Ep 23 Dream Crushers

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People are going to, well-meaning or not, do things that are going to crush your dreams. The guys sit down to talk about it.

Adrian Rêveur May 9, 2018 / 4:12 pm

What bugs me most about the “get a real job” sort of talk is that it always came from people who had never even bothered to see my art or read my stuff, never crossed their mind to ask themselves ‘does he have the/any skill?” They just straight told me “you’re gonna fail.” And seeing it from that angle doesn’t mean it didn’t annoy me, it just meant that I had an easier time moving past it because I could reply with the same dismissiveness.

I have decided to take the writer’s path about a decade ago, and I still have not gotten my big break but I have learned a lot in the meantime. Even in my notebook for ideas I’ve noticed that when I first started it the ideas I’d put down were a line or two long whereas now I write pages and pages for an idea simply because I’ve got a better grasp of how and what to write.
The bad thing about writing is that you can’t really have a similar trajectory to someone going to art school simply because what you can find to get your writing skill going is nowhere near as comprehensive as you can potentially find when it comes to digital art (for example). I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve spent enough time to get good, can’t wait to see what happens next.

On the matter of calluses and jobs. The future looks bleak. With every passing year, there are fewer and fewer jobs that require a ‘hands-on’ approach. There’s just more and more automation, AI is getting better, driverless cars are gonna take away jobs from cabbies and truckers. I saw this with my own eyes, I used to have a job as a backoffice operator in which I was tasked to fix the errors coming through the system (some actual app errors, most human error stemming from the sloppiness of how the requests were inserted). When I first started working there, there were way more things to fix than our department could handle. But back then the company was still using an app that they had from the late 90s or at least it looked like that. Fast-forward 2 years and in comes the new app, faster, better looking, better at correcting its own errors and since it was tied to the requests being introduced via tablet it had fewer problems there as well. In other words, with the new and improved app we were working with there was less work to go around, so much so that management kept training people for other tasks that weren’t really our department’s area of expertise (forgot to mention that in those 2 years we went from the 40+ people that I got hired with to less than half that).
So, yeah, working in entertainment (one way or another) seems like a good job prospect now and 20 years from now too. That’s the thing about the entertainment business, it just requires a diverse cluster of jobs for it to function. People keep forgetting that you can work in entertainment even as a carpenter. Someone has to build those big Westworld houses, right?

Ok, I’ve been ranting for waaaay too long. I’m going to just stop and thank you guys for having created this podcast and for speaking from the heart. Keep on fighting.

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