If there is a better community to ask this question, I’m all ears.
I majored in history because I like history. With a major like mine without a doctor thesis you can only work as a teacher and children are mostly idiots. You could try academia, but the ROI here is so much below zero it doesn’t make any sense.
As a child I was musically gifted but my parents never considered music as something worth following or studying. As an adult I bought me a classical guitar 12 years ago and a grand piano 5 years ago and started playing. I learned to play both instruments on my own.
Don’t think for a moment my technique is good enough to start studying at a conservatory for either instrument. I already rehearsed for a piano professor and he told me I must have invested an insane amount of time, that my technique is simply not good and if I want, he knows of 2 colleges that offer preparatory courses I could attend to.
I work as a firefighter and none of my coworkers even suspects I majored in history or that I’m capable of playing any instrument, it’s something I don’t talk about with any of them because I don’t believe they would understand and they’d start with intrusive questions I hate (if you are so talented like you claim and have a major in history, why are you wasting your time as a firefighter?). I already tried to find a decent job with history and failed. It’s something I don’t want to repeat with a possible major in music. Firefighting, as tiring and unfulfilling as it is, pays my bills and has given me a financial independence I never had, but I never saw myself here.
The curious thing is I have enough money to stop working and covering tuition fees and lodging for 4 years plus the preparatory year, but I don’t know if choosing this path would be the stupidest of decisions ever made. If I work part time, I don’t have to spend my whole savings.
Working as a firefighter I feel I’m wasting my life, I don’t want to be a firefighter till I retire, but this job has given me financial stability and I dread losing that.
I do my job and when I’m not very tired at home after doing the laundry, buying food and cooking, cleaning my apartment, walking a bit to disconnect… I play. It brings me joy but as of now it’s only a hobby. To even monetize it I would have to at least have a bachelor.
Is this what it looks like?
I have a pretty similar story except game design is my passion, and graphic design is the day job.
For a long time I wanted to make games professionally, and I’ve worked towards it for years, even releasing a game I made with a few friends in our spare time.
I’ve had some realizations lately though, that the closer making games becomes to a job, the less fulfilling it is for me. I’m starting to think I might prefer it as a passtime where I can make whatever interests me instead of trying to turn art into products.
Every job has shitty parts, which don’t necessarily exist when it’s a hobby. For games and for me personally, it’s was all the marketing and strategy around trying to get eyeballs on your stuff. I hate that part and I’m not good at it. I learned that the hard way with my released game, which very few people played even though I’m quite proud of it. It’s just really hard to get noticed as a small creator with no budget.
No real advice in here for you necessarily. I just see a lot of the same yearnings and frustrations in this that I’ve felt and it connected with me. Hopefully this is some food for thought at least.
“do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is total bullshit.
It’s more like “turn something you love into a job and you’ll ruin it”
I feel very fortunate to be in software development. I genuinely enjoy my job. Not the jobby parts of it, but the actually problem solving and puzzle solving and trying to make something the best I can within the box I’m given to play in.
I don’t know if I could handle another job, though one summer I loaded boxes on a truck and while it was physically demanding, I daydreamed about computers while I was doing it and left mentally refreshed even after ten hour days and had the energy to work on my passions. But that doesn’t pay like software does.