If those jobs are all to be done either by people who are essentially incompetent, or by people doing it temporarily as a favor for the short term, then a) an awful lot of them will indeed go out of business and b) a lot of genuinely important work won’t get done.
Except for farmers, I can live without all of them. I know plenty of part-time (hobbyist) artist who creates beautiful crafts; Bookstores are dying a slow death since Amazon; and I don’t drink coffee.
It’s great fun to be a grasshopper till wintertime.
I’m not very helpful, but a sibling helped a cousin get her shit together. She was working odd jobs and taking odd classes at the community college, and really just needed someone who understood the system and help her sort out a reasonable path to wrap up CC and get into / get credits transferred to a 4-year school.
She got the marine bio degree she wanted, which led to work she wanted to do and grad school, which she also wanted.
Sometimes it’s hard to ask for help because you don’t know what the questions are.
In grad school I had this friend, John. He was divorced, a perpetual student, pursuing a PhD in a field that probably wouldn’t take him anywhere. Begging for spare change on the streets of one city so he could get to the next Grateful Dead concert venue, where he’d beg on the streets for the next, et cetera. (He followed them through Europe this way and bragged about it.)
He started dating a woman, Moonstone, who looked like a big-time hippy but during the course of dating Moonstone, John quit school, cut way back on his dope smoing, and got a job that actually paid some money and had nothing to do with his previous supposed career path. Which, as I said, was going nowhere.
Now John and Moonstone didn’t last. But the weird thing was that, for some hippy Wiccan earth-mother type, people around her had to notice that every man she dated went through a similar transformation: She started with some nonmotivated guy, eking out a living at best (living on his parents, getting government cheese, etc.) and ended up with a solid citizen on his way to community pillar.
In John’s case the change was permanent. He got married, bought a house, kept up with his child support and got on much friendlier terms with his ex. I don’t know about the others, I didn’t keep up with them, but John’s ex and I were friends and she had some theories about Moonstone, the main one being that witchcraft might actually work.
Or maybe it was just that time in his life.
I have known several people who were just not motivated to do anything. One guy I signed up to learn appliance repair and when he got out of school he ended up with a good company repairing coin operated washers and driers. He ended up with a decent retirement and profit sharing which was close to a million dollars. I hired a few other people I knew into entry level positions in a diesel garage I ran. Some of them went on to learn the trade.
Sort of like Icarus’s situation, I helped a roommate move out of her “comfort zone” in a low-paying career area into more of a “real job” situation, where she could afford a car and new activities and other things she wanted, in addition to greater financial security.
But I wouldn’t call her “misguided”, just a bit stuck in a field that didn’t give her much room for advancement, in part because that’s where her parents had made their livings and she just wasn’t too sure how one went about having any other kind of career. I didn’t really do much more than tell her that my current employer was looking to hire more people, and reassure her that she did indeed have the requisite job skills and should apply.
Moreover, I don’t think that everybody working in a “marginal” or financially precarious situation is necessarily “misguided”, or necessarily should be encouraged to get on a more lucrative “career track”. I’ve known several people who stuck with low-paying, unreliable work that they happened to love (in the arts, entertainment, community service, etc.), and eventually parlayed it into profitable achievement and reputation.
And thank Og the OP’s helpful friend Phill didn’t happen to meet, say, J.K. Rowling when she was still an aspiring writer and single mother subsisting on odd jobs and government assistance while she scribbled drafts of Harry Potter in tea shops, eh? I shudder to think at all the enjoyment I’d have lost (not to mention all the revenue that the UK government and huge numbers of publishers and booksellers and entertainers etc. would have lost) if Rowling had been persuaded to “start thinking about her future” and give up writing in favor of a “regular job” with a “good salary” and “full benefits”.
What we really need, as other posters have noted, is a decent minimum of social benefits for everybody, employed or underemployed or unemployed. I’m all in favor of people climbing the career ladder if that’s what they want, but they shouldn’t have to choose between working at something they love and doing something they don’t really care about just to avoid dying in miserable penury.
You have a very narrow idea of what an artist is. Without artists, we wouldn’t have great literature, great music or the rare brilliant film. Nor would we have poetry that captures the parts of humanity so well that without it those parts of us would forever remain essentially trapped within us all. We wouldnt have gravity and reality bending architecture around the world. We wouldnt have the great comedians like George Carlin or Richard Pryor. They were artists. “Artist”, imho, means something broader and more meaningful that painting and drawing and maybe photography haha. It’s anyone who is able to express a truth about some element of life in a manner that communicates that truth with such simplicity yet also precision that it transcends function and becomes a source of beauty.
Just want to point out that there’s an unspoken assumption in this thread that the only thing standing between most people and long-term stability, home ownership, and a comfortable two or three decades of retirement is the advice of a concerned capitalist.
While it may feel good to believe in that story, I don’t think it’s true enough of the time to hold water.
Nearly ten years later, my stalker is still working as a part-time cashier at the same store. I don’t see him as often as I used to, but he still harbors dreams of sudden musical stardom (despite having made no progress on any instrument). He’s old enough now to be president, but still living with his retired, aging parents.
I long ago gave up on motivating him to do better. I think he’s passed from “needs to work harder” to “needed to work harder when he was young”.
I used to have parents of my brothers’ classmates call me desperate, asking for help because “you’re the only grown-up he listens to!” (which always left me pretty confused, but whatever). They wanted their kid to study X, kid wanted to study Y. In every single instance I got the parents to change their minds; later did the same with a distant relative who’d decided that since her son had been kicked from the USMC on account of being too thick for them, he should go to law school instead (I understand he’s now a happy mechanic). I’ve also helped people who had an idea of what they wanted to do but didn’t know the path for it or even the words figure both out.
But it was always people who wanted to have a big change happen, people who already had in mind the goal I helped them achieve. Even in the cases of the parents, what I did was show them that the path they were hellbent on wasn’t the best for the intended goal (having their child be a happy, capable, self-supporting adult who had a good relationship with the parents).
Please tell more. Of what level did he help you? I mean was it just small, careful suggestions or was it a strong heart to heart talk? Did he help you map out a plan of classes/training and jobs? Did he help you write a resume and go for interviews? Finally were you at the point of your life where you were ready to make changes?
I think that is why I enjoy the artist work but not the artist themselves. Most of them create beautiful works, but are terrible individuals. Not all, there’re plenty of exceptions.
But what point does someone realize they’re a Florence Foster Jenkins (without the inheritance), and does it as a hobby instead as the main source of income.
Actually, no: the majority of artists are quite nice people; some of those who did things that we find disgusting now were on par with their sociotemporal peers; and many of the things which were found scandalous whenever wouldn’t raise an eyebrow nowadays in most developed countries. And of course there’s those who figured out that being scandalous was good publicity so long as the scandal didn’t involve dead boys.
I just cant see why artists cant look at it as a business? I mean, they have talent to produce great work, well why not look around and see what the market wants and do art that way? I mean if they want you to paint… I dont know… pink unicorns - you paint that. If you can draw - why not try to be a commercial artist? Whatever. THEN you get to the point you can do the work you want.
One of my favorite artists is Winslow Homer. He started out doing what paid the bills, he paid peoples portraits. Only later on when he moved overseas did he start doing his really great work involving ocean scenes.
Not everyone can be a Jackson Pollock and create something new that everyone will fall in love with and pay big money for.
Artists can’t look at it as a business? I guess you haven’t heard of either Dalí, Wagner or Michelangelo, to name three… El Greco practically mass-produced “Portrait of the Holy Family” and “Portrait of the Holy Family with Saint Anne”, precisely because they sold like candy.
But there is a difference between knowing how to sell what you make and aim to produce “what the market wants”. One of the differences between a capital A artist and an artisan whose craft happens to be one in which others produce art is precisely that: the artist can produce unexpected things which are found of interest by people who would never have been able to ask for them if the artist hadn’t. There is also a huge difference between a capital A artist and someone who believes himself one when… nope. But that happens in any field, sadly; I’ve had quite a few colleagues who wouldn’t be able to design their way out of a paper bag yet there they are, getting paid for a job which in theory includes a lot of process design.
Some artists do exactly that, or work on their own creative goals in parallel with art teaching or freelance work or some other job. No reason they shouldn’t, if that’s what they want to do.
Some, though, need to work full time at what’s really important to them to stay on track with their skills and their vision. For some people, painting, writing, music, etc., is not a part-time endeavor and not a marketing opportunity: they’ve got a particular thing they want to do, whether it pays well or not, and if they don’t pursue it they won’t be happy. This doesn’t sound like it was the situation with your friend Phill’s gf, but it is for some people.
And thank goodness it is, right? As I said, consider some of the achievements we’d have lost if the people who envisioned them had gone with the market research and put aside the work they really cared about. The first Harry Potter novel, for example, took over a year to get placed with a publisher and was rejected by twelve others beforehand (all of whom I bet have heartily kicked themselves for that missed opportunity. Oddly enough, I’m now working on co-editing a volume in one of several academic series to be put out by Rowling’s formerly small indie publishing house, who now have more money than God, largely thanks to the Potter phenomenon).
I’m not arguing that the Harry Potter fiction is great art, but it’s super fun and gives pleasure to a lot of people besides making shit-tons of money not only for Rowling but for everyone who works on or distributes her creations. If she had given up her dream for these books and tried instead to write something considered at the time to be more “what the market wants”, rather than toughing it out for several years as a single mother on welfare following her own writing vision, maybe all of that would have been lost.
Long story short: Yes, it’s important to pay the bills, but sometimes artists are better judges than “the market” of what their art should be. Let’s support people transitioning to more lucrative careers if that’s what they want, but let’s also support people struggling to fulfill their non-lucrative dreams.
I knew this guy who basically had no professional experience and was really getting up there in age, to the point I was starting to question who would look out for him in his old age. He had never been able to hold (much less establish) a relationship with a woman. (I’m assuming he he straight.) Not sure he even really had a plan for retirement, as his view of the future was no more thought out than, “the Lord will provide!” But man, that worked for him for most of his life for some reason.
It was as though he was mainly getting by on his ability to get along with people — very charismatic. Just had this way of drawing people in with the way he could speak, and also managed to pick up quite a few languages along the way. Despite all this talent, it was easy to be concerned that he had like nothing in the bank account to deal with the bad stuff that happens to anyone sometimes.
Did I mention that he was basically broke and dependent on the goodwill of others - seriously like handouts - for most of his life. So what am I to do?
Well, there’s a ton of jobs that I think a guy like that can do. He was really into things like philosophy, so I figured maybe he could get a job at like a local public library and enjoy the books and whatnot. Or surely there were other jobs like that that he could qualify for.
So I do a little research and present him with his options. It did not go well. He basically said, “Dammit, Ravenman, I’m not a loser, I’m the friggin’ Pope!”
I suppose he had a point. He could easily parlay that job into a high-ranking corporate position, so library assistant was shooting far too low.
Urbanredneck, a big variable is: what do these artistic skills bring as income in the economy you live in?
A competent singer/guitarist in 1902 might make more money than a waiter. A painter might have been able to make a good living painting signs. Then they invented printers, and record players.
Also, Americans in 2019 are a lot less poor. More of us have indoor plumbing and daily meals.
Another variable: how passionate are you about this art you practice? And beyond survival, what are your other potential income sources? If you can practice engineering, medicine, or law for a living, you might be better off keeping your art as a hobby.
Actually, part of getting my art degree involved taking business courses geared towards a sole proprietor/small business situation, copyright law, and other relevant business-related topics for creative people.
But then, I was serious about plying my art as a career.
I have had some success - just enough that I didn’t qualify for food stamps. 
And my late spouse pursued his music professionally, and did so as a small business. A bit more successful than I have been so far with the visual arts.
It’s not that artists can’t set up as a small business, it’s that a lot of people in general are ill-suited to be entrepreneurs, and are often ignorant of what they need to do to set up as such. Tax problems are common - they don’t know what they don’t know and wind up in trouble with the IRS. Which is why I recommend people at least speak with an actual CPA to set up their finances, if not actually employing one for that purpose. This isn’t something people pick up well by osmosis, and not everyone goes to a school that has the wit to compel would-be artists to get educated.
That is one way to approach it.
Unfortunately - at least in the visual arts, and maybe for others - there are a sort of politics involved as working as a commercial artist doing for-hire work can ruin your potential for creating/selling works that you actually want to sell. You’re almost better off working at something unrelated to your art-for-arts-sake endeavor while working towards a big breakthrough. It’s snobbery. Sort of related to what led to the rules that Olympic athletes had to be “amateurs” doing it for love not money, and professional athletes need not apply. But I digress.
There are several ways to approach being a creative person without starving to death while waiting to have your work catch on:
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Get a “day job” and do your thing in your own time. However, such a “day job” can NOT be the sort that requires 60-80 hours a week input because then you have no time to work on your own stuff. This pretty much means you are NOT going to ever be rich because you won’t be putting 110% into that day job and working it as a career. Because the career you want is the creative thing. It doesn’t rule out having a somewhat comfortable situation, even some retirement planning, but it does mean you aren’t likely to be pulling down six figures year. (That is, in fact, the approach I have taken for the most part, as well as selling visual artworks and some writing I’ve also acquired a pension and a 401(k) along the way.)
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Get a “day job” related to what you want to do. That’s easier for some types of artwork than others. This would be someone who draws/paints getting a job as an illustrator in commercial arts, as an example. It’s not so easy for some other types of artwork, like someone who prefers stone lithography which hasn’t been a major thing since, oh, the late 1800’s. (I had a nice overlap for awhile between my leatherworking and working as a cobbler, but that didn’t work out long term.) Most of my college professors taught as a professors in an art college to provide a stable income for themselves and their families (most successful artists have feast-or-famine sorts of income from their artwork - many of my professors might make thousands on one artwork, but maybe sell one or two a year, or maybe four one year and none for the next. The opposite of “steady income”).
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Become a starving artist, piecing together a meager living between odd jobs and your own work. Maybe at some point you try #1 or #2, or give up the arts entirely. Maybe you die in a garret.
One thing my art school was careful to tell people was that most artists do not make the entirety of their income from their art. For every big success story pulling in millions you have a thousand who are professionals but won’t ever make better than a middle-class (at best!) income off their art. Actually, most won’t even make that. Or they’ll struggle for decades before enjoying some popularity/financial success. It’s not just the visual arts - my spouse the bagpiper could make 5-10k in one day… March 17… but the rest of the year pickings could be slim (LOTS of funerals and weddings, and a couple bar mitzvahs, and some parades over the summer if he had enough of a band to do so). At any given time more than 90% of card-carrying (that’s the SAG card, by the way) actors are unemployed, or at least not employed in acting. In between roles they are waiters, bartenders, carpenters, plumbers, Uber drivers, and Og knows what else. Few professional writers really make all their income from writing - one or two books, or a collection of short stories for the fiction writers and that’s about it.
From the standpoint of financial success it’s a high risk road. From the standpoint of doing what you love it can be very rewarding. The smart ones pick up a fallback skill or two so they have means of bringing in some money in the meanwhile. I took to heart what my parents said about doing what I want as long as I can pay my bills - maybe a bit more than they intended (mom wanted me to be either a lawyer or an architect), and except for a rough patch a few years ago I have done that in my adult life.
Unfortunately, it’s the dumpster-fire walking disaster artists that attract attention. Lots of sex/drugs/rock-n-roll type stories in the tabloids, for example, but how often do you hear about how about Harrison Ford prior to his break-through role as Han Solo worked as a carpenter to support himself and his family? That’s a big name that just about everyone knows, but there are a lot of creative types out there supporting themselves one way or another while also pursuing their passion. You don’t see them or hear much about them because they DON’T stand out. They look rather like normal people for the most part and because they’re not careening from one catastrophe to another they don’t grab your attention.
Hey, up until the 1980’s I made some nice money as a professional calligrapher… then everyone got computers and printer fonts that, along with spellcheck, really destroyed demand for fine handwriting services.
I did try to move into lettering for comic books… but computers were starting to encroach on that, too. All all those other calligraphers who had the same idea at the same time… People have occasionally mentioned that my writing is surprisingly legible and, for large handwritten notes, it almost looks like what you see in comic books…
Well, it wasn’t the last time I had to change jobs due to advancing technology.