Creative Labor Versus Economic Labor

Why writers have to be their own patrons

Jul 27, 2024

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about for the past decade is the question of creative labor versus economic labor (and its corollary, non-monetized time versus monetized time). This is as much an artistic consideration as it is a financial one since most of the things we do as people don’t earn income and only a select few types of labor actually do. Artists in every genre, medium, movement, and time/space, have struggled with the art/work dichotomy: there’s the thing you do as an artist that buys your groceries and the thing you do that nourishes your soul and nicks the cultural discourse. And normally these are very different types of labor. Sure, there was a time when court-appointed musicians like Bach and Mozart could make money by writing a piece of chamber music commissioned by an Austrian or German emperor, but the real bread for them was tutoring rich kids in piano and musical composition. Ditto with famous European artists who weren’t already part of the bourgeoisie. These artists didn’t want to teach but they had to in order to pay for their candles and their Viennese desserts and their French wine.

Having pupils was simply the way that artists and composers paid their bills so they could paint in their studios and write music in their salons and not live in poverty.

The point is, artists in general and writers in particular rarely live off of their art. Even the most famous writers in America now either teach a plush 2-2 schedule at an Ivy League university/east coast liberal arts college or they write screenplays. Almost no literary fiction writers that I know of other than Tom (aka TC Boyle) could make a living from writing alone and even he chose to teach at USC. In fact even some of the greatest conceptual writers like Shelley Jackson and Carole Maso (two of my favorites) or literary darlings like Chang-rae Lee, all teach (or have at one point). Hell, even Murakami taught at Harvard even though he didn’t need to.

Gone are the days when writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald could simply live off their short stories published in The New Yorker or Esquire. Gone are the days where rich people got off patronizing promising writers for the sake of nourishing their careers. Writers have to work outside of their creative labor like everyone else and that’s not a bad thing per se.

But if Wallace Stevens had to write poetry during his commutes between business appointments and if Proust had to be idly rich and if Lydia Davis had to teach at NYU/Albany and if Kafka had to work at an insurance company and if Toni Morrison had to work in publishing and Žižek had to write copy for Abercrombie & Fitch and Banana Yoshimoto had to wait tables, then I think it’s fair to say that pretty much all writers and artists understand that vocation and livelihood are necessarily different spheres of labor. There’s the thing we do that pays our exorbitant rent in LA and the thing we do that interacts artistically with the world we live in and they are almost never the same thing.

This is why teaching can be such a great deal for writers because they can be part of the artistic cycle of mentorship and patronage. They can teach and mentor during the school year and write for two months in the summer. This cycle allows them to avoid the scarcity paradigm, which is exhausting and leeches their own artistic energies. But academia—like every other profession—has its own pitfalls, advantages, blind spots, issues, & saving graces. Chief among them, the insane amount of time writers prepare for coursework, teach, grade essays, do department and university service, respond to multiplying emails, manage classroom Karens, & critique manuscripts compared to the amount of time they actually write. Insert summer is for writing mantra here. And academia, for all of its artistic and intellectual sanctity, has suffered from a horrendous labor market crunch since the golden age of tenure plateaued in the ‘90s.

This is precisely why I started applying to jobs in other spaces besides academia once my visiting writer contract expired at BG. It’s not that I don’t miss teaching or mentorship because I absolutely do. My students and I still write each other and I think about them all the time. One of my students just texted me the other day to tell me she’s moving to SoCal. Another just emailed me to say he finished his Masters and couldn’t have done so without my class. I love my former students with all my heart. I think about them all the time and I will do anything within my power to help them for the rest of my life. But there is teaching and mentoring and then there is academia and they’re not the same thing. And the salary structure for professors has been compressed forever. The salary structure for full professors is what I want now, not when I’m 75 and close to retiring. And since I’ve accepted that there’s the thing that pays for my happiness and the thing that gives me happiness, I have no problem working my ass off in another industry and writing in my free time. That’s literally what I did before. Why not make better money in the process?

Thank you for reading Mixtape by Jackson Bliss | ジャクソンのミクステープ . This post is public so feel free to share it.

So now I’m at this bizarre crossroads professionally as I consider making the transition from the academic space to the . . . financial space. I know what you’re thinking, what a bizarre plot twist! And it is. This is literally the last thing I saw myself doing five years ago when I started my tenure track job. But something interesting happened to me during the pandemic and it fundamentally changed something inside me: I fell in love with investing. It all started when one day I’d realized that my credit union had only paid me $2 for keeping all of my money in my savings account (and it had been there for a whole year). Two dollars! I’ve literally made more money doing Google surveys. There I was working my ass off at my tenure track job for my money but my money wasn’t working for me. Soon afterwards, I bought some Litecoin on my Venmo app just to say I owned some cryptocurrency. Then I got a Cash App card, bought a few shares of RIOT (a bitcoin mining stock) and APPL (Apple), & used my roundups to buy fractional shares of Bitcoin for a couple years that slowly grew to $300-$400 before I transferred my funds to my Coinbase account where I then sold all my other cryptocurrency, bought more fractional shares of Bitcoin, & then sold everything last year after making 150% profit. That was the end of my relationship with crypto. Afterwards, I transferred those funds to my brokerage account, which I’d opened along with a ROTH IRA account on Robinhood. Month by month I slowly created an investment portfolio of growth, value, & dividend stocks. I bought municipal bond and real estate investment trusts and corporate/treasury bond and covered call ETFs. I started doing weekly options trading, mostly cash-secured puts and vertical spreads. I joined Fidelity just to get their $100 promotion for new clients. I opened up a high-yield savings account with Goldman Sachs through my Apple Card for my emergency fund that paid me $5-$25 every month simply for parking my money there (no more $2!). I started reading books on finance, market psychology, & investing just because I’m nerdy like that and I love to learn and I found the topic incredibly interesting. In time, my investment portfolio grew from $140 in Litecoin to $40k in a highly diversified portfolio of my own design and research. And it all started with my measly savings account interest during the apocalypse!

After LB and I moved back to LA, I knew that I would have no retirement plan, so I’d have to create one for myself to make sure that I wasn’t an economic burden to my wife. That’s why I opened up my Robinhood account in the first place. But something changed inside of me along the way and now I find myself wanting to do this everyday for joy and income. Meanwhile, my artistic ambitions remain very much the same. I’ll never stop writing books because that’s who I am in the inside. I hope I get a dope agent by the end of the year. I hope they’ll have the skill and the cachet to get my books optioned and sell a few of my stories to the glossies and get me signed up in a speaker agency and help me go on tour. I hope I’ll get to participate in literary festivals. IOW, my literary dream is still very much alive. But it’s my non-literary dream that has always been causing me problems. While I know a ton of writers who are living decent but precarious lives and a few who are living great lives teaching in uni, for most of us, being a writer means being condemned to a life of perpetual struggle and uncertainty. And I’m fucking tired of that artistic cliché. I’m tired of the adjunct grind. I’m tired of the lack of equity between lecturers and professors. I’m tired of how writers are forced to cobble their livelihood together just to do what they love. I’m tired of the composition complex that sucks in new MFA and PhD graduates every year. I’m just tired of it all. And that’s why my desire to transition to the financial transition is my attempt at making and creating real wealth for myself and others while also sticking up for my own spiritual values.

After applying to a million jobs in IT, copywriting, teaching, editing, & advertising, I began focusing all my energy on jobs in the financial space. I’ve had a spate of interviews recently and now I’m seriously thinking about becoming a financial advisor. I realize how incredibly insane and boring that sounds. I also realize how unbearable finance bros can be, but those are yappy entrepreneur bros, not financial advisors. Financial advisors are like the guidance counselors or the life design coaches of the financial space. They’re there to ask a bunch of questions, understand where you’re at, figure out your life goals, & then help you reach them. That’s literally their job. And I really like this idea because I would get to use my analytical, research, organization, & communication abilities to coach clients, support them, & help them live their best lives. Not metaphorically, but literally. In academia the good you provide is important but it’s conceptual, philosophical, cultural, & intellectual. In finance it’s literal, material, emotional, & psychological. I like this a lot because I love helping people. I always have. With years of volunteer experience helping immigrants, BIPOC teens, refugees, & Latine undocumented workers with their language skills, this feels spiritually fulfilling to me. I also like the possibility of making much better money than in academia while still following my own spiritual beliefs (known as right livelihood in Buddhism). Whenever I have free time in this possible future career, I’ll work on creating new content and working on my newest book. When my next book comes out, I’ll go on tour and do remote work while I travel. None of that will change. But everything else will.

And that’s kinda exciting for me because for so long it felt like it’s either academia or bust. But after spending years breaking into my own economic prison known as the ivory tower, I realized at some point that I belonged outside the ivory tower because I love the sunlight more than the classroom.

So, stay tuned as I consider venturing into the foreign (and bizarre) world of finance and decide if there’s a place for me and my unique skill set, education, vision, age, & personality as a potential financial advisor in an industry obsessed with glib twenty-year-old MBAs and baby-faced entrepreneurs (aka baby sharks) dying to tell you about their Wharton degrees and their three summer internships at Goldman Sachs, which somehow equals two years of industry experience. I know I’m incredibly late to this game. Good thing my work ethic is kinda legendary and my mind is always voracious and my powers of concentration are second to none and my altruistic instincts run deep. Besides, I don’t mind failing. I just mind stagnating and I don’t like feeling poor.