the star, but to feel the joy of running with others, of belonging to a team, of laughing, working hard, and learning—together. Let him build friendships that might last a lifetime. Let him feel what it means to be part of something larger than himself, where improvement matters more than trophies.

And maybe, just maybe, let him find flow. On the field, or even in tutoring, if the conditions are right—if the learning is alive and the focus is real. Because flow is the goal, whether in a game or a classroom. That’s where confidence is born. That’s where joy lives.

Of course, I know Little League can be its own kind of heartbreak. When the game becomes about dominance, when adults project their own regrets or insecurities onto the boys, when coaches forget it’s supposed to be fun—it can damage the very spirit it’s meant to nourish.

That’s why it takes the right coach. One who listens. One who knows it’s a boy’s world for a short while, and that this game, at its best, teaches how to care, to lose with grace, to try again, and to trust others.

I told his father all this in our clumsy mix of English and Spanish. I told him I hoped his son gets to play. Not because it will lead to anything measurable. But because it already is something valuable.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do is willingly open the door—and let the players play.