”Parents in Tech Want Their Kids to Go Into the Arts Instead.” — Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2025.

             The sub-head was:   “Hands-on jobs that demand creativity are seen as less vulnerable to artificial intelligence.” 

Before all us underpaid artists and writers start letting the Schadenfreude sneak in, our chosen path is still a chancy way to make a living, and always will be.  That is, if you put all your financial eggs in one basket.  I’ve always believed that picking between science and the arts, or business and the arts, is a false choice. 

There’s no law that says you can’t do it all.  I have friends from college who went all in on careers in music, or photography, or theatre, or dance.  Some of them made it, and though now elder statespeople in their fields, many of their names, and certainly their achievements, are recognizable.  You haven’t heard about the ones who failed, now dead, embittered, or wistfully resigned. 

 I’m sorry for them, but I have little sympathy for those who regarded their art as a higher calling, superior to anything one might do to just make a little money.  This is nonsense.  I believe that all honest work is equally honorable.  My son is a working artist who also helps run a sawmill.  He paints and pays his bills.  The art might be more enriching, but he loves wood and delights in the associations he’s developed inside the woodworking community.  He also knows how to run giant mill saws, shop tools, laser cutters. CAD/CAM and C&C machines, computers in the service of art and commerce. 

You want to give your grandkids good advice?  Just say “Man-machine interface.”

I’ve been entangled in the building trades my whole life, mostly as a designer and cabinetmaker, and you won’t find a more intelligent and engaging bunch of people in any profession.  None of them ever thought I shouldn’t be writing books.  One of them is in a band with a standing gig at a local bar.  Another is a carpenter and phi beta kappa graduate in English literature.  Do not challenge him on how to cope inside crown moldings or the rankings of the best books of 2024.

I have another carpenter friend who’s also sort of a career criminal who loves my books and shares them with his fellow inmates.  He wrote me once to say he’d convinced the prison librarian to stock my whole list. 

This might be the definition of a captive audience. 

       The standard advice by the self-important is to follow your passion.  Well, I’ve aways had a passion for regular meals, a decent place to live and a serviceable car.  You can achieve all this and still have plenty of time left to write novels, paint landscapes, play funky bass or imitate Sir Laurence Olivier at your community theater.  Or all the above.  (You could also watch a lot of sports and work on your handicap, but these are different ambitions not addressed in this essay.)

Since this is a project in alienating as many people as possible, I also have little sympathy for those who talk about writing a book, or learning guitar, or playing Lady Macbeth, but never get around to actually doing any of it, blaming their demanding job/kids/wife/husband/Pilates class.  The same rules of time apply.  There’s plenty of it in a day, or weekend, to pack a lot in if you really want to do it.  I suspect that many of these people have learned that it’s really hard to be good at anything in the arts.  That it takes tremendous discipline, hard work and sacrifice.  So it’s a lot easier to talk about than actually do.

            I might have had a bigger literary career if all I’d done was write books.  I’ll never know, and I really don‘t care.  Instead, I got to do an awful lot of interesting things, meet a wildly diverse array of people, master several different commercial and manual skills (like playing the funky bass), and pay all my bills.

Mostly on time.