GET A JOB.

I’ve been a 9-5er for most of my life, pursuing my artistic passions on the side. The value of a paycheck can’t actually be measured in money, funny that! Conversely, the key to not losing your soul while “working for the man” is to keep your values. Don’t become so obsessed with dollars that you forget to stop and smell the roses (travel, go to concerts, take a painting class, etc.) Most of the people that surrounded me during my years in the tech industry spent their life sitting behind a desk and cashing in their vacations instead of taking them. Now many of those people are sad because the big house they bought is underwater. But my year living in Africa, no one can take that away from me. And if I’d been a starving artist all my life, I wouldn’t have that year to look back on. I am rich in experience, and it was getting a job that gave me the ability to afford the experience. So yeah, get a job!

Fire and Air

A stable one. 9-to-5. With health insurance and a 401k. GET IT NOW.

Stop angsting over whether your Art or your Muse will survive Selling Out. Stop saying that your delicate artistic expressiveness can’t cope with an office job. Stop being allergic to money and then wondering why you can’t make rent and your lights are always being turned off.

Please understand that I’m not angry, and I’m not yelling. I’m Italian, and it’s how we talk when we get passionate. We get loud, and we curse, and it’s okay.

You can’t hack a “soul-killing” office job? You know what’s soul-killing? Having to sell your instrument or live out of your car. Believe me, the logic that office jobs and Working For The Man ruin one’s artistic creativity is a fiction created by idiotic trust fund kids with big ol’ safety nets beneath them, or people with rich spouses who…

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