Ask YC: Should I quit programming to pursue the arts?

All that I'm saying is I don't expect you'd gain much by swapping out a tech day job for an arts day (or night) job. It's still going to be the thing that's paying the bills to help you support what you're really into.

We're awake about 112 hours a week. Even with a full time job that leaves more hours than most people can be productive in arts endeavors.

This isn't, "Well, goofing around on stage is fine as a hobby..." blather. Go full on. Set goals. Get in a community. Produce stuff and find a place to exhibit it.

But if the guys in the Blue Man Group (or similar) are doing artistic stuff they're really excited about, it probably isn't the Blue Man Group. :-)

Making a living in the arts is excruciating. Classical musicians today tend to live in an unstable patchwork of part-time gigs, private teaching, side jobs lacking health insurance, etc... and that's if they're lucky. Only a few manage to obtain full time jobs. As others have noted, the day to day life of a musician isn't as glamorous as it might seem. I loved Beethoven's 5th as a child; but after playing it for the N-teenth time, I began to see how a career in music could grow tedious.

When I decided to go into CS it was because I realized that the people who had successful music careers tended to be a.) either so insanely talented that it was obvious they'd be catapulted into the inner circle (eg, full time gigs) fairly easily or b.) so monomaniacal in their dedication to their craft that they simply had no other choice. Anything other than being a musician would have meant having to curl up and die.

Since I was neither of those, I decided to turn to something that'd I'd been quite good at in high school (math/science) and rather enjoyed, and I would describe myself as much happier now. Vastly happier, and financially secure. Music is still a part of my life as a fulfilling hobby.

Whatever you decide, I'd highly recommend reading Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness," before making any irrevocable decisions. Gilbert is a psychologist whose research suggests that people are generally extremely bad at predicting the future and figuring out what actually will make them happy. It's a cautionary tale for anyone who might think "If only I could do X I'd be happy..." Follow that with "How to Want What You Have," by Timothy Ray Miller, and you have a prescription for happiness.

There are many of us that tried to make a go of it in the arts scene, but ended up going in to technical fields. I think that there is a correlation.

I've had a day job as an ER nurse for 15 years. I knew it was not what I wanted to do for a living, but it paid the bills. I, too thought that vocational happiness was to be found pursuing the arts, so, I studied art formally and on my own in a lot of different forms: interior design, sculpture, painting, photography, computer graphics, video editing, animation, 3D modeling and animation.

Any one of those things can be done to pay the bills, and there are career paths for each one of those. But, at some point, I found that I had to trade my passion to someone else for cash. And, doing that was impossible for me. I wasn't able to stay sane and edit the industrial video about the history of SmallCo's dialysis machines. I wasn't willing to create the logo like the client wanted, because I knew that what the client wanted was aesthetically wrong and ugly. I wasn't willing to put in 16 hours x 6 days a weeks just to be a visual effects artist in Hollywood.

It's one of the reasons that Hackers and Painters made so much sense to me. There is a creativity in programming, and in hacking that is very close to the creativity that one gets while painting or sculpting. Especially when the hacking is done on your own business.

It's the reason that I'm not going to work for someone else as a programmer, too. Why should I create value for someone else, when I can create value for myself? Why should I spend 8-10 hours a day at a desk so someone else's company can increase in value, when I can spend 8-10 hours a day on my own company making something that people want.

As an entrepreneur, I get the creative control. I get to be the decider. I set my own hours. I financially benefit from my own work. And, I get to do a bunch of different things. That's why I'm going to be a founder instead of an artist. It's a lot of the same benefits and risks, and a lot greater upside. At the same time, had I never knocked on the arts door, I would have never ended up being an entrepreneur.