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?

  • JRaccoon@discuss.tchncs.de
    5·
    1 day ago

    I don’t have any real advice for you but I just wanted to say I have huge respect for firefighters. You are literally risking your life to save others. So, from the outside it looks like you’re doing the exact opposite of wasting your life.

    EDIT: Reading the other responses, I thought might as well add my own experience. I used to write. Both fiction and nonfiction, opinion pieces, short stories, fanfic, and sometimes even some spicier NSFW stuff. I’m not good at expressing myself verbally and writing is/was my way of expressing myself.

    It was huge for me when I got a couple of my articles published in a printed tech/PC magazine (albeit a very small one) that I had been an avid reader of, and they even paid me a little something for them. Then I had some guy online commission a short story from me. I was so excited about it and the amount I charged for it didn’t even come close to covering the time I spent obsessing over the story to make it perfect, but I still really enjoyed doing it.

    Then, during covid I lost my day job and was seriously considering whether I should try freelance writing. But then AI and LLMs came along. At first, I thought it was a positive thing. Publishing online requires English, and English is not my native language, and even the very first public AI models were great for fixing grammar, typos and improving the flow of a text you give to it. But very soon I found that it also destroyed my motivation to write anything at all. Why should I spend time writing something myself when I can just describe the idea to an AI and it will write something almost as good in seconds that I would have spent the whole evening on? I got okay-ish results by taking the AI output and refactoring it to fit my style but I don’t feel comfortable ever publishing anything where a major portion of the work was done by a machine rather than me.

    Venting over haha. And really, I enjoy my current job in software development and it pays the bills, so it’s not all bad for me. But I can definitely sympathize with you.

    • unfortunate_ferret@piefed.caEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      Why should I spend time writing something myself when I can just describe the idea to an AI and it will write something almost as good in seconds that I would have spent the whole evening on?

      Because it won’t write something almost as good; it won’t write anything even approaching good. It can’t. What it can write is 18 seasons of filler, and it will be like seeing a repeating texture - glaringly obvious. I said nobody could tell it apart and that’s patently untrue, AI writing is easy to see for what it is after not very long at all. Your writing is an entirely different beast, it’s a message from you into the brains of your readers.

      You can use AI to get over writer’s block, you can use it to translate and for advice on grammar and spelling. It can’t write your stories. Try it - the advice is that writers should write for themselves first. So try to make it tell a story you want to read; I think you’ll find yourself mentally correcting it and thinking things like “it would be better for this to happen”, “that person should say this instead”, “that character wouldn’t react like that”, and so on. The writer in you has opinions and you’ll hear them as you read.

      Don’t let the tool discourage you. It’s just a tool; without you it can’t do anything at all.