I've had this thought at times. I work a normal 9-5 in tech support, but ever since I was like 16 or so I thought of music as transceding from a hobby to an actual "I want to do this as a career", and it seems like in the past idk year or two I've really gotten serious to the point I pretty much have no other hobbies, where in the past I'd still play the occasional video game or watch series in my spare time etc.
Now even though I do love it, and don't really feel like it's even a chore to practice or work on writing a song, sometimes I wonder if it's what I'd do if I had true financial freedom. Like who knows if we lived in a socialist utopia where we could work like 15 hours a week etc I would be fine just going to work and then doing whatever, and just doing music purely as a hobby or enjoyment, but the idea of not having a choice, you either gotta work a 9-5 or somehow make your passions become a career makes it feel like maybe I've kind of "tricked" myself into viewing a passion as needing to have a career or money path in it. Anyone else feel similar?
I wish the US had a fraction of the EU shit where artists got a base wage/housing. They leave no room for creativity in this stranglehold. I really need to read more about artists that have dealt with COVID gig payments, I'm out of sync with their status through all this bullshit.
Music wwaayyy antedates civilization. They have found flutes that are like 70k years old that appear to have used the modern diatonic scale.
Visual arts and music quintessentially human pursuits.
i am the eternal dabbler, but the one thing I REALLY went hard on was game development, after half-finishing a few projects I thought I would finally make a full game and sell it and maybe make a living off of doing something I enjoy
long story short, after a few months of treating it like a job i ended up fucking hating it and have only recently started fucking around with unity againI've written lengthy self criticisms of the bourgeoisie character of my hobbies.
A socialist utopia wont allow you that much more "free time to do whatever" until the technology advances a fair bit more.
There is way too much work to be done.
There is way too much work to be done.
We could split a lot of it up amongst people currently working bullshit jobs tho. Like I'll happily work on software to automate things during the week (40hrs/wk is way too much and no one can even actually be productive that long consistently) but it's not like we won't get the whole advertising industry, insurance industry, finance industry, etc added back to the actually useful labor force
They are not useless.
Also, unless you wanna go Nazbol there is the fact that an Utopia would be a global project, there is a lot of people in the world and the earth is running out of resources.
How does advertising or insurance or hedge funds actually move society forward? Especially once capitalism is out of the picture
Accounting, statistics, design, PR, management, planning, mathematics Its what this people are skilled at, those are some of the more valuable skills that one can have.
I can see those industries adapting perfectly to work in a socialist country, perhaps instead of having the goal of cheating out as much resources as possible they could focus on making their projects as attractive, efficient and forward looking as possible, the difference would be the end goal of the whole organization they work for.
Yeah the skillsets aren't useless, but the industries are. Hence they can start doing work that moves society forward (i.e. "useful work") instead of trying to get people to buy things they don't need, or moving numbers in accounts around to create a bigger number that doesn't reflect anything in society.
I think I am, there are moments where I feel like i wish I could do a little more in terms of creative stuff like songwriting, since that you can't be sure how long it will take ideas to develop etc, so it's times when I'm doing that I wish I could just have a general "have all day to come up with something"
Playing video games and watching series is the height of mind numbing capitalist entertainment. If that's all you sacrificed to spend more time on music, you're good. The rest of your thoughts are spot on, concerning not just capitalism but all other modes of production involving division of labor (so everything except communism). Marx wrote: "For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now."