The Plight of the Starving Artist
Why it’s Better to Be Useful than to Follow Your Passion
Keep in mind that by “passion,” I don’t mean giving up on your dreams of going to medical school, becoming a real estate agent or working at the zoo.
When I say it’s better to be useful, I mean it strictly in an economic sense. If you‘re going to follow your passion in an area where you are compensated fairly well, this is a career worth pursuing.
One of the problems in today’s society is the glorification of the self and individual experience. This is what Yuval Noah Harari calls Liberal Humanism in his book Homo Deus.
We praise our subjective experiences, with this new cult of personality captured by phrases such as “The customer is always right” or “voter knows best” or “beauty in the eye of the beholder.”
The perverse obsession with subjective experience is the embodiment of the starving artist.
The starving artist is someone who has taken “Follow your passion” and his liberal humanistic ideology so seriously that he is willing to get rich or die tryin’. He ignores the obvious signs of needed re-adjustment in the pursuit of martyrdom.
In the age of social media and the internet, the self has been placed on such a high pedestal that we believe our individual experiences are the pinnacle of existence.
We believe that our individuality should garner views, followers, subscriptions, and paid advertising endorsements. Our subjective experience is so unique that it needs to be projected to the biggest stage for the whole world to see.
The problem with the so-called “influencer” route of a career is that it follows a classic Pareto distribution. If we think of attention as a commodity, which it most certainly is, than we have to assume that a majority of attention that is spent on any given platform like YouTube is directed towards a handful of YouTube channels.
Becoming a YouTuber would’ve been a great career…had one started 10 years ago like MrBeast. Every passing day there are millions of ambitious internet “wantrepreneurs” looking to make a living off of an online brand they create for themselves.
It is true that the barrier to entry has never been lower. However, the competition has never been higher. Added to that, the fact that the majority of the attentional market share is still commanded by the top influencers on any platform, makes it increasingly difficult to monetize an online brand with any given passing day.
What Nassim Taleb refers to a ergodicity is the phenomenon in any functioning economy of the top 10% in income earners being constantly replaced by people from the lower 90%. This ensures the greatest degree of meritocracy as well, giving people an equal chance in theory to get rich or die tryin’.
However, ergodicity is becoming more absent as the rich invest more heavily in maintaining their top spot instead of placating it to some lower hopeful.
The same happens in the online space.
Take someone who wants to start a new YouTube channel for example.
YouTube’s algorithm prioritizes content based on watch time. That means that if people on average watch 90% of your videos’ watch time, your content will be shown to more people with similar interests to the content you are showing.
Besides the upfront capital required to invest in high-quality production, you still need to engineer your videos for watch time. After this, you need to be patient and keep churning out content at a rate equal to or greater than the most successful YouTubers to stay relevant.
If you don’t feed the beast, you will become irrelevant.
It’s always been the entrepreneur who takes on a disproportionate amount of risk in the pursuit of a dream to become “self-made” and successful, yet this dream is becoming more and more of an illusion in the increasingly competitive space of online branding.
Just being yourself is no longer good enough since people will not pay you for projecting your unique voice to the outside world. This is also why I also have a paying job instead of relying on my 32 subscribers to generate income for me :)
To follow one’s passion i.e. monetize your personality in the online space means to offer something that is so incredibly unique and novel for the world to see. This either means you need to change who you are completely to show your audience something they have never seen before, or risk falling into the oblivion of abandoned YouTube accounts.
I have an admission here.
I once hired an online “coach” to help me become one of these online entrepreneurs on Twitter.
For $6,500 USD, the promise was to make my money back and abandon the 9–5 for good.
This offer seemed as irresistable as a moist steak to a famished villager in an underdeveloped country.
I paid the $6500 USD, believing this was an investment in myself, my future, and my unique dreams that the world would cherish.
The problem here was that making such money, as applies to any online platform, requires one to amass a sizeable following on Twitter, which requires more upfront capital to pay for retweets, follows, advertisements, etc. Additionally, it requires an endless source of unique content for the world to consume, churned out at a faster rate than others on Twitter, to become relevant in the online space.
With the advent of AI creating online social media content, this means that it’s sometimes nearly impossible to compete with AI-generated content that is produced at a faster rate and with higher quality than yours.
After not seeing a single return on my investment after a year, I requested my money back. Luckily, my “coach” obliged.
This story is a warning to the potential starving artist out there. I understand the allure of complete freedom, but maybe it’s not complete freedom you’re actually after?
Maybe you’ve been tricked into thinking that this is the pinnacle of human existence, to be compensated for your individuality, instead of doing something where your existence is actually depended upon.
Choose something where you will be useful. It might not be an online “brand,” but a local job.
Online brands don’t make the world turn; real labor does.
You’ll recognize after continuous heartbreak that the truth was waiting for you there all along — to be recognized for your efforts as someone that can be depended upon.
To be recognized in today’s society, you need to offer something of value to the market to earn recognition. Maybe that recognition is a lot closer to home than you realized?
