Meh. I don’t think you really get it.
I’m not going to be very specific. I was an artist for a significant number of years. No, I didn’t get a ‘job’ doing it- I was the job doing it. It didn’t pay me a million dollars, but I get to remain the artist. It’s gotta be the major contributing factor to my current position (which is mostly a job), though I couldn’t explain exactly how. In the long run it probably actually is worth a million dollars, though it appeared rather worthless at the time.
I want to address this point made in the OP:
I disagree strongly. Art, any art, adds to the human experience and is a fundamental good. This goes for Rembrandt as much as for Romero or Michael Bay. Nietzsche recognised this in making the central characteristic of his Overman be the creative impulse.
I would argue that this is not true. The “average” lawyer is not anywhere near Dali in the amount contributed to the human experience. Dali articulated emotion and encapsulated in a way that still has an impact today. Far better to compare that lawyer to the “average” artist, where there’d be less difference in impact. Or compare Dali to , I don’t know, Darrow or Scalia or someone.
I agree, but this is not the same as the bolded point. You’re inferring this judgment when it is the former that is intended, methinks.
About $15k higher than a humanities major, or at least it was when I a graduated. Then the rest of us catch up quickly, and many of us make far more. There is simply a ceiling to how much you can make writing code all day or designing ball bearings for the space shuttle. I looked at the highest mid-career salaries by college majors, and if I made $109k after 20 years in engineering, I would engineer a way to kill myself. I made more than that with less than five years in analytics.
You are still not understanding the feedback between expectations and the demand for labor. If 20% of today’s youth spontaneously took your paternalistic advice and transferred their hopes and dreams from the humanity-enriching arts to becoming bricks in the wall, the starting salaries for these formerly lucrative college majors would drop and competition for crappier work would be more intense. You’ll see this happen once we figure out how to outsource low level white collar flunkies.
The starting salary for these “useful” jobs is not exogenous. It is higher because the jobs are either undesirable, have high barriers to entry, all impose prerequisite education costs, or have a great deal of competition. Usually all of the above are true. If any of the above are manipulated, say, the perceived desirability of a job, this change will drive a change in salary.
You might want to consider memorizing some economics along with that poetry.
It is by no means obvious why the metric of interest here by short-term job prospects.
I do not think you know very many lawyers. Most don’t dream of, say, spending 90 hours a week on the documents of structured financial transactions. They do it for the money, because it is (was) safe, and had good prospects. And they are miserable, just like most engineers I know as well. At least lawyers are much better paid.
How do you actually know this for a fact?
Do you have any idea what the life of a Big 4 accounting trainee is like? Alternatively, you don’t think settling down when you are 22 years old to do other peoples’ taxes is just a little bit sad?
You keep repeating this more or less, but it is not clear why this would be desirable or why it is even true.
I am sure I can speak for plenty of people out there who would prefer experiencing disappointment than settling for your brand of paternalistic mediocrity.
That was a cheap shot that missed the mark. I had my chuck-it-all and move experience. One of my only niggling regrets is that I did not actually go through with it.
Debts can be repaid. It’s just money, really. It fills no natural need, and if you are somewhat awake, you can always make more. Experience, of a useful kind, typically cannot be so easily purchased.
So you get knocked off your feet. It sucks. But then you get up. This is not a circumstance to be terrified of.
Your views are not moralistic; they are paternalistic. They are the views of someone who has never actually tried to make it on his own, who has never really committed himself to something grand and wonderful because of a perceived high chance of failure. I hope for your sake that you will not find yourself full of regrets in a decade or two.
Strong words, but, like all absolutes, I can hypothesise where it could fall down. Say Kurzweil is right, and strong AI is developed. Such an AI would be self-improving, and rather than being programmed by BS grads, they may need to be communicated with -by philology grads or linguists. And that’s just one possibility.
What is that? You consult people on how to be evil?
Heh, when I worked as an artist (a sculptor in a pottery studeo) I must admit I saw plently of people who lived up to the OP’s diatribe.
My favorite example was one young lady hired out of a reputable art college who one day simply cracked. She was handed a mop and told to clean up: in a snit, she threw the mop down and said something like “I didn’t get an education as an artist to mop. I’m an artist, dammit!”.
We all sort of ruefully laughed: an “artist” who actually works as one does lots of stuff that, either literally or metaphorically, amounts to mopping up. A clay studeo naturally fills with dust if you don’t.
Sadly, the life of a working artist can typically be filled with soul-destroying work as any accountant. The actual creative part is the tip of the iceburg, as above all you are running a business with all that implies - organizing shows, doing taxes, dealing with employees and customers; and above all marketing and promotion.
I’d say a goodly number of artists (probably the large majority) want to do the tip-of-the-iceburg stuff, and have distain or dislike of that below-the-visible-waterline stuff which is, unfortunately, the stuff that most often makes for actual real-world success.
An artist who is not an employee, but who is self-employed, has to be a jack of all trades as much as any small businessperson. This requires much gruntwork. Those unwilling to do the gruntwork had better be supremely talented (and have the luck to be discovered by someone who is both honest and willing to do gruntwork on your behalf), or go into something easier.
Another unfortunate fact is that there is lots of competition, even among people willing to do the work. This means that profits can be thin, even for those with lots of talent. The saving grace is of course being your own boss and producing your own product; but having done that, I personally found that, while I could survive doing it, I could not make it pay enough to be worth it to me; especially as after a while the marketing etc. becomes more and more significant and one might as well be selling any sort of widget: what I discovered was that I loved making art, not selling it. Also, I simply took too long on each product, which cut profits unrealistically.
I’m not saying that no-one should do it: far from it. I simply state that it requires certain attributes for success, of which talent at art is only one, and that not necessarily the most important; and that most starting down this path are not aware of this.
No, I consult on how to write a good villain.
Living the dream. No wonder you picked that username!
While this is no doubt true, I would venture this mindset applies equally well even to more (or less) lucrative fields. If I had a dollar for every time I heard:
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I didn’t go to law school to review pointless and redundant documents. I’m an attorney, dammit!
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I didn’t get my MBA to do templates. I do strategy, dammit!
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I’m not getting my PhD to grade horrible undergraduate quizzes, I’m a scholar, dammit!
The arts, law, business, whatever is full of people who simply do not want to do their time. I’ve worked with all of these people before in my various walks of life. A combination of a sense of entitlement and ignorance of what actual work entails cuts across every discipline I have ever seen. I have had the misfortune to spend time with cohorts of newly-minted MBAs, whose peculiar blend of entitlement and arrogance is equal to any starving artist’s.
Some of the people wise up, other wash out, and further some get lucky and survive on the patronage of others.
The thing about becoming a successful artist is contained in the old addage, “It’s not who you are, it’s who you know.”, which is funny considering that it’s usually spat out as an epithet by people who don’t know the correct people. The solution to this is to get out and know people. This is one of the things about New York with it’s obsessive networking culture that I think sometimes is missing elsewhere. You can meet and know many, many people. Some of the most lucrative and long-lasting relationships I’ve had came out of things that I did for fun, whether it was playing RPGs or organizing Raves. You really just never know who you will meet along the way and how they might benefit you.
It’s always better to shoot for the stars but be willing to take a little less if it comes across. The hardest thing of all though is when your dream job is offered to you and you feel some allegiance to a different lesser job that you worked so hard to get and the company would be screwed in the short term if you simply bounced.
You have to think of the safety issue like this. If you are working your safe job, you might just be keeping that job from someone else who dreams of having it. There are lots of people who dream of supporting a family with a nice home in the suburbs. If you are holding their accounting job, that might screw their dreams over.
It’s optimal for people in society to be working in jobs they love.
A friend of mine quit his job as a dolphin trainer and turned down an opportunity to be a deep sea treasure hunter in order to pursue his career in acting. He just finished post-production on his first feature film where he is both the star and executive producer. If only our lives could all be so charmed!
This is completely true.
Well, for me, there will always be an economy where a B.S. in Computer Science is significantly less useful than a B.A. in Classics.
I have no aptitude or interest in the technical side of Computer Science. Assuming I even managed to finish my degree without dropping or failing out, my career would mostly like be a long string of jobs that I either quit or got fired from. My best option would be to find a job outside of IT, or maybe a non-technical IT job. That, of course, would negate the value of my CS degree.
Or, put this way, even if you could implant the information you learn as a CS major into my head and give me the degree, I still wouldn’t work a programming job unless the pay difference was enormous (as in hundreds of thousands.) I simply loathe staring at a screen all day.
But I am a great teacher.
Funny how things can work out well like that!
Heh I didn’t go to college I went straight into the job market in 1996. Otherwise I would’ve graduated when Maeglin did. The dot-bomb shit came down hard on me as well because I worked in IT as my fall-back, at the time I was really into it. But because it failed I was suddenly competing wiht all of Maeglin’s CompSci friends for the jobs. Became a lot tougher to get work than it was in the free-wheeling dotcom era.
Speaking of people unwilling or unable to do their time, I give you this gem. You just can’t make this stuff up.
Georgetown sophomore seeks personal assistant
Additional bonuses at my discretion.
Often, at the time “dreams” are developed, the dreamer does not have a full idea of the real world options available to them. My friend Ann had an early ambition to be a theatrical costume designer and actually did that for a while but one thing lead to another and she actually ended up being an engineer that designed sewing machines.
If everyone followed their childhood dreams then no one would end up doing things like engineering sewing machines because that’s just not the kind of thing you think of when you are young. However, she likes it just fine.
It’s very easy to let your dreams become the enemy of reality and if you are working at Wal-Mart at age 35 while still pursing your dream of becoming a ballerina chances are it isn’t going to end well, you may be letting your dreams sabotage your life. Something similar happened to a young woman I know.
She had pursued her dream of becoming an actress for 14 years, while basically being supported by a very nice man with a successful business in New York City, who wanted nothing more than to marry her and start a family.
After 14 years of nothing, at age 36 she finally got 1 voiceover job that yielded a real paycheck. In her excitement, she decide that it was now “her turn” and she insisted that her boyfriend close up his business and move to LA with her where she thought her career would have a better chance.
He refused and they broke up, among lots of bitterness regarding his failure to support her “dreams”.
She has now been living in LA for 2 years, in a studio with a roommate and has yet to get another acting job. The ex-boyfriend is happily married to a woman who shares his life goals and they are expecting a child.
Really? Someone went through four years of college and lots of years of grad school and is surprised that professors teach? And is too dumb to get a TA to do it? You seem to know lots of stupid people.
In nearly 30 years of engineering, I’ve met very few miserable people, except for a few who were incompetent, knew it, and were stuck at the bottom. They’d be miserable anywhere. Someone forced into a field they don’t like, either business or law or computer science, is of course going to be miserable - which is why following your dream is a good thing. I write code and I write funny columns for a magazine, and the pleasure in a clever program and a clever column are pretty close. Inventing something is every bit as creative as writing a novel.
The engineers I know get joy from figuring things out and solving problems. I’ve worked for top tier companies all my life, so maybe the story is different in little third tier ones. Just because you have no interest in field X doesn’t mean that everyone working in field X is a miserable cubicle dwelling wage slave.
That’s a great point. One of the biggest benefits of college is the exposure to all kinds of stuff you don’t get to see in high school. No wonder little kids want to be doctors and lawyers - that is all they see on TV. Getting a new dream and acting on it is just as rewarding as following an old dream.
BTW, did your friend have an agent? Did she get auditions? The delusional will always be with us, alas.
WRONG Monstro! Wrong, wrong, wrong.
You should have written …doesn’t know a tunicate from a cat in a tunic. See how much better that is :p?
I otherwise completely endorse your post.
Err…carry on, the rest of you.
This is a distortion, intentional or otherwise, of what I am saying.
I refer to the administrative burden not placed on professors but on grad students, hence the “I’m not getting my PhD to grade quizzes” is in the present tense. Almost every grad student expects to teach, but the volume and actual time commitment surprises many people and they burn out quickly. They just need to suck it up if they want to learn the trade.
I do know a lot of stupid people because I simply know a lot of people. I also know a lot of intelligent people with enormous senses of entitlement. Perhaps it is a generational thing, I do not know.
I suspect there is more than a little survivorship bias operating here, given you are presumably at the peak of your career and have spent the past two decades or so working mostly with senior, committed people.
I would contrast this with my own experience: I have worked with many intelligent, highly motivated people who left all subfields of engineering because, in their own words, “it sucked”. Most of these folks were non-miserable by disposition. It should be noted that we worked together at a highly prestigious and highly competitive Fortune 50 corporation in New York City. My sample is not exactly drawn from personnel at the bottom of the barrel.
I don’t know where you are getting the idea that I think people live miserable lives if they work in areas that do not necessarily interest me. I have never said anything approaching that. I spend all day figuring out things and solving problems, too, and I adore what I do. I also spend a nontrivial part of my life writing code, which I also enjoy.
Plenty of people have left financial services because it sucks. I am one of them.
Because the alternative is less appealing. If I could do what I REALLY wanted I’d be an astronaut porn star, but that never worked out.
I have a long history of failing to accomplish my goals. It seemed the harder I tried, the farther away they got. Maybe that makes me a bad person. Maybe that just makes me stupid or inneffectual.
So my experience in life is not to push, but to just keep an eye out for opportunities that drift by me like logs in a river. It’s worked out pretty well. I’ve lived in some interesting places and I’ve done some interesting things, including directing performances at the Kennedy Center, and I can’t say I’ve worked real hard for any of it.
Right now I’m a faceless drone in a monolithic bureaucracy, and that’s ok too.