"Why Do Actors, Musicians, and Film Creatives Give Up for 'Normal' Jobs, Becoming Influencers, and Poor Decisions?"

The very neon pink elephant in the room.

Your childhood best friend is soooooooooo good at everything. Attractive. Possibly sings. Is a strong writer. Soooooo creative. Talented. He, she, they, will waltz down on to Los Angeles or London without too many acting credits and–

Make it big.

If you saw my post about the statistics of the top agencies’ representation alone summing up to the size of a small town, that is what your friend is up against. Or you. You reading this post.

The performing arts never pay well until you have made it really big. Lead actress on a sitcom, renegotiating that contract big.

You can be an Oscar winner with endless debt. You lost your day job to take the movie because your restaurant wouldn’t let you go work on it.

A working actress living beyond her means from pressure to have all those amenities barely scraping by. Legal, management, agent taking fees. The acting classes, fitness, personal assistant, security from stalkers thinking they want children with her from a few guest spots on a soap.

You can be, a very real example I’ve come across enough to shout it here, someone deep in the studio system making your apartment or house into a short term rental, or renting rooms, to make ends meet. Because the same jobs in music and acting keep going to the same people of the moment.

After a few years of this, your friend, you out there, might think you can make it. You have the passion of a teenager, or a young twentysomething.

“Millions of people compete against me for the same jobs. I can outsmart the system by talent and networking.”

Age 18-29, lots of jobs involve objectification and unnecessary nudity. Men are not immune to this, but women get more of it. Some of these projects can ruin your life, because the plots are quite thin, and the nudity so rampant, it shouldn’t qualify as a theatrical production. Are you taking this job for next to no money?

People demand headshots, websites, and all of these business expenses. If you’re a musician of some kind, your bills are through the roof with music products and tools.

You’re 20-24 now? Get used to people talking to you if you happen to female, regardless of your financial setup back home, how you should get married to “a rich man” they can introduce you to. You never said you wanted to date anyone or that you needed help, wondering what it’s in it for them. You remind them of this. They tell you how you’ll be used goods by 25 and need to marry the nearest person like it’s 1802. Or you’ll be “invisible by 40.” Because in this age of better health care and skincare awareness, you’re going to age like it’s the 19th century, apparently. Which is only OK when men do it. Men can look like ogres. You as a young man or woman have to be with an older, richer man and/or woman. You complain about this repeated harassment. Nothing happens. Now, repeat all of that. A lot.

People always try to do worse forms of harassment or abuse not part of the job description. You complain. You might talk to the right people to help. If you’re like men I’ve met, they get laughed at. Men never get abused, do they? Sissies. Only women get abused. Your case doesn’t go anywhere as a young man. Or you’re a handsome fellow. You asked for it by expecting to be an actor or model and not having this happen. You should’ve gone into finance.

You’re going to get offers to do really bad stuff off the table. Some of it highly illegal adult work. Are you going to agree?

By “poor decisions” in this title, I’m referring to how career frustrations are frequently when people get mixed up with bad company and make decisions that get them in trouble with the law.

You said no to that? Continue on.

You get hit on all of the time by people old enough to be your grandparents or great grandparents. You say no. These people often presume that you’re an underpaid creative talent, so you probably want to say yes. You don’t.

You go out and tell people you’re an actor/actress, musician, makeup artist, theatrical talent of some kind. People out in the “real world” think you are really rich and hate you. They don’t reason that most jobs hardly pay. That music streams bring in trinkets. Some act like “actress” is another word for “adult worker” and look down on you, something that hasn’t quit on us since the middle ages. Read Dorian Gray sometime and see what that book says of actresses in mass culture. Nothing has changed.

Age 30. You see people dropping out because they can’t pay their bills who used to be your friends. Many of them are turning to becoming influencers or selling intimate photos/videos because they need money, fast. They don’t have real world skills from never pursued “proper educations.” Or, they did. Their degrees aren’t in anything relevant, because a science lab does not care about your passion for chemistry if your degree is made for the stage. The doctor’s office looking for a billing manager is not impressed with your $50,000 per year or worse, per semester, private acting education. A master’s from Harvard or Yale is not going to cut it for an executive position you can do. Or that workplace doesn’t want to hire entertainment professionals. It’s a “bad look” for the company.

Age 35. More dropping like flies. Some people join the many realtors trying to sell homes who are all coming from similar paths across trades. The only thing with possibly more humans fighting for scraps than entertainment is real estate. You keep telling yourself that this time will be different, as you see the actresses who used to be mean to in their flashy leading babe acting roles now playing soccer moms with no plotlines. If they’re aging out, what hope do you have? Even the “hot man” leads are aging out.

Oh yes, people discriminate against hiring qualified applicants whose second life is in the performing arts. You get punished for chasing what you love and frequently told things like how “inappropriate” your ad posing in modest clothing for a hair product was. You get shamed in magazines for wearing modest retro swimwear by female writers who themselves wear skimpier clothing to the pool and heavily promote sexuality as feminist power unless it comes from the performing arts’ everyday women who aren’t A-listers yet.

Age 40. Are you still around? Maybe you’re getting a toothpaste ad between gigs. You’re a touring guitarist who somehow makes enough money to keep your apartment. You scored a film, but it barely paid. You sang as a cartoon character in a flop movie. Or you acted in that big studio animated film, no one hiring you since. You used to be in an iconic film, but you haven’t gotten a job once since the movie that isn’t, “Would you like fries with that?” to George Clooney. As an example, Mr. Clooney’s newest film, Jay Kelly, has one liner characters playing fans on the train ride. None of those people are going to make rent money from that job.

Some people between 35-45 want children. As a man, you won’t support yourself with this hustle. As a woman, you’re past the ideal window of getting pregnant. If you adopt, a noble choice, you need stable income. Congrats, you don’t qualify. How are you going to support your child again? Can you have an in shape body and audition, pregnant? Probably not. On this list, I thank the stars at least children were never on my to do. They are for many others.

Age 50. Well, you could get a job waiting tables for life and keep on auditioning for those pharmaceutical ads requiring you to play older than you are. Maybe you’re a little sick of all of the roles playing up to negative stereotypes, or you’re sick of only being offered poorly paid maid roles.

The harassment doesn’t end. Some people in “real world” jobs and entertainment alike think because you want to be a stage actress, you’re easy. You get harassed by everyone when you look for a job or audition. When you tell people how you’re on the receiving end of sexual harassment and/or abuse, people say you’re lying. Nobody would harass a human being like your age, and not a woman over 40. Nobody would ever harass a woman older than him/her/them. You could complain to someone’s corporation or the production itself, but what good would it do? Do any of those groups supporting advocacy for men and women, and non-binary and trans people as well, forgotten often in #metoo, ever mean what they say?

You keep hoping someone will hire you. Your work experience isn’t in anything relevant for a “normal” job to be taken seriously because of real job discrimination against people in the performing arts. You don’t know anyone but retired Hollywood people or Oscar winners if you do, but they’re not hiring you because they already have full staffs and casts, so good riddance, and they aren’t going to be good help at getting real world corporate jobs. They only know people who work in Hollywood. They don’t care about your financial situation.

You think about things not mentioned on this list.

And you tell yourself that maybe tomorrow will be it. Tomorrow is another day.

Someone might be saying this as they shifted focus to something else like influencer gigs or selling photos. Just this once, age 28. This once becomes three times a month. Three times a month becomes daily. Soon, there is no acting, music, or arts career. You’re a full time something else. But you won’t leave LA/NYC. No, that would be admitting failure.

Or you never did that, and it never paid off anyway. You die. You leave behind some “important” IMDb credits. You’re like a dying man I spoke to on the day he died, who had acted in supporting roles but never became a star. You hoped, and there was only one life, so you tried while you were on this planet. And it never paid off, did it?

But you tried. The only thing worse is admitting you failed. Or you had nothing else to live for, which nobody understands, they who shout at you what a “loser” you are, loser being one of the nicer words.

Your university education in a liberal arts degree won’t cut it to be a librarian. You need a master’s in the right degree.

Can you work in research? No, you need a psych degree, or marine biology. A degree in English or anything else won’t do.

You try to work in what you studied. Your university was awesome and pro-women. The real world of your degree isn’t. You get told degrading things regularly. Or asked to do things you shouldn’t. The casting couch. People shame you about the casting couch being part of the world of entertainment. But the “normal job” world has far more casting couch setups, and everyone seems OK with that. When you complain, you’re told that’s just how the world is. Didn’t you grow up? Or someone in your family shames you how a company must have “found” your voice work in an animated film online, as if voicing a cute character online is posing nude. You cut ties with an already semi-estranged family member who says that you and all the young people and middle aged people of every gender talking about harassment are crying wolf. You all must have made it up because you all are probably bipolar or mentally ill, crying out for attention. You realise that so many in life are just enablers of victim blaming. But you are the bad one. Remember that. It’s all on you because you’re the weird one who decided not to work a “normal” job with the “normal” life of that suburban dream and children running around.

You don’t do drugs. You might not, like me, drink alcohol or have vices. You’re not flaky at all. But you’ll be seen as some “weird” creative stereotype. You’re an unreliable Bohemian person who couldn’t possibly be “normal.” If female, you fight out of in “normal job” land and within your own industry how you’re reliable and qualified for everything. People talk to you like you’re a dabbler. Men who have no skills or life direction are geniuses. A woman who knows what she wants and works on it with passion is delusional. A life wanderer. Not serious. Probably every stereotype there is about women in the arts.

And if you can, as I am today, right now, feel that you’d rather try and give it up all for nothing at least knowing you tried? Than have a “conventional” career path leading to depression or always wondering what if?

I guess you and I are in the right place then. Wishing you much love, because you and I need it. May God bless you that you succeed, because you deserve it.

xoxo,

Nic