Well, you know. We probably shouldn't determine the "point" of doing something by whether it generates money, right?
Hm. Maybe...? But... I'm almost 48 years old. I can't ever "retire" in the normal sense. So my only option is to find work that I love to do, and do that until I keel over. At this point in my life, the "point" (as you put it) is to develop a career that allows me to make money doing something I love. So, in my case, you could say that the point is whether the thing I like to do generates money or not...
I understand your point, but I think you are missing mine. a) I do make my living from writing. b) I enjoy my work. These two things are not a happy accident. They are the result of concerted focus on a specific goal to make money by doing something I love.
At first, I wanted to say, "You are very lucky," because while I love to write, I have come to feel that a career in writing is out of my personal reach. However, I am certain that you have managed to make this happen for you out of skill, perseverance, practice, all on top of some undeniable, but unquantifiable, element of "right place, right time" which might be classified as "luck." (As you yourself say above this.) I'm glad that you have managed to make it work for you, and of course, a little envious. I'd love to hear what kind of writing exactly you do and how you make it pay (article writing? magazine editing? freelancing? fiction books? kindle books? a little bit of everything? do you write only on spec? how long have you been writing/publishing? etc), because I am passionate about and interested in writing. I am greatly interested. But - with that in mind - I am pretty sure such a career is beyond me, and my kind of writing. I said what I said because as an amateur, I have to enjoy writing in order to push at even what little success I've achieved - and I have had to push hard, and I've burnt out a few times along the way. So to me it's important to do things because you love them, not because you achieve success at them. Because if I was doing it for material success I should just stop right now. I don't know, I feel like I'm talking about a circle in very thin slices and maybe, it all sounds the same to anybody else.
I totally got that, and that is exactly why I responded in the way I did. I was an amateur once, too. What I saw in your phrasing was a base assumption that it was silly to think that you could ever do what you loved and make money at it, and I wanted to be a counterpoint to that way of thinking. Anyway, the way I did it was through Marketing. I learned how to market things, how to do marketing writing, etc. You get $20 for this article. And then $50 for that one. And then do a package of three on the same topic for $75. Etc. After a while, someone will like your work. Then they will send you more work. And they will ask you to write other things. "Hey, I know you normally write blog articles for us, but do you think you could do ______?" Yes. Yes, I can! Because writing is writing. It's all stories. There is a goal to be achieved at the end of the article, and there are facts that need to be presented in a coherent order to tell a good story, and you need to not stab your eyes out with a fork when you write it, so you throw in some artistry in the sentence and story structure, and... $500. Then you get offered a $10k, 6-week contract, working on a product launch for a high tech company that needs you in their office, 8 hours a day, developing "content" for their web site, marketing sheets, booth materials, etc. You have just made HALF your annual income in 6 weeks. Anyway. Now I write sales proposals for a tech-ish company. Some organization needs to buy a product that does X, and they put all the details into a thing called an "RFP", and send it out to potential providers. I read it. I figure out if we can do it. I research their company, their use case, our products, what we can do, what we can't do... and then I write a 50-100 page document that tells the story of how amazing these products are and why the customer wants to buy ours. That work hits a lot of my "loves": technology, research, writing, storytelling, etc. Then for fun, I have a bunch of freelance work I do in the evenings. Writing articles, customer case studies, blog posts, editing other people's work, etc. Small things - transcripts, article editing, etc - I get $100 a piece for. I have one client that can send me 4 of these in a week, and they each take me about an hour to do. Sometimes I can do four of them in an hour. Larger Case Studies I get $500 each for. Two or three a month. These can take 1-5 hours each. My day job pays me very well. (Actual amount redacted because it felt weird to write such a big number.) I have two books in the works, one fanfic story, a TV series, and two other screenplays I work on to keep my creative juices flowing and to scratch the creative writing itch. So yeah. I get paid to write, and make a good living at it. It took me 10 years of concerted effort to make it happen, but I did it. The whole reason I go into all of this is because I don't want you to sell your dreams short. There are lots of people like me. But we don't talk about it in public. We just say, "I'm a writer." It feels weird to talk openly about this... there's kind of this unwritten rule that we writers don't really talk about the money end of things. But. Now ya have it. I said what I said because as an amateur...