[bikingbismuth]

This is great advice.

I am an amateur in a lot of different arts (music, painting, writing being the main focus). I have friends who are professionals in these areas and each of them of them has a day job they don’t care for to support their art. I was moderately close to making an attempt at being a professional musician in my early 20s, but playing enough local shows and only making $50-100 to split between 4 people dissuaded me of that notion. Now I have a fairly hard, but not stressful job in STEM that pays well and has good work life balance.

I find I have a couple advantages because of my reasonable stream of STEM based income: - I don’t ever have to care about selling anything I create, which makes it less stressful - I can afford almost anything I want to tinker with for a particular art

Consuming and creating art is a very critical part of my being, but given the realities of our modern economy and the insane competition in the arts, I am glad that I will be a “forever amateur”.