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This is just a modern newfangled manifestation of a problem artists have always had: When your rent payment depends on your art (I am deliberately sidestepping

This is just a modern newfangled manifestation of a problem artists have always had: When your rent payment depends on your art (I am deliberately sidestepping the question of "what is art?") you are in a shitty situation indeed. What used to be fun turns into a chore. It's better to have a day job, even though it means you can't spend the whole day doing your thing. (I wouldn't necessarily want to anyway, and I don't think I'm alone in that.) Think of your art or fun hobby as like a horse. Making it pay for your rent and food is like throwing a heavy saddle on its back and sitting on it. If you let a day job carry you (or a patron or parent etc.), your thing is suddenly freed from your heavy ass and you can remove the saddle altogether. It will be a lot happier, treat you better, and incidentally run a lot faster too!

anyfoo 8y ago
Yes. Even as a "non-artist", it's well worth avoiding this trap. I'm very careful to not let my software engineering day job get too close to my (quite extensive) electronics hobby. My job can be stressful at times, which I don't consider to be strictly negative, but I have noticed just how much this has impacted my enjoyment of, for example, reading technical articles that are too close to my work subject matters. On the other side, I still have great fun on reading challenging articles, application notes or whole books on different subjects in electronics and signal processing, and my way to ensure that it keeps being fun, is to keep it away from being relevant for my income.
joe_the_user 8y ago
This is just a modern newfangled manifestation of a problem artists have always had. Well, the "independent artist" directly selling to the market place is a fairly new thing in the scheme of things, originally artists had patrons, then galleries and art dealers set fashion. Youtube lets a wide variety of people sell directly to the world and this creates an intensification of the precariousness earlier artists felt. The artist in the modern world is imagined as someone turning a hobby and a dream into a profession but profession artist derives originally from artisans of the middle ages or other time, individuals skilled by no means concerned with "art for art's sake" (coined by Théophile Gautier in the 19th century). Of course, it should be noted that during the evolution of the modern artist, artists' skills increased but simultaneously the artist sold more their sensibility and "themselves" rather than simply selling their skillfully produced products.
Theodores 8y ago
This even applies to studying. It is better to get a 'proper degree' that is 'a job' (of sorts) than it is to study your hobby-interest. Imagine that you were passionate about programming and already managed to get 'facial recognition for seagulls' working on your hand-me-down PC. You could go to university and then find that they start teaching you ASP.NET or ADA or some other dead language that only prepares you for the military or the city. Coding then becomes a matter of dread, herd mentality guessing what you are doing wrong and artificial deadlines. Or even at school this can happen, if Geography is your thing and you are a walking gazetteer, able to talk and learn from anyone no matter where they are from. So 'Geography' would be the natural thing to study, right? A few weeks in you realise that you are only ever going to learn how 'volcanoes work' and 'Geography' then becomes a chore.
egypturnash 8y ago
I dunno, I’ve been absolutely delighted that Patreon has made it possible to pay my rent by drawing arcane comics about robot ladies with Phillip K Dick problems and cartoon animals in space. Especially since I don’t have to crank out product every single day without any break like these Youtube kids do; I can actually have downtime to go for a walk in the park, watch a movie, play a video game... these folks sound absolutely miserable in part because they are constantly working on stuff for their channels, without a chance to build up a buffer, or ever do anything else besides bars survival necessities. To extend your analogy, these folks have to ride that horse all day, every day, from dawn to dusk, and they are starting to get some serious saddle sores.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  (And for what it’s worth, when I believed all the advice from web comics folks from the pre-RSS era that you have to set a schedule and stick to it, no matter what, I was starting to get pretty miserable. When shifted my official update schedule from “Tuesday/Thursday” to “aim for two days a week, don’t fret if life gets in the way”, my job satisfaction shot way up.)
raverbashing 8y ago
To be honest, that applies even to programmers At one point solving the same problems ever again it turns into a chore. There must be some new challenges to have things interesting (either at work or outside)
kozikow 8y ago
I had the same with programming. When I was younger, both my work and hobby were programming related. Regardless how much you enjoy your job, having the same hobby as the day job is not a good idea.
Havoc 8y ago
>What used to be fun turns into a chore. Yup. Part of the reason I'm so wary of kids being told "do what you love" as advice on what career to pursue. Not bad advice per se, but can be tricky for the reasons you highlighted.
tootie 8y ago
Ask Dave Chappelle.
rubicon33 8y ago
> When your rent payment depends on your art I think this applies to ANYTHING you enjoy. Take X activity that you love to do, and start doing it to survive (a paycheck). Suddenly, X becomes a burden and a chore, and your previous love for X goes out the window. I have experienced this with programming. When I started, I thought I had won the lottery. I loved it so much, and to think, I could make money doing this! Well, 10 years later my love has significantly waned. I still enjoy it, and I am content in my job, but I have nowhere near the intrinsic motivation to work that I had when I started.

anyfoo 8y ago

Yes. Even as a "non-artist", it's well worth avoiding this trap. I'm very careful to not let my software engineering day job get too close to my (quite extensive) electronics hobby. My job can be stressful at times, which I don't consider to be strictly negative, but I have noticed just how much this has impacted my enjoyment of, for example, reading technical articles that are too close to my work subject matters. On the other side, I still have great fun on reading challenging articles, application notes or whole books on different subjects in electronics and signal processing, and my way to ensure that it keeps being fun, is to keep it away from being relevant for my income.

joe_the_user 8y ago

This is just a modern newfangled manifestation of a problem artists have always had. Well, the "independent artist" directly selling to the market place is a fairly new thing in the scheme of things, originally artists had patrons, then galleries and art dealers set fashion. Youtube lets a wide variety of people sell directly to the world and this creates an intensification of the precariousness earlier artists felt. The artist in the modern world is imagined as someone turning a hobby and a dream into a profession but profession artist derives originally from artisans of the middle ages or other time, individuals skilled by no means concerned with "art for art's sake" (coined by Théophile Gautier in the 19th century). Of course, it should be noted that during the evolution of the modern artist, artists' skills increased but simultaneously the artist sold more their sensibility and "themselves" rather than simply selling their skillfully produced products.

Theodores 8y ago

This even applies to studying. It is better to get a 'proper degree' that is 'a job' (of sorts) than it is to study your hobby-interest. Imagine that you were passionate about programming and already managed to get 'facial recognition for seagulls' working on your hand-me-down PC. You could go to university and then find that they start teaching you ASP.NET or ADA or some other dead language that only prepares you for the military or the city. Coding then becomes a matter of dread, herd mentality guessing what you are doing wrong and artificial deadlines. Or even at school this can happen, if Geography is your thing and you are a walking gazetteer, able to talk and learn from anyone no matter where they are from. So 'Geography' would be the natural thing to study, right? A few weeks in you realise that you are only ever going to learn how 'volcanoes work' and 'Geography' then becomes a chore.

egypturnash 8y ago

I dunno, I’ve been absolutely delighted that Patreon has made it possible to pay my rent by drawing arcane comics about robot ladies with Phillip K Dick problems and cartoon animals in space. Especially since I don’t have to crank out product every single day without any break like these Youtube kids do; I can actually have downtime to go for a walk in the park, watch a movie, play a video game... these folks sound absolutely miserable in part because they are constantly working on stuff for their channels, without a chance to build up a buffer, or ever do anything else besides bars survival necessities. To extend your analogy, these folks have to ride that horse all day, every day, from dawn to dusk, and they are starting to get some serious saddle sores.

egypturnash 8y ago
(And for what it’s worth, when I believed all the advice from web comics folks from the pre-RSS era that you have to set a schedule and stick to it, no matter what, I was starting to get pretty miserable. When shifted my official update schedule from “Tuesday/Thursday” to “aim for two days a week, don’t fret if life gets in the way”, my job satisfaction shot way up.)

raverbashing 8y ago

To be honest, that applies even to programmers At one point solving the same problems ever again it turns into a chore. There must be some new challenges to have things interesting (either at work or outside)

kozikow 8y ago

I had the same with programming. When I was younger, both my work and hobby were programming related. Regardless how much you enjoy your job, having the same hobby as the day job is not a good idea.

Havoc 8y ago

>What used to be fun turns into a chore. Yup. Part of the reason I'm so wary of kids being told "do what you love" as advice on what career to pursue. Not bad advice per se, but can be tricky for the reasons you highlighted.

tootie 8y ago

Ask Dave Chappelle.

rubicon33 8y ago

> When your rent payment depends on your art I think this applies to ANYTHING you enjoy. Take X activity that you love to do, and start doing it to survive (a paycheck). Suddenly, X becomes a burden and a chore, and your previous love for X goes out the window. I have experienced this with programming. When I started, I thought I had won the lottery. I loved it so much, and to think, I could make money doing this! Well, 10 years later my love has significantly waned. I still enjoy it, and I am content in my job, but I have nowhere near the intrinsic motivation to work that I had when I started.