You Should Give Up on Your Creative Dreams
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You Should Give Up on Your Creative Dreams<br>It’s Time to Get a Job, Lil’ Buddy
Russell Walter<br>Jul 10, 2026
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Recently, Kill Your Darlings ran a piece titled ‘Who Can Afford to Be a Writer in Australia These Days?’ In it, Nina Culley kvetches about the economic precarity of being a writer and artist in contemporary Australia.
Take, for example, the plight of her friend, Gogo Bumhole. Gogo Bumhole is a theatre and drag performer. Gogo Bumhole has to work ‘multiple part-time gigs’, including ‘caring for a Sydney cavoodle.’<br>In a sane society, Gogo Bumhole would be subsidized by the state (or better still, patronised by a wealthy benefactor). But because we live in an insane neoliberal hellhole, Gogo Bumhole must moonlight as a dog-sitter. A dog-sitter! Has any country, in all of human history, been so wantonly cruel to its artists?<br>Nina isn’t a drag performer, like her friend, Gogo Bumhole. She is a writer. At university, she was told that she would probably never make it as a writer. Her lecturer said, ‘maybe two per cent of you lucky ducks will. The others are going to drop out, go into communications, advertising or—god forbid—become copywriters. If you want to make money, this isn’t the degree for you, folks.’<br>In light of this fact, the lecturer gave students an opportunity to leave, and a handful of them actually did. But not Nina. No, Nina stayed. Now, she is thirty. She lives above a pizza shop with ‘sewage water periodically leaking from the kitchen sink.’ She is ‘thoroughly in debt’. She cooks jacket potatoes in the microwave. The microwave! And she is wondering, how did this happen? To quote her:<br>This doesn’t sound like life as it was promised when we were told that racking up university debt was a fast track to a mortgage and an air fryer.
Ermm, Nina, you were explicitly told you weren’t going to make money. If you wanted an air fryer, maybe you should have studied accounting instead of creative writing? Or maybe you should, like, go on Facebook marketplace?<br>Nina is a millennial, and this essay reeks of millennial entitlement. The not-so-subtle subtext is: why won’t the government subsidise my hobby? Why must I... work?<br>Anyway, it got me thinking about the relationship (or lack thereof) between money and writing. Samuel Johnson once said ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.’ But Samuel Johnson was arrested twice for debt. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say, no man but a blockhead ever wrote for money. That, at any rate, is the contention of this essay.<br>Extremistan<br>In 1976, students from the University of California were asked to rate the personal importance of various life objectives, such as raising a family or being very well off financially. ’Measured by life satisfaction twenty years later,’ the psychologist Daniel Kahneman observed, ‘the least promising goal that a young person could have was becoming accomplished in a performing art.’<br>In other words, aspiring actors, dancers, and musicians reported the lowest levels of life satisfaction. Aspiring writers, I suspect, would place a close second.<br>Why is this?<br>Maybe it’s a temperamental thing. Artists are, after all, infamously moody and broody. But I think a more plausible explanation is that most of them fail to achieve their life goals. As Kahneman says, ‘one recipe for a dissatisfied adulthood is setting goals that are especially difficult to attain.’<br>Suffice to say, becoming a professional writer—and a literary one, to boot—is especially difficult. Contra Nina, I don’t think it’s difficult because of ‘neoliberalism’, or other such bugaboos. Instead, I think it’s because of technology.<br>Technology has made art a winner-takes-all domain. ‘Consider’, Nassim Taleb says, ‘the fate of an opera singer at the end of the nineteenth century, before sound recording was invented. Say he performs in a small and remote town in central Italy. He is shielded from those big egos at La Scala in Milan and other major opera houses. He feels safe as his vocal cords will always be in demand somewhere in the district. There is no way for him to export his singing, and there is no way for the big guns to export theirs and threaten his local franchise. It is not yet possible for him to store his work, so his presence is needed at every performance, just as a barber is (still) needed today for every haircut.’<br>Today, that same opera singer has to compete with every other opera singer in the world. Technology, in other words, has made art scalable. Pavarotti doesn’t need to perform Nessun Dorma every time you want to listen to it. Nor does he need to travel to your city. In fact, he couldn’t (because he is dead). But you can still listen to him on Youtube and Spotify, which millions of people do monthly. Meanwhile, the median musician on Spotify has more band members than monthly listeners.
Now, let’s compare art with something non-scalable, such as...