Quit Your Day Job? –
From the advice column “Work Friend” in The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2018
You Can’t Beat Them (You Will Be Arrested)
What are your thoughts on friends who leave high-paying jobs to pursue their creative dreams, then end up broke and complain about it?
— Brooklyn
Obviously, we must all tell them to shut up and get back to work on their canvases and scripts. I thank these folks every day for keeping me on the straight and narrow. As a chronic quitter, I’m the most likely to blow out of Dodge and suit up for a six-month bike trek down the Continental Divide or a nine-month woodworking apprenticeship, only to end up an incompetent waitron in Silver City, N.M. But now we have Instagram, and we can spy on our sad, failed basket-weavers together.
Time, though, will have the last laugh on all our choices. A great novelist is one who quit his job in time; a failed painter is just one who hasn’t died soon enough.
