Help me decide my next move.

I don’t like my job. I don’t passionately hate it, but I feel like it’s slowly sucking my soul out.

I’m an artist at heart. I’ve drawn for my entire life, went to college at an art school, and made my living for a couple of years doing murals and portraits. But I also recognized that I had bills to pay and my freelancing wasn’t exactly working out. So I got my soul-sucking job in the graphics and marketing department at an insurance company. I do web design and graphic design. It’s about the most creative position I could get, but its still for an insurance company.

Because it’s such a conservative environment, I don’t have any leeway when it comes to colors or fonts or artwork or sizes or… well… anything. My hands are tied on every project I do. I feel my artistic talents dying a slow death. I’ve got side projects outside of work, but now I find myself doing web design 8 hours per day at work, then coming home and doing another 5-6 hours of web design before bed. Its ruining me.

As I see it, I have a few options:

  1. find a new job. I’m in a good position to do that, since I can wait until something really good comes along and just keep on keepin’ on with my current position until then. But I’m sure that in a couple of years I’ll fall into the same rut.

  2. Freelance/start my own business. I’ve tried this before and failed hard. But I was young and had no idea what I was doing. I’m reasonably sure I could make it work this time, but its a huge risk to quit my job with nothing to fall back on, and I’ve got a house and car and…

  3. Stop doing the web design on the side and focus more on artwork on the side. It’d be a creative outlet and maybe lead to other things. But I still have to deal with the soul-sucking monotony of the insurance job by day.

I know I should complain. Thousands of people would kill for this “problem”. But I can’t stop myself from thinking that I’m not made to retire from an insurance company. I’m an artist, damn it!

Advice?

If it were me, I would start with #3 (it’s what I personally am doing, but not in insurance). You might find that the day job isn’t soul sucking when it clearly supports what you are doing after hours. If it is, then also do #1. If that still doesn’t work, then build up a good safety net and plan before embarking on #2.

Why can’t you get a job at an advertising company? You’ve got the education for it, and now the experience.

It’s a job with a paycheck and benefits (hopefully!) doing what you’re doing now, but instead of the same droll stuff every day there’ll be new opportunities all the time.

My 2 cents.

There will come a time in your life when either your mind or your body starts to fail a little. When that time comes, you start to run out of options and chances. When that time comes, you may well start thinking about lots of things you’d like to do, but have never done. And you will realise, ‘It’s too late… it’s too late… my chances were there, and I didn’t take them’.

You only get one life, and then you’re a long time dead. If there are things you want to do, places you want to go, people you want to meet, experiences you want to have, challenges you’d like to tackle, then now’s the time. One day, you won’t have the option. Life doesn’t come with many guarantees, but I can give you two. (1) You will never, ever get a better chance than now to make a choice to life the life you want to live. Even one day older is one day less perfect than today. (2) You will never, ever look back on your life and say, wistfully, ‘Gee, I wish I’d spent more time working in an office for someone else’.

Everyone always says the same thing, ‘but there are bills to pay’. Yep. But working for someone else, doing a job you don’t want to do, and feeling yourself dying on the inside isn’t any good way to pay them. And don’t forget, a lot of the cost of living comes from having a job. When I quit my job, I found I was able to live a lot more inexpensively, and make huge economies.

Make a choice: do what you want to do, or shut up and carry on living this life, and loathe it in silent resignation to your fate. Tough choice? I don’t think so.

I was in your position ten years ago. I walked out of my job, left the whole office thing behind. No salary, no pension, a very small amount of savings. This year, I’m celebrating ten years of working for myself, doing my own thing, surviving, running a successful business and having a great time. You can do the same. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get to your ten years of happy, fulfilled self-sufficiency. You will have adventures you never guessed, spot opportunities that you can’t spot while you’re in an office being part of someone else’s wealth generation scheme. You will never, ever be bored (I haven’t had a moment’s boredom for ten years) and you will be challenged almost every day. Comfort zone… what’s that? I haven’t been anywhere near mine for so long I’ve forgotten what it feels like. You will accomplish things you don’t even dream you can do, and you will also achieve things no-one around you thinks you can achieve (that’s okay, they can own their negativity, you don’t have to).

If you quit your job, what do you seriously think will happen? Do you think you’ll just sit in a chair and wait until you run out of money and food? Not a chance! The human survival instinct is one of the strongest instincts you have. if you have to survive, you will. If you have to earn money somehow, you will. You are swimming in a sea of opportunities every waking second of your life. You know how to get one person to give you paid work? It’s simple: you ask 100. If you want ten people to give you paid work, ask 1000.

I’m not advocating a policy of recklessness. Quite the reverse. It takes a lot more mental energy and thinking power to survive on your own, and plot a successful path, than it does to just do the commute and be an office drone every day (which I found I could do in an almost entirely mindless way). You will need to think intelligently about your opportunties, and be willling to learn by experience. You will need to work hard. You can make economies so that the bills are smaller, but they still need to be paid, so you need to challenge yourself to come up with ways to pay them. You can do it. Your mind is the greatest computer in the universe. Tell it to find a way to earn money, and it will.

Remember: earning money by working for someone else is always the least efficient way to do it, because the employer keeps a percentage of what you’re worth. When you work for yourself, you keep the employer’s share as well.

It will be tough, but that’s good. You will survive, and you will never look back. The only people who will tell you otherwise are those who are locked in the 9-5 drone life themselves, and can’t bear to see you make the break and achieve a better life for yourself.

Of course, if you don’t want this alternative, then just carry on with things as they are. Your next year will go by. Your next decade will go by. Your life will go by.

Whatever else you do, paint some things that you can realistically imagine 1000 people might want to buy, and set up a home website business. This is the easiest, simplest way to make money the world has ever seen (I’ve done it for ten years, so I know what I’m talking about). Even if you don’t make a fortune, you’ll earn enough to get by from month to month. And in the meantime, you can search the horizon for fresh mountains to climb.

If you want any more practical advice, email me.

I won’t wish you good luck, because wishing doesn’t work and you won’t need it any way. Like the wise man said, the harder you work, the luckier you’ll get.

Great advice Ianzin - great advice indeed. I can not say anything else to the OP but Go where your heart leads you. You’ve go the skills the experience now make it happen.

You went to art school. Have you ever heard of RISD? Rhode Island School of Design? My brother-in-law went there [graduated with an Illustration Major] and his first job out of college was designing web graphics for a news company. He hated it, but then he got the bright idea that he knew a lot of people in his same shoes and they hated their work as well. And what he did was rally 5 of his close friend all RISD grads they started their own business doing graphic advertizing and in one year their company went from a one bedroom flat in Boston to one of the most sought after advertizing conglomerates in Bean Town. They all worked their soul sucking jobs for that first year and did this work on the side. They had a great website designed and supported by themselves, and then when it started bringing in a ton of money, they opened shop and started their own business. One fellow dropped off to get married and do the family thing, but of the four guys who run it now [ all late 20’s] they all own homes and are doing quite well.

Moral of the anecodote - think outside your cube, and DO IT NOW!!!

I am in a similar situation, funnily enough in the insurance industry as well, and it is a hard decision to make. I am not happy in my work, but my work pays me a large amount of money and I spend much of my free time at the theater, the opera, museums, etc. which helps to keep me intellectually stimulated and keep my soul from being crushed by the working world. When you enjoy everything about your life except your work it is hard to decide whether you can suck it up because everything can’t be perfect and overall things are pretty good because your salary allows you to live the way you like or whether you should change before you are stuck where you are and unable to get away. I have decided that I can’t be satisfied with the job I have and there has to be a change, but I haven’t quite figured out what that change should be.

Before I make any changes though I want to be certian that the decisions I make will make me happy. I don’t want to switch careers or make any drastic changes to my life to end up in the same boat this time next year. I am taking my evenings and weekends to do some research and try to figure out what the next best step would be before I take it and how to do it without falling on my face. I recommend you do the same. Read What Color Is Your Parachute, start putting money away so you have 6 months or more worth of living expenses as a cushion, talk to your family and see what they have to say. After all, what is the point of taking a big step forward if you are just going to land in a big pile of dog doo?

Thanks for the advice all, and keep it coming. I’m particularly interested in success stories. Ianzin and I have been emailing back and forth, and he’s got a great success story that’s been very inspirational to me. I’ve got some irons in the fire and have decided I want to make the leap back into freelancing. Sooner is better than later.

I’ve even felt better at my soul-sucking insurance gig since I decided to start seriously pursuing other interests and income.

Is there an “arts” community near you? I hope that you could stay in touch with other artists - show your work in local galleries, attend the different artsy functions, hang out - this helped my daughter get a dream job. She was working as an AutoCAD draftsman (and making a good salary for a college kid) but she’s an “artist, damn it!” like yourself. While she was working this utilitarian job and finishing college, she cultivated friends in the art district - met other artists, went to shows, etc. A few weeks ago she was asked to join the staff at a glass studio. She would never have known about the place, or met the owner if she hadn’t done all that networking. That’s my 2 cents.