i think maybe better advice is "work really really hard and find the closest commercially viable approximation to your dream" there are plenty of stable, well

i think maybe better advice is "work really really hard and find the closest commercially viable approximation to your dream" there are plenty of stable, well paying jobs for all sorts of different skill sets in the entertainment industry. becoming a key grip or an audio engineer isn't a high risk career trajectory. the bigger problem with creative fields is that most of the advice kids are getting is misinformation coming from people who have to idea what the industry actually entails. the quality of art education in the us is fucking abysmal. imagine if you had english teachers who only cared about slam poetry and discouraged students from learning functional writing skills or a music teacher who never taught meter. i never had a single art teacher who taught any representative drawing fundamentals or even hinted at what was required to become an employable commercial artist. anything even remotely representative or commercial was frowned upon. >Putting out advice, "don't do risky stuff" also doesn't harm real risk-takers because they won't take that advice anyway. maybe but when you're only ever told not to do something it doesn't exactly give you a strong footing to take smart risks and further sets up passionate but under informed kids to be exploited because no one ever taught them how to value their work.