"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
Life Lessons from the Implosion of the Arts Industry
It kind of seems like there’s never been a worse time to be a creative.
Acting:
Bob Iger, allegedly: “The deal signed with the actors and writers will be the last deal ever and AI will be advanced enough at the end of the contract to never bother with either group again.”
Jerry Seinfeld: “The movie business is over”
Writing:
Elle Griffin: “No One Buys Books”
Simon Rich: “I’m a Screenwriter. These AI Jokes Give Me Nightmares”
Music:
Ted Gioia: “AI companies aim to replace human recordings with cheap bot-made tracks.”
Will Sheff of Okkervil River in a WaPo piece:
“I don’t know who the hell is making money off Spotify”… On his last tour, he said, he lost about $5,000. He’s predicting he’ll lose triple that on his upcoming European stint. But if he doesn’t tour to help the album, he’d be basically “signing a death warrant for my whole solo career.”
Creative supply faces competition from AI models, and demand for that creativity is displaced by distraction-based, algorithmic content. In such a world, breaking through can feel increasingly out of reach. But just because it isn’t valued doesn’t mean creating art isn’t important or instructive. In fact, artists may have some helpful guidance for living in our accelerating culture.
Of course, you could point out that, across history, very few artists were supported fully by their art. At times, a lucky few had patrons, but Anton Chekov was a doctor, Philip Glass was a plumber, T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk, and on and on.
More than that, “success” as an artist creatively and financially are often not the same thing. Here’s Anne Lamott in her 1995 book Bird by Bird reflecting on her first novel’s publication and the difference between the desire to write versus the desire to be published:
I had secretly believed that trumpets would blare, major reviewers would claim that not since Moby Dick had an American novel so captured life in all of its dizzying complexity. And this is what I thought when my second book came out, and my third, and my fourth, and my fifth. And each time I was wrong…
My students do not want to hear this. Nor do they want to hear that it wasn’t until my fourth book came out that I stopped being a starving artist. They do not want to hear that most of them probably won’t get published and that even fewer will make enough to live on…
But I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part.
To focus on writing for a moment: it’s never been a great way to make money. Even if you concede that the image has displaced the word, AI is replacing the artists, and everyone’s too distracted by TikTok to even notice, you would conclude that commercial success has merely gone from really hard to really, really, really, really hard.
But to Lamott’s point, writing—rather than getting published—is where the magic is. I would go one step further and propose that in our world today, creating art is becoming more important even as its financial prospects are becoming more bleak, and this is part of a broader pattern.
There is a deep-rooted desire to be like the rich fool in Jesus’ parable who builds bigger barns and says to himself, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” In some ways, our modern life offers more control and comfort than any time in human history, and this makes total security feel just out of reach. But it’s a mirage.
For all of our progress, there will always be destinations and accomplishments beyond our grasp, and some are now trending in the wrong direction.
The pace of technological change guarantees professional disruptions that will demand you pivot and recreate yourself time and again. Gone are the days of job security, employer loyalty, or a graduate degree that ensures your future. There is no safe and sure path to having a good career. There is no moment when you can say, “Soul, thou hast much career capital laid up. Eat, drink, and be merry.”
On the personal front, having a great relationship seems harder than ever. Men and women are politically polarized, current dating mores aren’t conducive to getting married (and social mores aren’t conducive to staying married), and all the while, there is shiny, well-tailored content online ready to sow discontent with your relationship.
Additionally, there’s a pressure and intensity to modern marriage. Chris Rock joked:
I was married for 16 years in the era of the cell phone, which means my 16 years is actually longer than my parents’ 40. In 16 years, I had more contact with my ex-wife than my parents had in 40 years. Okay? My father used to leave for work at 6:30 in the morning and come home at 8:30 at night. And during the day, he and my mother had absolutely no contact at all. None, okay? That’s what a relationship used to be. The kids could have been dead, but he wouldn’t have found out until he got home. “The kids are dead.” “What time did they die?” “Eight hours ago.” “Damn, I missed it.” And you know what else? They actually missed each other. They actually missed each other. You can’t miss nobody in 2017. Not really.
When will you be able to say, “Soul, thou hast much relational capital laid up. Eat, drink, and be merry?”
This desire to have a good career or marriage is like the desire to get published in that it idealizes a point of future accomplishment. It assumes that if I could just say, “I work at ___,” or “I’m married" or “I’m a New York Times Bestselling Author,” then I could be happy and finally relax. That flawed premise focuses on outcomes not processes, destinations not journeys, rewards rather than the work itself.
And so many of these destinations seem to be receding into the distance. If it is foolish to wait for a “Soul, thou hast laid up much goods” moment in our career or our families, then enjoying the journey becomes both the most pleasant and the most effective way to live.
The secret that artists, who by nature starve and scrap, learn is that the dream slowly goes from something out there to something inside, from an external achievement to the work itself. As Lamott says, “The actual act of writing turns out to be the best part.”
If the future seems uncertain, you can spend all of your time scanning the horizon. You can also spend some time just watching where you’re walking.
Now, I can feel that this is getting into sappy motivational video territory very quickly. There are few celebrity tropes as well-trodden as, “I thought fame and success would make me happy, but they didn’t.” It took me about two seconds to think of these representative quotes:
I’m about to star in this movie Zathura. They’re paying me a ton of money. People recognize me at the airport. I’m doing everything I had dreamt of doing for 30 years. It all came true. And I am the least happy I’ve ever been in my life. I’m closest to not wanting to be alive as I’ve ever been, and I have every single thing on paper that I wanted…I had a million dollars, and I couldn’t get on a flight to fly 35 minutes.
It’s hard to get really depressed until your dreams come true. Once your dreams come true and you realize you feel the same way you did before then you get a feeling of hopelessness because you feel like “I have this empty hole in me, but if I get to do this thing this is gonna fill that hole,” then one in a million get to do that thing, and then you do that thing and then you realize, “Oh I feel exactly the same.”
Most people who are really driven for something are doing it because they think it’s going to satisfy something in them, yet most worldly things tend not to be so satisfying
Some celebrities talk about therapy or exercise or other general strategies that we too could benefit from.
But the better (and more helpful) advice they offer is to go deeper into the work.
Here’s Matthew McConaughey:
Personally as an actor, I started enjoying my work and literally being more happy when I stopped trying to make the daily labor a means to a certain end. For example, I need this film to be a box office success. I need my performance to be acknowledged. I need the respect of my peers. All those are reasonable aspirations. But the truth is, as soon as the work, the daily making of the movie, the doing of the deed became the reward in itself for me, I got more Box Office, more accolades and respect than I ever had before. See, joy is always in process. It’s under construction. It is in constant approach. Alive and well in the doing of what we’re fashioned to do and enjoying.
I could go on.
When Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond series, was reflecting on writing’s pay-offs, he mentioned the money and the work life, but then he added:
Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.
Just to repeat Fleming’s dry wit: “Since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.”
Today, this “by-product” of “being alive” remains available, even as the financial or status rewards feel more remote. Indeed, in the era of the smartphone when we are “forever elsewhere,” has the awareness that writing engenders ever been more beneficial? The act of sitting down and taking an idea from fuzzy thought to concrete expression is particularly satisfying when distraction is our normative mode of existence.
Hollywood may be collapsing, but has the empathy and embodied presence an actor hones ever been more relevant considering how much of our interaction has moved to disembodied, coarse, online channels?
The work of cultivating a marriage—a physical relationship where you are challenged to look beyond your own needs and particular wants—is perhaps more demanding today, but it’s also clearly a saving grace in a world built around targeted, instant, cheap gratification.
It’s easy to fret about how AI will disrupt the labor market. You can respond with despair and slack off. You can chase performative busyness in the hopes of proving to yourself and others how irreplaceable you are. But for most people, since it’s so hard to predict what new jobs will emerge in the coming years, the best course may well be to learn as much as you can right where you are.
The erosion of extrinsic rewards doesn’t negate the importance of the intrinsic. It heightens it. As virtue is less rewarded, it’s more needed to navigate a treacherous, perilous world. As polemics and sophistry proliferate, wisdom’s value only grows. A culture without transcendence makes The Church a key bulwark against nihilism and anomie, not an optional add-on. A culture of demagoguery makes clarity in writing and thus thinking an even greater blessing. Muzak proves the value of music.
Attention. Striving for excellence. Taking pleasure in the work itself.
These are the fruits of the artist’s life for which we all can strive, no matter our occupation. For every artist who toils in obscurity for years and years before breaking through, there are countless more that we never hear of.
Perhaps those people wasted their time. Surely some of them would feel that way. But undoubtedly, some of them would say the time honing the craft, the “by-products,” and the work itself were all worth it. The true pay-off.
We can never know if a sudden breakthrough or blessing is around the corner. In the parable of the rich fool, we are expressly warned to not gather up riches on earth in pursuit of the moment when we can say, “Soul, thou hast laid up much goods. Eat, drink, and be merry.” Instead, we are instructed to lay up treasures in heaven.
How do we do that?
Here’s one simple idea from Fr. Thomas Hopko: “Live a day, even a part of a day, at a time.” Not in the past, not in the future, and not focused on things you cannot control. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” If you merely aim to do the work you’ve been given to do, you may find that it’s where the action is, where the sanity is, and ultimately, where the joy is.