How to Deal with Choosing Beggars
What to do when people want you to work for free
Take a deep dive into r/ChoosingBeggars or r/ForExposure on Reddit and you’ll find thousands of tales of entitled people demanding things for free. While the stories are amusing (and sometimes infuriating), they speak to a larger issue, one that many creative people face.
Many people don’t value artists’ work, despite regularly consuming it. Combine that bias with an attitude that artists must be “starving,” and you’ve got a recipe for disaster: Artists whose imposter syndrome whispers to them to lower their prices and “buyers” who figure that artists aren’t making much anyway, might as well get it for free.
Let’s be clear about a couple of facts:
Yes, artists can and should make a living off their art.
Yes, buyers should expect to pay for a product, even if it’s artistic in nature.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s go over what both parties should expect. How can you deal with choosing beggars, and how can you avoid being a choosing beggar?
Choosing Beggars 101
According to the Choosing Beggars subreddit, a choosing beggar is someone who demands a specific item for free, demonstrates unreasonable standards for a…
