You Have Demanded That Professional Goods or Services Be Provided to You for Free. Here Is a Civil Response.

The context for this response is you entering the digital home of a stranger on social media and declaring their professional work product valueless. You’ve gotten this reply in lieu of an instablock.

ABOVE: The infamous Side-Eyeing Chloe meme you have so richly earned.

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{Note: Content creators should feel free to link to this article whenever, in the course of their own professional employments, they find it useful. This piece of my professional work product—born of anguished experience as an independent content creator—is being provided for free.}

Introduction

Did you recently enter a business establishment and demand that its goods and/or services be provided to you for free? Did you make this demand either (a) arrogantly, (b) self-righteously, or (c) exasperatedly?

Did you recently go to work—a place where you’re paid thousands of dollars monthly for your work product—and tell your boss that going forward you’re willing to work for free?

Did you recently enter the home of someone who’s a total stranger to you and give them unsolicited advice about their professional career? Did you, for instance, tell them that whenever they produce work product that is really valuable or important it should be given to you for free, but that you’re okay with them not charging for work product that you personally don’t want—a business plan that would, not coincidentally, leave them financially bankrupt but give you all the free content your heart desires?

Did you recently lecture a stranger about how them not giving you their professional work product for free means that they are clearly (a) a nihilist, (b) a greedy person, (c) unpatriotic, or (d) some combination of all three of these?

Did you go to the workplace of a stranger and heckle them by telling them that their work product is without market value? Did you tell them that a few bucks—maybe even less than the cost of a cup of coffee—is more than weeks, months, or even years of their professional work is worth? Did you do all this while trying to guilt them into giving you free stuff by saying what they are asking is more than you could imagine being able to pay for a good or service, when in fact almost every good or service you’ve ever purchased has cost what this professional is asking for or even much more?

No?

You haven’t done any of these things?

You can’t envision yourself ever doing any of these things?

Then why are you on social media demanding that professionals give you free stuff?

If you think the stuff you want for free isn’t worth what’s being charged for it, that’s no problem at all—just walk on by and say nothing. No professional is upset when you don’t buy their product; you may have noticed that small business owners don’t yell at passersby for not stopping and spending cash at their establishments.

But if you were to decide, instead, to go inside a business (the equivalent of commenting on someone’s social media feed) and arrogantly, self-righteously, and/or exhaustedly demand free goods or services, you’d expect to be thrown out of that establishment instantly, right? And if you persisted in such antisocial behavior, you’d expect the police to be called, right?

Fortunately, you have engaged in your antisocial behavior online. So the worst that will happen to you now is that you will be blocked from viewing the free (i.e., social media-published) writing or other work product of an independent professional whose work you have already declared without value and who you have advised to adopt a business plan that would bankrupt them.

So, be happy! This is the nicest way a professional can call you out for being a presumptuous jerk.

For Aural and Visual Learners

But what if you’ve engaged in the conduct described above and you’re an aural learner?

Don’t worry. We still have you covered. Check out this free video:

And if you’re a visual learner instead, don’t worry! We’ve got something for you folks, too:

Like the song above says, if this article for some reason hasn’t been enough to keep you from harassing independent professionals over their fees rather than just going along on your merry way with your mouth shut—and if your recalcitrance causes you to keep commenting in the vein of your previous social media comments rather than (as you should) deleting the ones you’ve already made—you can expect the digital equivalent of being tossed from a privately owned establishment on your ass: a block.

Conclusion

Since you are a stranger to the author of this article, they cannot know your intellect or reading comprehension skills. So please treat the summary below as a polite but firm reminder of what you should already have understood from the paragraphs and song above:

1. You are free to think my work is worth less than what I charge for it, or even to think that it is worth nothing at all. I am not bothered by this in the slightest, nor am I bothered when someone decides not to pay for any of the goods or services I offer. Part of being a professional is having the right to set my own prices without your unsolicited input, but another part of being a professional is understanding that no one is obligated to use my professional services and that no one should be given grief for declining to use them. That is not why you have been gifted this wisdom-filled article.

2. What you have done wrong is presume to demand for free something you can perfectly well understand is not free—and worse still, something that is not free because an enormous amount of professional work went into it. Chances are you know little about my background, or else you would not have stepped to me in the way you did online. Suffice to say that my professional work product is the result of years and years of education, training, and experience. Just because you want me to have spent all those years of blood, sweat, and tears for your singular and free enjoyment does not mean that that’s what is going to happen. While I will and do sometimes give away my work for free, it is exclusively my judgment as to when and why and where to do that (and, as the case may be, how and for whom).

3. I am particularly insulted because you came into a digital space that is at once my workplace and my home in order to insult me in this way. It would take an enormous amount of familiarity between us for me to be willing to take from you silently what you have done to me here, but of course anyone who actually has any familiarity with me as a human being—someone with bills and a family and self-respect—would not have disrespected me in the way you have in the first instance. I want you to know that I find your presumptuousness breathtaking.

4. You have compounded your error with self-justifications, insults, and/or a guilt trip. Do not point out to me that other professionals have made different choices; if you like those professionals so much, patronize their work instead of mine—that’d be fine. I am not bound by the actions of others any more than you have shown yourself to be bound by the actions of the 99.6% of my audience who do not harangue me in the way that you just have. And it should go without saying that insulting strangers in their digital home/work space, let alone going further than that and actually trying to gaslight them, is contemptible and richly warrants an instablock.

But most importantly, I want you to understand that I believe you will learn absolutely nothing from this article. I long ago learned that people do not change their minds about things unless (a) they have entered a space in which people voluntarily go to have their minds changed (and this article, which you were directed toward but did not—at least not consciously—solicit, is not such a space), and (b) they encounter in that space someone they trust (and clearly you do not respect me, so the chances you trust me are almost nil). Also, though this is a bit repetitive with (a), a mind is only changed when (c) it wants to be changed, which I doubt yours does—as I expect you have been told everything you have been told here before and have simply chosen to ignore it.

In fact, I expect your response to this essay will be to go back on social media and hurl invective at me, giving me the moral license I already had but—for some inexplicable reason—decided not to exercise by referring you to this article in the first place rather than instablocking you. If I do hear from you again in a way that suggests you did not read or did not understand this article, please know that I did not enjoy our brief time together and I am not sorry to have thrown you off my social media feed. In fact, I’m likely wishing I’d simply done so from the beginning.

If, however, you have taken this article to heart and not only won’t ever again do what you did to me but feel regret at having done it to me or to anyone else, I thank you for meeting the basic requirements of living in a civil society that has a market economy.

Howsoever you choose to respond, please be aware that I will not be discussing this further with you. It goes without saying that I wrote this article specifically to save myself the time and energy of doing so. Because—as I hope I have established—my time and my energy do have a discernible value, just as yours do, and it is not zero.

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