7 ms·

> “I could manage quite well working as few as twenty to twenty-five hours a week—in other words, three full days or five half days. Even after I returned from

• TrackerFF 2y ago
  Sure, you could move out to rural nowhere, where housing costs next to nothing. Find some part time job, and live your life. I'm from a place like that, and a bunch of my old classmates from HS have lived like that their entire adult lives working part time. They work 2-3-4 days a week. Of course, you'll be sacrificing lots of materialistic things, but that's a given.
  • medion 2y ago
    100% - but people don’t want to make those sacrifices. They want to live and do what they’ve always done. It has and likely always will be possible to pick up stumps and move somewhere very cheap and get on with a personal creative endeavour - not many have the courage though.
    • financltravsty 2y ago
      Your creativity is a composition of all the novel stimuli you experience. Going out into the sticks, while calming and healing for the soul, is artistic suicide.
      • l33tbro 2y ago
        Cormac McCarthy? Georgia O'Keeffe? Robert Johnson? Plenty of artists excel beyond the urban fringe.
        • financltravsty 2y ago
          I'm sorry, but I don't hold them in high regard as artists. They're part of the "western/southern frontier" crowd that encapsulated the zeitgeists of their environments, rather than create something that transcended it. The "frontier" is a notable and interesting subject in itself, but it has only peripheral cultural value to... civilization.
          • bartonfink 2y ago
            [flagged]
            • blt 2y ago
              I was going to write a more serious rebuke, but I can't really do any better than yours
              • financltravsty 2y ago
                Go for it.
          • cossatot 2y ago
            Much of O’Keeffe’s work relates to gender in a way that was counter to the zeitgeist of the contemporaneous southwest. Johnson more or less embodied a nascent Delta blues, defining it on wax, then died. It was too early in the codification for there be something to transcend. His career was like 9 months long. McCarthy I don’t know, can’t read because I don’t like the violence. Nonetheless your final point is far more vapid because the frontier is where civilization is created and destroyed. It is where norms, values and modes of production of some civilization are placed with decreasing amounts of their domestic support, and usually in increasing conflict with a different civilization, so that it becomes clear what aspects have some more fundamental truth or at least robustness, and what is simply town and gown, responding to the ever shifting attentions of easily bored patrons.
            • 2y ago
    • _acco 2y ago
      You can’t participate in performance arts remotely. Not to say anything about networking, which is critical for most arts.
  • joe5150 2y ago
    If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. vatys isn't asking if you can make any living this way, because of course you can. The specific conditions that allowed Philip Glass to work part time jobs and still live in the same city as people like Steve Reich and institutions like The Kitchen don't exist anymore.
    • JKCalhoun 2y ago
      > If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. I'm not so sure. A lot of art comes out of "affordable areas" — sometimes small college-town ghettos like Athens, Georgia, for example. Why couldn't we get a Philip Glass from Manhattan, Kansas?
      • joe5150 2y ago
        Why not indeed? If there is an orchestra's worth of musicians available and an audience there with the taste and curiosity necessary to support avant garde performing arts, anything can happen. It's easier now than ever to put a band together in your college town or even record and release music without ever leaving your bedroom, but beyond that scale you still need a critical mass of creative collaborators all in one place to pull it off.
        • creer 2y ago
          There are orchestras everywhere. Because musicians want to play and directors want to direct and any random school has a performance hall. Whether they are all that good is another question, but that's true of big cities in the US also. And audience is still another question: I expect you don't get to have all that much of an audience until you have somewhat made it. No doubt Philip Glass didn't start with much of an audience. Most artists that try to invent something new start with essentially no audience. They don't create that for the big bucks.
          • 2y ago
  • CalRobert 2y ago
    I did that, and it was horrible. The people were nasty, mean, and intellectually incurious. Conformity was valued over all other traits. Some places might be better, but this is a dangerous option.
• baerrie 2y ago
  In New York particularly this could maybe work. They have strong blue collar unions so benefits and pay would be actually livable. Plumbing anywhere is pretty viable. Faulkner worked in construction and did a similar thing. I am working in tech to fund my creative pursuits, an industry on its way to being blue collar
  • hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    Not at all. Do you know what it actually takes to get in to those blue collar unions in NYC? It's not at all a "I can just show up, with no experience, and convince a business owner to give me a job" like Glass did.
    • neaanopri 2y ago
      Well it sounds like glass was charismatic enough to get people to take a chance on him
  • JKCalhoun 2y ago
    Glass learning plumbing by asking the guys working at the hardware store sounds more like handy-man work, not a union job.
  • thechao 2y ago
    > I am working in tech to fund my creative pursuits, an industry on its way to being blue collar I can't tell if you think tech or art is going to be blue collar, but based on the AI revolution, you should stay in tech, or join UA.
• mmooss 2y ago
  IME, my impression, is that far more people today are in 'survival' mode - the fight/fligh/freeze response: not trying to create, build, and self-actualize but to survive, and ridiculing - as people in that mode do - art, humanities (and humanitarianism), knowledge, etc. Advocating the value in those things is now transgressive, IME. 'That's all pointless!' they say - and yes it's pointless if your only goal is to survive a week or maybe a year, and make nothing better of the world.
  • jordwest 2y ago
    In my experience, that attitude for me was due to the devaluing of spirituality and the resulting overemphasis on rationality. Funny thing is in hindsight, I didn’t realise how much my “rational” attitude was informed by the Protestant work ethic pervading secular society. It’s like we threw away the god part but kept the part where we’re all “sinners” until we prove ourselves worthy through work. Instead of appreciating the natural beauty in the world as it is, I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world. From that latter, small view, art was difficult to appreciate.
    • mmooss 2y ago
      > I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world I was there too, and I see others doing it. I think that when we look externally for our value, we end up sacrificing a lot of ourselves for someone else's approval. Is 'rationality' the right word here (I see you put it in quotes)? It doesn't seem rational or based on reason, more a social custom.
• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  It's simply impossible today, in the same way that my dad was able to pay his way through college with summer jobs is also impossible today.
• fuzzfactor 2y ago
  >Would today's youth, even if equally gifted and ambitious, have the same opportunity? Not the exact same opportunities, but the same type. The type of opportunities that work like this have never been there for the taking, only for the making.