On Not "Quitting Your Day Job"

It is, of course, the case that the artist endeavoring to make a career for themselves but not yet making it pay, and at the same time not independently wealthy or supported by other people, usually holds a "day job" to support themselves until they can make a living from their true vocation.

Most people see no great difficulty in that--and react to any suggestion that there may be difficulty with glib dismissals such as "T.S. Eliot was a banker!"

Those people, of course, are quite stupid--as they demonstrate by speaking such non sequiturs.

Not only is it the case that a day job automatically leaves less time, energy and freedom for artistic activity (for which those trying to make a real start are likely to find there are never enough hours in even the best of circumstances), but, while Day Jobs are not all the same, they are especially unlikely to be Dream Jobs. Few are the positions that are secure and pay well and yet open to someone whose real interest is elsewhere. Many are in fact insecure, ill-paid, unpleasant--and in the process take a lot more from the artist than the hours they consume.

A day job one cannot stand, the material hardship they may have to endure as a result of low pay with its additional toll on their time and energy, etc., have their effect on artistic output--and contrary to stupid remarks about how "The artist must suffer!" (a lame excuse for society's denying aspiring artists support, if not sadistic punching down at a low-status group), not a positive one. In the worst cases the day job may make the night job an empty pretension--the artist only hoping to create, rather than actually doing so because after a long day's work at that day job they are simply too run down to do anything more (as Martin Eden finds when he tries juggling a day job with his authorial efforts). Even if they do have some opportunity to create left, with the day job having the first claim on their time and energy, and their time chopped to bits by its demands, and learning the hard way that their creative faculties do not necessarily obey the clock (they may be readiest to produce just when they have to run off to work, least productive when they do have the time, etc.), there is just less of them to put into the work as, fighting for hours and even minutes in which to get something done, everything but the day and night jobs gets squeezed out--outside interests, social life, all those things that all people need, and which are also indispensable to enriching the work of the creative (the writer will find they no longer have time to read!), as they go about overtaxed all the time, exhausted all the time, rushed all the time, doing far from their best all the time, and maybe miserable all the time, especially if there is not much to buck up their hopes. Indeed, in the absence of what David in Lost Illusions called a "sublime cynicism" toward their hardships (a matter of saintliness rather than artistic genius), they are likely to find themselves aiming for low-hanging fruit rather than the masterpiece that may be the work of a lifetime, while an emotional and intellectual impoverishment is apt to produce work to match.

Grinding and frustrating as this all is it might be tolerable if it goes on for only a little while--the artist finding some alleviation of their situation, some encouragement, some practical relief after the initial hardships. But many are likely to find the hardships simply going on and on, themselves living this way for years--decades--of giving everything and getting nothing in return, perhaps not even a piece of work they can be proud of, as they look down to find themselves still standing on "square one." A particularly cruel irony for those who had thought that following an artistic career would permit them a broader, richer, freer life than the narrow existence they could expect (and most people get) from the workaday job, they are likely to feel they have wasted their lives--the more in as whoever is left in their life is likely to say to them "I told you so" at any and every opportunity (empathy and sympathy from even their nearest and dearest, as Balzac and Jack London candidly acknowledged, not something an aspiring artist is likely to have in their lives).

Given the economic realities that mean so few artists have any opportunity to gain any recognition at all, things would likely go the same way for many of them even if they did not have to hold down a day job. But there is no denying that it made the road harder, that it meant less realization of their potential than would otherwise have been the case, and all the hand-waving of the unsympathetic does nothing but advertise their essential meanness whenever anyone points out any of the less pleasant facts of life.