Bold Statement: The idea that “everyone’s gotta have a dream” perpetuates the myth of the American Dream and is harmful to society.
Why can’t people be happy doing the thing they love doing on a non-professional basis? Like, if you don’t love it enough to make time for it in your life and if you don’t love it enough to do it for free then you probably don’t really love doing it that much. So why can’t you just keep doing it without trying to be a Huge Success? That’s way less pathetic than trying to be a Huge Success and being a Mild-to-Major Failure. And then you’re doing a thing that you love doing. And you also have a job that pays the bills. What’s wrong with that?
There’s nothing wrong with being a bartender or waitress or whatever until you’re 60 because you’re also in a band or are an artist or writer or whatever.
Uh…discuss…
This is also something I’ve been grappling with, having just graduated and being unemployed blah blah blah. For me at least, what gets in the way is extreme egotism and narcissism. I don’t want to just be a writer; I want to be the next serious writer that everybody’s fucking talking about, so with that, undoubtedly, would come financial success. Will it happen? Obviously not. But it’s always on my mind.
If something’s your passion, you’re usually arrogant about it; you don’t want to see your peers succeed before you. It can be good for the competitive aspect of things, but mostly it’s unfulfilling and self-destructive.
So if you’re like me, you can’t be content doing your passion on the side because it means you’re not the best. So you’ve got to work to getting to that level of acceptance or else you’re gonna be eternally in turmoil.
