deleted by creator

deleted by creator

I've worked as a copywriter in advertising for a couple years. It was the most alienating work i ever did, it completely killed my drive to do anything creative outside of work until i got out of that career, and it is an awful industry full of awful people that pays like shit, and that makes that crappy pay even worse by taking a completely cavalier stance on unpaid overtime. It was also the most interesting job i ever did, though, and i learned a lot of useful skills during those years. It tought me to structure creative processes and to churn out content on demand, it tought me the patience needed to go through endless cycles of corrections and revisions and a bunch of other stuff about how to understand target demographics, how manipulative language can be, how the bourgeoisie ticks and how they view the world and so on. I had a real love-hate relationship to it and if it wasn't for the unbearable cognitive dissonance caused by hating capitalism and actively working on capitalist propaganda, i'd probably still do it.

If you get into any creative field to earn a living, you will frequently be in a situation where you produce utter garbage that you viscerally hate, while having your energy to do creative work you actually care about sapped from you. It is very, very hard to live entirely off artistic work you can fully get behind, and it is normal to supplement that with shitty, cringy bread-and-butter jobs. This seems to go for all creative fields. I know a couple of people who've managed to work as musicians full time, and that wasn't even hard for them do pull off (if you exclude the fact that they were incredibly skilled musicians who played 8 hours every day since their early childhood even before they studied jazz guitar or recording or whatever), but none of them are rockstars who make their money by writing, recording and performing their own music. Instead, a professional musician is normally somebody who plays cover versions at weddings, or elevator music jazz at lounge gigs for bougie ghouls, or who teaches guitar to talentless kids, or records jingles for commercials. But that means they get paid for making music all day, and being able to develop their skills to virtuoso levels and to maintain that level by amounts of practice that would be impossible if they worked a "normal" job and be hobby musicians like me. Like, if i play bass for two hours on a given day, that's a fucking lot for me.

Past a certain age, you normally end up having to choose between relegating your art to a hobby, not having nearly as much time for it as you want to, or being forced to commodify your creative talents. That's a tough choice to make. But it isn't a choice you have to make when you're 19. You can absolutely go and get experience in different creative industries, take as much from that as possible, and then decide how you want to use it. Maybe you'll find a creative job that you enjoy in the long term, maybe you'll end up doing something else and only edit videos as a hobby. That's a decision you can only really make after you've tried it out. So i'd say use the time you have rn and take a peek into a bunch of different industries, see for yourself what it entails to work these jobs, how various crerative industries operate, what it entails to be an employee or a freelancer and so on and then decide based on that knowledge.

What you should absolutely never do is to make your life choices dependent on the opinions of people who have zero experience with creative work, or with degrees where people do not immediately get what they're supposed to be good for. I've come across way too many relatives or accquaintances who just couldn't wrap their head around what i was studying, or later what i was doing for a living, and none of them could offer any useful advice to me. Job insecurity and low pay are very real issues for creative workers, but all industries you can work in have their drawbacks, that's just how capitalism is. You'll always get the short end of the stick as a worker, and you need to learn for yourself which forms of exploitation you can put up with at least a bit more easily.

Here's a report on work coöperatives in the creative industries in the UK, US and Canada: https://web.archive.org/web/20201222201619/https://culturalworkersorganize.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Sharing-Like-We-Mean-It-Web.pdf

Might be something to think about.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Took a theatre degree. Got a second degree as a backup. Both failed. Life is hard when you're broke and have no connections lol. When things were good I had regular work and connects to mad spots all over town. Now im kind of fucked bc of coronam

I would say this. There is a ton of money to be made in entertaining ppl. Ppl will say, "oh there's no money doing art"-- and while that's true, ppl will also give you every single dollar they have to be entertained. Find some simple content you can make, make a ton of it, and go on to the next thing.

Have you considered building a Twitch account? It's basically on camera work and you can create a community around your vibe and on your own schedule. Having ppl to actually show your work to is literally such an insane difference. Back when I was writing regularly, I had an insane output with access to regular readers and editors thru my classmates and teachers

the hard part about advising you on the degree is that you dont really know what you get out of if until you have it, since every class, every lesson, has a potential to stay with you.

my suggestion is to pick something to be good at now, something you can do really fast and leave you time to think how you can do it differently next time. Then apply it, repeat. Might be set building, camera operations, etc. Be decisive when you do it. Worry about all the mistakes when it’s over.

Want something, dont just like something. Make connections, they are more important than the degree in the long run. Share what you have so far while youre surrounded by like minded people, it’ll literally never happen again in your life.

I got a college certificate in a creative (but still technical) field. While it didn't land me a job in the same field (not even close) it did help me build my resume and land a pretty awesome career in a totally unrelated (but still technical) field. So no, your degree isn't pointless, and if you love it then stick with it if it makes you happy.