Jettboy What Bith is trying to do is validate his/her own decisions by invalidating the decisions of others. It’s pretty simple.
Is working on electronic music in a small apartment and working at Tully’s less significant or rewarding than working for Warner Brothers records and working on electronic music in a multi-million dollar studio? What validates it here? Is it the money? The access to things that required a lot of money to purchase? What validates the lifestyle here?
Likely Bith has a crush on this girl and she is an artsy type who isn’t in to him because he’s not an artsy type.
Bith, if you want to tell that girl anything about her choices here’s a piece of advice of someone who has spent much time just, ‘hanging out’, in New York. Get to work, working is the best way to meet people. I am not saying work in terms of working at a crappy job, but take an internship somewhere or get involved with some kind of arts community and devote some hours. That’s the way, ‘in’, in New York. It’s much more fun and rewarding in New York to get to work than it is to ‘just hang out’.
That sounds like a reasonable platitude, but I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that with your limited life experience, you do not even have a good way of evaluating what the underlying probabilities and magnitudes of these choices even are.
And perhaps they will fail, just like many who aspire to be lawyers, office drones, and other more market-friendly activities fail.
No, you are not forgiven. Sorry.
This is completely illogical. These more “profitable” fields are in fact highly competitive and there exists a great deal of concentration at the top of the chain. If you want to be an attorney who makes at least decent money by NYC standards, you have to either absolutely love what you do or possess a remarkable ability to absorb punishment. Typically both. This is true in any of the “profitable” sectors. The ranks of doctors, attorneys, investment bankers, and mid level corporate functionaries are full of miserable people who hate their lives.
You have neither the perspective nor the logical foundation to pass judgment so blithely on the risks and dreams of others.
Yes, he does seem to assume that it was different when we were kids. I remember making student films in your Dad’s office!
Bith Listen up, you’re getting grade A advice from a professional risk analyst who is one of the people I’d use as my positive example of someone living the dream who went there by a circuitous route.
It’s better to have a dream than not to have one.
It’s better to take a step or two towards that dream and fall short of it than to just dream.
It’s better still to have a dream, to make that dream into a plan, to work on that plan and live your dream.
For years I dreamed of going to Bali, seeing Hindu temples, climbing volcanoes, snorkeling and surfing in the Indian Ocean. I finally did that last year, having saved money for a long time while working a mind-numbing, soul-crushing job in a call center. In other words, after I worked hard at it. While I was there I came up with an idea for a business and now I’m saving money and making contacts to start that.
I also dreamed of retiring in the tropics, but had no idea how to acheive that. Since I’ve been lucky enough to be in a mortgage for 12 years and I’m now working on a business there, I think I am on the way to living that dream.
For a long time it was just an idle dream, but I’ve worked at it. There have been setbacks and difficulties, but overall I’ve made progress towards it. If it never pans out, at least I can say that I got off my ass and made some progress toward living my dream.
You might not realize it, but following your dreams can take you away from the arts. My daughter was a successful actress at 11, starred in an NYU student film that won several awards, and made some films shown at festivals. Her dream, however, was to do research in economics and become a professor, and she is well on her way. Her husband’s dream was to do space law - with a lot of effort he made it into law school is now busy establishing connections. I’ve had a very happy 30 year career in computer science and engineering, and before that I got to do a dissertation on a topic I was fanatical about.
I suspect that someone barely making it acting, but who is rapturous to the point of orgasm on stage, is a lot happier than a money making actor who hates every minute.
While people often have a variety of different goals, they collectively hold and are encouraged to hold dreams that are not even remotely representative of the real-world job market.
People dream mostly of these:
Any kind of artist: actor, musician, painter, writer…
Doctor
Lawyer
These are the big dream targets. The number of people who believe that they want to be doctors is a lot lower than the number of people who will end up being doctors - not slightly lower, a lot lower. Many of these dreamers do not have a lot of knowledge of what being a doctor is like on a day-to-day basis, what it takes to get through medical school and residency, or what it takes to even get into medical school.
The same, to a lesser extent, could be said of lawyers. While it easier (only easier, not easy!) to get into and through law school, law is nevertheless a difficult and competitive field. Many people think that they want to be lawyers because they don’t have any other ideas of how to make a living.
The sort of dream that I criticized in my OP was the artist dream. I criticized this sort of dream because it is where there is, in my opinion, the greatest discontinuity between the land of dreamers and the land of livers.
Many of you have shown an obscure aggressiveness towards me, suggesting that I have an unrequited crush on my New York-bound coworker (I do, but let’s talk about that in MPSIMS) or that I just want to shit on the dreams of others.
I very much wish that the discontinuity between the number of people who dream of being doctors and the number of people who actually become doctors were smaller, just like I wish that the number of people who could become successful writers was closer to the number of people who wish they could. There are two ways to approach this: increase job availability in those fields or decrease the number of dreamers. I chose to advocate the latter.
Many people go through their early years dreaming of artist/lawyer/doctor because of inevitable youthful ambition. Some hearts have to be broken in their early-to-mid twenties - that’s just how things are. Nevertheless, I think the following things could help more closely align what young people dream of and what they actually achieve:
Increased awareness of jobs that don’t have much notoriety.
Increased awareness of the difficulties posed by certain professions (I met a woman at North Seattle Community College who said she wanted to be a neurosurgeon because they make tons of money. I wanted to lecture her on the sort of life a neurosurgeon actually lives.)
Increased awareness of methods for keeping decent finances while working on your art on the side, for fun.
The third point deserves special attention. I do not begrudge the person who works at Tully’s and works on electronic music at home. However, I think that many people get holed up in the “struggling artist” life stage because they are under the illusion that, within a relatively short period of time, they’ll be able to get a job doing what they love. My closest friend works at a book store and works on his writing at home. He has told me that he hates his job. He has also told me that all through college he had dreams of becoming an artist. Any member of this board who met him would agree that he is employed below his intelligence. I think that, if he had been more cognizant of barriers facing artists in becoming successful, he might have been able to land a better job and still have time to work on his writing when he’s not working.
So it’s not bad to work some unglamorous job and work on your art during your free time. I just think it’s unfortunate that so many people end up being stereotypically impoverished artists when they could have been not-so-impoverished artists. Not wealthy artists, mind you - just artists making more than ten dollars per hour.
I may have created the wrong impression when speaking of money. I do not believe that happiness increases linearly with income, but I do think that it increases logarithmically with income. That is to say, I think that as your income increases, the value of more money becomes more and more negligible. But at lower levels of income, I do think that increases in income make a noticeable difference in one’s quality of life.
So here is a more precise restatement of what I believe:
We need a greater diversification of dreaminess among people in their late teens to mid-twenties. The real world isn’t just composed of artists, doctors, and lawyers. A demographic broadening of career goals would be great.
Stereotypically “struggling artists” might not have to struggle as much if they were more aware of the barriers facing them.
People should know that a step-by-step plan does not reduce the enjoyment of one’s life - it inevitably improves it. Moving to New York is not a bad thing if you know how your finances will line up. It’s a bad thing if you don’t.
Dreamers tend to be too attached to one notion of what kind of life is the right life for them to live. This is almost always counter to reality. The job of doctor, lawyer, or director might seem exciting to someone, but there are tons of less-well-known jobs that the same person might enjoy just as or almost as much.
That’s a very different thing though. I wish more people would follow their dreams too, that is also a wish for a discontinuity between dream and success. One can either temper their dreams or more fully commit to them either way it solves the problem.
Basically my problem with your OP is that you mentioned some odd things. Graphic Designer? That’s some kind of pie in the sky dream where you come from? I could’ve been a professional graphic designer, like really truly, seriously I was on a path to get there. Do you know what stopped me? Lack of ambition. I have dreamed of being a Doctor and a Rock Star also, similarly I was stopped by lack of ambition. I could have been a famous DJ, I was on the track toward that, again stopped by lack of ambition. I had a following, a scene that I created with a handful of other people, there was a period where I couldn’t go to a party without being stuck in one place saying hi to fifty people who passed by. It was brief, but do you know what? I didn’t really want to be a famous DJ hard enough to work for it.
Anything that is worth doing, any career requires you to work for it, they are all competitive and none of them pay exactly what you expect them to. I have recently realized that I have half-assed my way past several pretty good opportunities to make serious money because I didn’t have the ambition for it. I became moderately skilled in several fields and made a decent living. Basically, I did what you are suggesting that people do. You know what? I wasn’t truly successful at anything.
Now I am working toward being a writer. I have a tiny bit of work, one regular client who I work for a few times a year, but it’s real work in the field I want to be in. I still utilize some of my other skills, but even in those cases to be competitive I have to work up my skills and fight for the jobs.
Basically, what you haven’t considered is what happens when you focus on your fallback career to the detriment of your dream, and then fail at your fallback. Haven’t really considered that option much have you?
We are in complete agreement that becoming a neurosurgeon for the money is beyond retarded, so don’t think I disagree with you entirely.
On this specific point, I think you bring up an important issue: the choice of a fallback. In my view, a fallback choice should be one that requires many of the skills needed for your “dream” job, but that has greater job security and allows for greater financial stability.
Nevertheless, I agree that it’s entirely possible to fail at one’s fallback position. This might mean that running straight for one’s dream was a good idea. It might mean that one didn’t pick the right fallback. Or it might mean that one had some serious life issues that would have prevented your success no matter what and which need to be overcome with care. It depends on a lot of different things.
Cite? (This being GD and all.) And the cite should be for people over six years of age.
I suspect many people think that being a doctor is cool before they take biology for the first time, that is.
I’m sure there are a set of people with rock solid C averages who have all sorts of dreams like this, but what is the problem with them having them? Someone with super low LSAT or MCAT scores are going to see the problem soon enough.
As for writing, there are a lot more writing jobs out there than “best selling novelist.” My wife, who is a trained biologist, is now a freelancer doing medical writing and making a fairly decent amount of money at it. She’s had three books published under her name, a few more ghost written, and one she sold which never got published. She makes most of here money writing for medical encyclopedia websites.
The thing you are missing is that all of these things take talent. There is a big difference between having a dream and refusing to face reality. The dream might be going to NY or LA and finding an agent, if you are an actor. Facing reality involves quitting if no agent is interested. But someone without a dream isn’t going to try, and, if you are good, getting into the business is very, very easy.
I was a computer programmer for 14 years, then I decided to follow my dreams.
Now I teach at a private school in England.
My subjects are chess, roleplaying and computer games. :eek:
I earn so much doing this that I could retire 10 years early. The only reason I keep working is that I enjoy it so much.
“OK, let’s see how to mate with a King, Bishop and Knight.”
“There are several ways to win in Civilisation IV.”
“The gatekeeper looks grumpy. He wants to know why he should let you in after dark.”
This is illogical. You are not thinking through the feedback between expectations and the job market.
If many people decided that dreaming of being a cubicle monkey were preferable than dreaming of a career in the arts, there would be greater competition for the former and less for the later. Some of the dreamers on the margin would drift back into dreaming their way into the arts, and thus the equilibrium restores itself. People want to be artists because they perceive the payoff is greater. And very often, they are simply right. It is.
Expectations about what is “representative of the real-world job market” are also often tragically wrong. I am about a decade older than you and went to one of the top five universities in the US. I was surrounded by hordes of budding computer scientists, all with ivy league educations, trained intellects, and dreams of glory. We graduated just in time for the dot-bomb in 2000. I ended up doing as well or better with my degrees in dead languages. I used to pass folks on my way to work on Park Avenue with “Will Code For Food” signs. I went to college with these people.
The same was true for finance thirteen years before. A lot of freshly minted MBAs got fucked when the demand for their labor dried up. Now one of my best friends got her JD months ago from a top school and still has not found a job. This is the worst time for attorneys, like, ever.
Hack jobs are the jobs you fall into and later discover maybe you like, not the ones you aspire to.
So what?
Why?
Your authoritative tone foregrounds your complete lack of actual experience.
Why does this offend you so much? Surely then she will fail early on and the problem will take care of itself. And after all, how do you know how neurosurgeons live?
Learning personal life skills is not exactly a controversial position.
Who should be doing the ten dollar an hour jobs? Why not artists?
You keep repeating that “we need” this. Why?
The real world is not exclusively composed of writers, lawyers, etc. But very many of us really do work interesting, rewarding jobs that we dreamed of. Someone has to. Why not the dreamer? The odds are longer, but for many, the potential payoff is worth it.
Maybe, maybe not.
So says you. Some people benefit from this kind of plan; others don’t. So plenty of people who move to New York fail and go home afterwards. This is hardly disastrous.
Maybe. But you also never know what jobs are actually like until you do them. Under such a veil of ignorance, you might as well aim for the little brass ring. If you fall short, you fall short. It is not the end of the world. Acceptance of these kinds of failures is perhaps are more useful life skill than financial planning.
In a small way, I agree with the OP. Many people sit around waiting for a “dream” job, letting many valuable opportunities pass them by because those jobs seem below them. Many young people also don’t know about paying dues–which sometimes requires doing unrewarding, soul-sucking drudge work for many years before they’ve “made” it. They just want “it”–whatever “it” is–right now.
And I’ll be the first person to say you don’t have to have a dream to have some modicum of success. I have never really had a “dream”, so to speak. I’ve just followed the opportunities that have come my way that have seemed interesting, and just kind of flowed with it. I’m not overcome with joy about my present job, but I make a decent living and I don’t hate it. I’m good at it and have no regrets. So I kind of disagree with the notion that you must have a dream to be successful. Sometimes every day brings something new and you just have to go with it until you can figure out what you what you want. Sometimes that takes a very very long time.
But I do agree that life is easier if you have some kind of waypoint. So a C-average college student wants to become a marine biologist, does poorly on their GREs, and doesn’t know a tunicate from a house cat. Loser material, might as well give up and flip burgers somewhere, right? No, because if they’re really passionate about becoming a marine biologist, they can still become one–the road will just be harder. They may have to take a job as a lab technician in a marine biology lab for a few years while they bone up on their GREs and make contacts who will write stellar recommendation letters. Or maybe in the process of going down that road, they discover scuba diving in coral reefs and decide that’s the dream they were looking for all along, and they become a diving guide. Either way, a dream is fulfilled. The road might not be simple and may take dead-end turns occassionally, but this is life. Nothing in life is simple.
Don’t tell someone to give up on a dream. Give them encouragement and/or advice on how on to reach it. They will learn on their own whether their dream is really meant to be.
You know, there are those of us who don’t really have clear cut dreams or concrete goals. Are our lives not worth living? All I know is that as a young person I could have highly benefited from an adult telling me it was okay not to have a “calling”, that in the absence of some burning passion for any particular path in life, following my aptitudes was a valid and fulfilling choice. I had to hit mid-thirties (having squandered a nice inheritance pursuing a dream that wasn’t really a dream) before I realized that.
FTR, our plan is to live for a year in Manhattan after I retire. I’m from New York, so I know what we’re getting into. I’ve lived all around the country, and there is no place like New York, so I understand the dream very well.
I didn’t mean to imply that someone without clear cut dreams or goals is in any way inferior. My dream was just idle curiosity and an unfulfilled desire to surf until I was 30. I spent much of my life without a real dream. That’s how I know it’s more rewarding to have a dream and work toward living it than not to have one.
Whatever you find fulfilling, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone or get you arrested, I think that’s perfectly valid. If you find meeting your obligations to societal or family expectations fulfilling and rewarding, then do that. Just living a life void of fulfillment, that is really depressing.
How do you really think your Ivy League classmates are actually doing with respect to the rest of the population? What do you suppose the average starting salary of a Computer Science graduate is from your institution?
The figures for job acquisition and starting salary for Computer Science majors and MBAs or JDs from top institutions really don’t go along with what you’re saying. Many graduates with degrees in Business, Law, or Engineering who didn’t get good grades and/or didn’t go to a very prestigious university have to fight hard for jobs after graduation. Many have to accept sub-optimal positions.
But there will never be an economy in which a B.S. in Computer Science is not significantly more useful than a B.A. in Classics. An average Computer Science graduate from my own university will make more money upon graduation and have greater short-term job prospects than any but the most top-notch of Humanities majors.
The single greatest danger - and one that deserves to be brought up - from pursuing MBAs or JDs is the accrual of immense debt. There’s more debt in the case of a J.D. (law school is three years, MBA two years).
If there were fewer people following their dreams of becoming a lawyer, there might be fewer cases of people going to law school and accruing tons of debt only to not get high-paying positions.
Careers in the arts are better for some. The degree of luck, skill, and hard work required to make it in in such a career is often greatly underestimated, which inflates people’s desires for such jobs.
My earlier statement (which you contradicted) that it takes more work to make it in an artistic field than in a higher-paying field is correct. An average college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in accounting has a skill that is in much greater demand than the artistic skills of the average graduate with a B.F.A. in painting. He or she can expect a very livable starting salary if he markets himself with any sense.
By contrast, the artist with the B.F.A. needs to work incredibly hard (non-stop work) and have an amazing degree of artistic ability to make a living from his or her art. This can be said for all not-particularly-practical pursuits: you have to be really good, really persistent, and really lucky just to make a living.
So I singled it out in my OP.
Because then there would be fewer people who are delusional about the sort of career they might actually end up in.
Lots of people learn, in their mid-twenties, that they’re not going to get into medical school or law school the way that they thought. While I wish this sort of disappointment could be minimized, a certain amount of it is inevitable.
It doesn’t offend me, it makes me wish that she was more informed of the hardship and stresses neurosurgeons have to go through.
I know something about the lives of surgeons generally because my mother has worked in the medical industry for the past thirty years and we often discuss how stressful the lives of her MD coworkers are, in some detail.
I think that our emphasis on “following your dreams” often keeps people distracted from the day-to-day reality of not having yet achieved their dreams.
They could be filled in by those with less education and ambition or the unemployed. In my area, I see a lot of competition for near-minimum-wage jobs. I imagine that this is the case in many other parts of America.
I never suggested that those who dream of having certain jobs shouldn’t get them - rather, it’s a fact that many who dream of getting their dream jobs won’t.
It is not clear to me how being aware of the barriers facing them could do anything but help them sort out their career goals and options.
Walking towards the horizon with your possessions in a duffel bag hoping for the best is always an inferior idea. Do I support a Martha Stewart-like approach to everything? Of course not. One should keep one’s eyes open for unexpected events or possibilities. But thinking ahead and considering the various possible challenges one might face or events one might experience is never a bad thing.
Youthful flights of fancy are not harmless. Some people walk towards the horizon and come back with a sack full of debt. The sorts of financial mistakes people make because of a lack of preparation may not seem serious to you, but they are serious to other, less Ivy League adventurers.
Acceptance of failure does not remove financial burden, but financial planning can reduce the likelihood of cumbersome financial burden, allowing one to stay on one’s feet after failure.
You’ve persistently tried to make my views seem more moralistic than they are. People have a right to live out their lives the way that they wish. I wrote the OP and my subsequent posts because I have met more than a few people who seem extraordinarily distraught by their dreams not coming to fruition. Unable to accept that they won’t be a doctor or artist, they fail to latch on to more practical options that might help them both financially and emotionally.
I don’t deny that many people actually are best suited to artistic jobs or heavily sought-after jobs like lawyer or doctor. I merely believe that too many people are distracted by thoughts of success in these fields when their chances of success are not great. I think that many of them do not recognize the amount of hard work and skill required to make it in these fields.
And I still hold on to the idea that, if young people had more realistic views on what is necessary to really achieve one’s dream, they would be in a better place to actually pursue such a dream.
