FINANCIAL STRESS VS. CREATIVE WORK
Financial risk is one that makes all the other creative fears concrete.
Most of the risks we take as creatives live in our heads, but money makes them real. You can push through a fear of judgment. You cannot willpower your way through a late mortgage payment.
Here’s my situation when I quit my job: no debt, a partner who covered our rent, and money saved. I had an unusually soft landing by almost any measure. And still, financial stress found me. I think about that a lot. Because if I have been there, I kinda sorta know what it looks like for people without those buffers. And honestly, I’m not sure I would have jumped without them. In fact I would probably still be baking pies in the middle of the night—which is great if that’s what youu want to do—and that was not the vision I had for my life.
THE TIMELINE PROBLEM
Creative work and financial stability operate on completely different timelines. A salary hits your bank account every two weeks like clockwork (until it doesn’t, but that’s a whole other thing). Creative income is lumpy, backloaded, and sometimes nonexistent in the beginning. You do the work now and hopefully get paid later (sharp contracts are a must). And that mismatch alone is enough to keep a lot of genuinely talented people from ever trying.
FINANCIAL STRESS VS. CREATIVE WORK
What’s especially fierce is that financial stress is cognitively expensive, not just uncomfortable. Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir spent years studying what financial worry does to the brain. Their finding was that financial scarcity consumes mental bandwidth. The cognitive resources we use for planning, problem-solving, and creative thinking are reduced. Simply raising monetary concerns in people with lower incomes eroded cognitive performance by the equivalent of approximately 14 IQ points, which is more than the temporary deficit from a full night without sleep (usually about 1 point per hour lost). So, the mind under financial stress is, measurably, a diminished mind.
BRUTALLY IRONIC
Which brings me to the irony I find most frustrating about all of this: research on the creative brain suggests that stress disrupts the interaction between the brain’s default network (involved in generating novel ideas) and the executive control network (shapes those ideas into something useful). Meaning that the financial anxiety of pursuing creative work can potentially make the creative work itself difficult.
You risk everything to chase the thing you love, and the possible stress of that risk can actually deteriorate your ability to do the thing well. Rude.
THE CLASS DIMENSION
There are so many people being very encouraging and saying things like, “If I can do it, you can do it! This is what you do…” and more often than not, these people did have some sort of safety net. And I recognize the generosity of spirit aspect and the positivity of their intentions, but I see this everywhere and I feel like somebody has to put these uncomfortable words out there.
Financial risk in creative work is not equally distributed. The leap is genuinely smaller when you have a partner with employer benefits, family money, no student loans, no car payment, can live with your parents for a year, or just a safety net of any kind.
Historically speaking, the arts have been shaped by who can afford to make them. And I do appreciate the increasingly democratized industry of creative fields and entrepreneurial drive that is prevelant today. But I still think the negative possibilities have a place in the discussion. For the sake of balance and information.
I don’t mean to sound like this is an inevitable starving artist fate. That’s 100% not the goal. The sunshine is out there, but it’s not like there aren’t rainy days.
WORKS CITED
Feinberg, Cara. “The Science of Scarcity.” Harvard Magazine, May–June 2015, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/social-sciences/the-science-of-scarcity
Mullainathan, Sendhil, and Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books, 2013.
Olteteanu, Ana-Maria, et al. “The Creative Brain Under Stress: Considerations for Performance in Extreme Environments.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, 2020.