But you can string together a serviceable career as a coach/instructor/umpire. My son is a high school player, and there is quite a bit of demand for $100 an hour batting and pitching coaches - most of these guys were college players who didn’t make it further. They do Summer camp work, coach, umpire - and throw together a few odd jobs - not much different than the musician and actor friends I have. Now, granted, they don’t get paid to play the sport they love, but they do continue to get to work in it.
The thing that gets me is that the “smart” kids at school all know how unlikely it is to wind up being an NBA player or movie star - but no one ever sits down and tells them how unlikely it is that a major in History followed by a PhD is going to end up with them in a tenured University position making decent money.
Sure, if its what you love, do it. But you might end up teaching high school. Or as an adjunct with low pay and no job security. Or working in corporate America.
Yes, they are deluded. But gambling provides something that even losers crave - a thrill. It actually stimulates brain chemicals that work like drugs.
This! If there’s one message American popular culture churns out more than any other, it’s “never give up on your dreams.” You get exposed to it over and over and over again. And it’s never following your dreams for its own sake, instead the characters always end up making it big - by virtue of not listening to others who tell them they can’t make it.
I can’t blame people for being seduced by that endlessly repeated message.
Chasing a dream is one thing, expecting it come true just because you entered the race is a delusion. The people who will be satisfied with doing their best will be ok. I am reminded of a story that has been reworked for many industries: When a young man who’s job at the circus was to clean up after the elephants for minimum wage was asked why he didn’t take his education and go out and get a decent job he responded “What?!? And give up show biz?”
I’m a poster child for NOT pursuing your dreams. I’m “the man living in a van down by the river” who put aside my childhood interest and tried to be practical and failed miserably. My personality, appearance and abilities are such that no one would ever take me seriously in my presumed profession. I didn’t choose a college major that plays to my strengths and my interests, so job recruiters view my degree as nothing more than a piece of paper.
Many young people in my life who’ve seen what happened to me have been motivated to drop their practical career ambitions and are pursuing their dreams by majoring in whatever interests them. And many of my classmates became relatively successful pursuing their interests. You can ignore me when I belly flop on your living room coffee table at your own peril. 
There are a lot of people who just don’t care that much about careers. I know people who make a living (sometimes a good living, sometimes far from good) in film, writing, music and the like. They do it because they like it and they don’t think they would like doing ‘normal’ jobs. They very rarely ever think they are going to be famous. They’re not ‘chasing a dream.’ They aren’t stupid; they have chosen to accept a lower income, often, in return for doing something that makes them relatively happy. If everything goes horribly wrong, there’s usually some sort of job or another they can jump into and, really, does it matter that much which kind of office you sit in all day?
But the thing is, if someone had sat me down as a high school kid and told me that my dream was too ambitious for someone like me, I would have written them off as a jerk trying to burst my bubble. Especially as a minority female well-aware of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
If my average kid wanted to be a professor, I’d be worried, but I think I’d still be very reluctant to discourage him. Having a dream is better than no dream. And there are profitable offshoots a person can take on the path to becoming a professor.
Along my professional path, I have encountered quite a few “average schlolars” who are nonetheless well-credentialed and well-employed. Not all of them are the children of the well-connected. There’s a lot to be said for good old fashioned luck.
So I don’t know.
The path to a tenured professorship at least prepares one for other useful occupations. An injury in freshman year of undergraduate school won’t derail that course. Now someone who wants to be a star athlete can major in phys ed and learn something about coaching and training and get some kind of career, but that’s a minority of the people who try. I knew a bunch of guys who started college on an athletic scholarship, skipped the scholarly part of that, and washed out quickly with nothing to show for their efforts. Had they considered taking advantage of that scholarship to work towards a degree things might have worked out better for some, but simply enrolling them for long enough to find out if they’ll succeed as an athlete did them no favors. I wouldn’t count those schools among the well meaning who encourage this kind of thing, they do it deliberately without concern for the consequences.
That’s kind of what I’m talking about; I realize that with every high aspiration career, there are greater or lesser fall-back careers you can have if you don’t make it to the very top.
I’m not talking about the guy who wants to be an astronaut, but who washes out in astronaut training and has to settle for being a professor of geophysics, or a Colonel in the Air Force instead. I’m not talking about the guy who plays college football who ends up not being drafted and ends up a coach at a Div II school. Or the girl who goes to college and gets a degree in drama, acts in a few commercials, a couple tv show episodes, and ends up a drama coach or directing a theater company. Or, you know, the kid who realized that regardless of how good he may be, he’s still too short to play Div 1 offensive line, and ended up getting a computer science degree.
Those aren’t what I’m talking about- they tried and failed, but still managed to build successful careers in the process.
I’m talking about some kid who’s convinced he’s the next basketball superstar and concentrates on basketball to the detriment of academics, because, you know, he’s going to be a superstar. Or the classic pretty midwestern girl who goes to Hollywood straight out of high school to become a star, without actually having a plan past that, or fallback plan or anything.
It’s the lack of planning or rationality that I’m talking about. Setting your sights high is great- people SHOULD do that. I’m not saying people shouldn’t do things they might fail at, but rather that they should be aware of the odds, and plan accordingly.
It’s patently stupid to assume an exceptionalist attitude and not expect that you’ll probably be one of the 99.99% that do wash out before they end up in the NBA or NFL or NHL.
How do people get that deluded? How are they that oblivious? That’s what I want to know.
Because people—a lot of them—are patently stupid, and bad at planning and rationality.
I’d do the same thing I’m doing with my kids “sure, pursue the dream, but have a backup plan.” I have an actress and a baseball player. (The actress is planning on a liberal arts degree and law school and a career in human rights, the baseball player wants to be a pipefitter - he will likely out earn her)
And don’t invest (or plan on having me invest) so much in your dream financially that its becomes a burden. (i.e. parents who have hundreds of thousands invested in sports hoping for a scholarship are not that different than people who load up student loan debt at a third tier school for a History PhD hoping to wind up with tenure).
There are a lot of things that you can do with ANY degree…but unless you have so much sporting talent that you end up going straight into professional sports in high school, an athletic scholarship provides the same thing. (Actors, artists and musicians who skip college have a harder career path, but seem to also have a personality where they don’t need a huge income and picking up temp jobs works)
This one applies to everyone in all walks of life. I am astounded at how often people make significant decisions without a Plan B. Not just in their personal lives, the world of business and politics is full of collapse from this simple failure.
The availability fallacy is when someone overestimates the probability of something they see a lot of. For example, people tend to think there are more murders than suicides during a year because murders get reported more. In fact there are more suicides.
Someone thinks of big stars and overestimates their chance of becoming one.
On the other hand, you are falling into the same trap, since you don’t seem to see the many supporting players, and you seem to have no idea of how they get compensated.
Now, becoming a super star in a major movie has a big component of luck. Making a decent living does not. But you have to have it. My daughter’s manager sorted kids with potential from kids without potential by having them say “I love Cheerios.” I could tell also after being around professional kids. The one kid we thought had it got signed immediately and had major roles in a couple of movies.
And even among professionals there are those with that extra charisma which can propel them higher. I’ve seen that in a kid who has become a major star - no surprise to me.
Now most people can’t tell the difference and so think success is just luck. But professionals can. Parents used to say to us “my kid can do that too.” No she can’t. She is welcome to visit an agent and see if the kid gets signed.
Not luck at all, except in the sense of being born with the proper talent.
With regard to your acting friends - do you live in a major market? (NY or LA.) Do they have an agent? How many auditions do they go to? Are they theater people, or are they willing to do commercials?
Same thing for writers. Are they working on the great American Novel or a short story for the New Yorker or are they willing to write what sells? My wife has 13 books, none self-published. They are non-fiction for middle school kids, and none have any chance of making the NY Times bestseller list - but they pay. And people ask her to write them - none are done on spec.
Sometimes the problem is lack of talent, and sometimes it is unreasonable expectations.
I think in all these cases we are dealing with conditional probabilities. I’m tone deaf - the probability of me becoming a professional musician is way below that of the public as a whole.
We’ve all read of professional athletes who got picked up by trainers and coaches at a very early age because the professional saw they had something. That works for lots of areas.
Writing is particularly rife with self-delusion because it takes a big effort to have something to show to someone, and now it is possible to “publish” without any filters. And availability means one thinks about the success of “The Martian” and not the 10,000 ebooks which sell four copies if they’re lucky.
Maybe they really enjoy playing highly competitive baseball.
The problem with your math is you aren’t accounting for the utility the players and their families derive from playing high level sports. It’s fun and challenging. Of course it’s a sunk cost, but not everything in life is an investment. My ticket to see “The Force Awakens” cost $15 that I will never get a penny back of, but that doesn’t make the money wasted; in exchange I got just over two hours of entertainment, which has real utility.
Some of both
Some of my friends have written what sells. Few of them make a comfortable living at it despite having a dozen books in print. For a few of them, they made a living at it for a while, then had writers block badly enough that they moved on. And a few of them write what they need to write - but those writers have day jobs, they aren’t really writing as a profession.
My actor friends are Twin Cities actors, so not major market. Some of them are Equity, some are not. Some teach, some do standup/improv work. The Twin Cities isn’t a bad market to do this in - there are enough professional stages around here that a theatre actor can make a living if they are good (its probably less competitive in many ways than LA or NYC). A few have done commercials or industrial work. Some do the Renfair circuit - living out of vans and making enough money with a stage routine on weekends to pay for food and put gas in the van.
My musician friends tend to be folk or folk/rock musicians. Again, not terribly commercial. But enough money that they eat and usually pay rent (or have a partner that helps support them).
The artists I know, some are commercially successful, but they choose to work in a utilitarian format (potters who make things that sell at craft fairs and the like, one now retired but professionally successful luthier).
What family? Many of these people are in fact leeching on their parents or other relatives and unable or unwilling to economically support themselves. The fundamental problem is that society has invested a tremendous amount of resources into each child, and for them to waste their lives without making a contribution that benefits society is at a cost to all of us.
Since when is “a contribution that benefits society” a requirement of people? I always understood it to be that you pulled your own weight and didn’t leech off others or the public teat. Other than that, you have no obligation to do anything productive whatsoever.
And I wasn’t trying to imply that failed actors who end up waiting tables have done something morally wrong with their lives; far from it. I was more curious about the mindset that leads someone to pull up roots, move to Nashville, NYC or LA, in the *expectation * that they’ll be a successful actor or musician without having a realistic view of their chances and some combination of a fall-back plan if it doesn’t go well, and a cut & run strategy for determining when it’s not going successfully.
That’s the foreign idea to me; the expectation of success in such an unlikely endeavor, and the lack of alternative planning for when that goes south.