The Neglected Life Of An Artist

Choose your sacrifice

“Am I still going to be doing this when I have a baby at home?” I wondered to myself.

It was December of 2022. I was sitting in the back of a comedy club, waiting for my turn to go up in front of maybe a dozen audience members in a room that could easily seat a hundred. The clock was creeping closer to midnight on a Monday evening, and I had to wake up early for work the next morning. My wife was at home, asleep in bed with our dog, and I was about to go onstage to get middling laughs from a bunch of strangers who’d forget about me the second I left the room. Nothing about this situation was positive, inspirational, or aspirational. It did not feel like a valuable use of my time, or a rewarding sacrifice to be making. The juice was simply not worth the squeeze.

It was around this moment when I thought to myself, “Maybe I need to stop doing stand-up comedy.” I ultimately decided to give it one more year–all of 2023–for a final attempt at a viable stand-up career. I pushed hard, expending more effort and energy than I had since before COVID, but by mid-August the writing was on the wall. My comedy “career” was finished. I now needed to shift my focus to what I had ignored for most of my adult life in favor of comedy.

Chris Jesu Lee

recently shared a piece titled “Would You Rather Be A Forgotten Success Or An Immortal Failure?” where, among other things, he mentioned that he’s close to finishing the first draft of a new novel. However, its eventual completion will come at a cost:

“I’ve never been fully engaged at my day jobs and my career is middling, at best. I’ve discovered I like writing at night, so in trying to finish this novel, I’ve had to give up the gym (not to mention the increased drinking and smoking) because no way am I waking up early on a workday to work out. My personal life has suffered too because the neuroses that fuel the incessant need to write also poison the chances of happy and long-lasting relationships. In another life where I didn’t have this incessant need to write, I may have a family by now (I’m now at an age where I’m increasingly aware that each passing year is one less year that my parents won’t have with their potential grandchildren).”

This passage hit me hard because I made similar sacrifices throughout my comedy career, and I’m now having to pay the (both literal and metaphorical) bill for them.

The job piece is the biggest one for me. Ever since I graduated college, my jobs were just that - jobs. They were ways for me to earn money so I could pay my rent and pursue my actual career - stand-up comedy. I never went the extra mile, never stayed late, never actively pursued a promotion. Doing any of those things would have gotten in the way of comedy. As a result, I basically have the same job now that I had when I moved to New York 13 years ago, albeit with a decent pay bump that comes with years of experience and cost of living increases.

However, I find it deeply humiliating that most of my peers at work are in their 20s, while I’m still chugging along at 38 (About to be 39). I feel like Ray on Girls when Elijah calls him “Old Man Ray.” I’d gotten so used to thinking of my bosses as older than me that it was a genuine shock when I realized the VP of my department, a man who is multiple levels above me within the company, graduated college a full four years after I did. Imagine going back to visit campus as a 23 year old and asking a first year frat pledge for a raise. That’s where I’m at right now.

The financial component is huge too. Without those promotions and commensurate raises, I’m radically behind my age group in terms of yearly income. That kind of stuff is a big deal when you’re trying to purchase a home in the midst of a global unaffordability crisis. No amount of skipping lattes and avocado toast can make up for that difference. Luckily, I’m married to a woman who took her career seriously and has advanced in accordance with that, so I don’t have to stress out about us going broke. But when it comes time to do our taxes and I look at the vastly different totals on our W-2s, I can’t help but feel emasculated. I have a lot of catching up to do.

On the bright side, my marriage is the one element of my life where comedy did not get in the way of eventual success. Comedy certainly got in the way of past relationships, but those were never going to work out anyway. It’s only through blind luck, Divine Providence, or both, that I managed to find and stay with my wife. She’s been incredibly patient throughout the nearly ten years we’ve been together, and I realize not every struggling artist is going to happen upon a partner who will gladly stand by them through all of their failures and frustrations. To be frank, I think the fact that she’s seven years younger than me went a long way. When we met in her early 20s, she wasn’t in as much of a rush for marriage and kids as someone my own age would have been. I had a longer leash to work with.

Things could have easily gone the other way though. I can totally see a world where I never met my wife, or she decided she had enough of my self-absorbed nonsense early on in our relationship, and I’m sitting here today single and nearing 40. My mom has a handful of relatives on her side who never married, and one of my big fears in my 20s was that I would eventually grow to join their ranks. Your 30s are a crucial time where you’ll either zig or zag in that direction. Luckily I zigged, but a potential zag was never far off.

If you’re an artist with a decent head on your shoulders, you’re somewhat aware of these sacrifices as you’re making them. You know that you’re giving up career stability, financial growth and potential romantic fulfillment in pursuit of your artistic goals. You’re just betting that your sacrifices will pay off and any future success will help close the gap that you surrendered in your younger years.

Who cares that you didn’t get that promotion at work? You made it as a writer/comedian/actor, and now you’re rich. Take that Director of Accounts job and shove it. All those relationships you left behind in your 20s don’t matter anymore either. If you’re a successful artist in your mid-to-late 30s, you won’t have any problem dating attractive women in their mid-to-late 20s. All good, right?

But not everyone makes it. In fact, most people don’t. And if you don’t, good luck out there. Good luck explaining the ten plus years on your resume where you bounced around multiple companies, all while never advancing or changing job titles. Good luck making a downpayment on a house with all the “exposure” you got performing at comedy festivals for free. And good luck finding a romantic partner in the rapidly winnowing dating pool. No Gen Z girl is excitedly telling her friends about the new middle-aged guy she’s dating and saying “He’s the total package: old AND unsuccessful!”

I understand this is kind of a gross thing to talk about, but just because something is unappealing doesn’t make it less true, nor does it excuse us from recognizing and acknowledging that truth. I think the one saving grace of artists, at least the sensible ones I mentioned earlier, is that we’re inventive and find it easy to aspire to things that seem outside of our grasp. We never fully lose hope, whether it’s in pursuing our chosen craft, or re-stabilizing our lives after that initial pursuit falls flat. An emotionally intelligent artist has a much better chance of finding a profitable second act career or a suitable spouse than an accountant of a similar age.

So that’s where I’m at right now. I’ve spent the last year or so attempting to get my house in order after neglecting the practical elements of adult life since I left college. I made my sacrifices, they didn’t pay off, and now I have to square that debt to try and get back on equal footing with my peers. It's not easy, but at least it’s a struggle worth undertaking.

Now that we’re in the Lenten season, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of sacrifice, and the different sacrifices we can choose to make. When I was pursuing comedy, I sacrificed stability. Since I gave up on comedy, I have more stability, but I’m now sacrificing a wider sense of possibility. Even when things were at their bleakest with comedy, there was always a hope in the back of my head that said, “Hey, maybe this time it works out.” I was still afforded the luxury of dreaming big. That’s gone now.

But I believe it’s time for me to make this particular sacrifice. I had fifteen years where I was able to think “Just maybe…” while ignoring more practical realities. That was all well and good when I didn’t have other people counting on me, but now I have a nascent family that I need to provide material support and model values for. That initial sacrifice had its time in the sun, and it’s no longer a pragmatic or worthwhile one to make. It’s time for a new sacrifice to rise up and take its place. And if it allows me to be at home every night with my family instead of wallowing in the back of a comedy club, well, that’s even better.