Back to the Cave by Frank Chimero

I have to admit, when I first started reading this and the author was framing some important questions, I felt like I was going to barf a little when it seemed he was going to give a definitive answer for each (like almost every article on the internet it seems). But then he didn't. It was so refreshing. It reminded me how little things like that make me love Frank’s writing. The question he frames: is going off on your own worth it?

Well, I am here to offer a resounding maybe.

Frank is always marrying paradoxes, which is what makes great writing in my opinion. Like this other part:

How can we be independent together?

Independent together? Resounding maybe? Jumbo shrimp? These are great paradoxes stacked against each other and in proving contraries you find the truth. As Frank points out later in his article “independence is always supported by interdependence."

Now about employment:

Many people presume that employment is the opposite of independence, and that endlessly irritates me. It’s so short-sighted. History shows a long record of artists who did “normal” work to support their creative practice.

He points out many of the famous artists and writers whose work that is now famous today were “side projects” from their daily employment.

There’s one other important benefit to the unrelated day job: when it comes to your art, you don’t have to take any shit from anybody. You can honor any creative impulse because your paycheck is never on the line. Go nuts, make crazy shit. What’s more independent than that.

That’s one reason I’ve personally never liked contract work on the side, or even writing tutorials now. I feel like I have to finish all those things and sometimes I just don't want to. I want to explore as far as I want to go and stop when I want. A day job affords me that because my side projects can be whatever I want whenever I want. I never thought of that, but that is freedom.

Along these lines there is also great quote for this Krista Tippet:

I worry about our focus on meaningful work. I think that’s possible for some of us, but I don’t want us to locate the meaningfulness of our lives in our work. I think that was a 20th-Century trap. I’m very committed and fond of the language of vocation, which I think became narrowly tied to our job titles in the 20th Century. Our vocations or callings as human beings may be located in our job descriptions, but they may also be located in how we are present to whatever it is we do

That last line is fantastic: finding meaning and a calling might be found in being present in whatever we do, be that our job, parenting, or just being a friend. As Frank goes on to comment, “meaning comes from a way of being”:

When Campbell told us to follow our bliss, he wasn’t telling everyone to chase their dreams until they became careers. He said it as a call for people to pursue a vocation as Krista Tippett has defined it. Vocation is as much about who you are and how you are as it is about what you do. Bliss is an attitude, a disposition, so meaning comes from a way of being and is not a consequence of producing work. You make the art, the art does not make you.

One last great point:

I mistake the work’s flaws for my own. Perhaps that’s something many of us have in common. The way to approach this issue is clear: we must acknowledge we are involved in our unsteadiness, but believe we are only part of its reason. If we allow room in our work for serendipity to occur, that same space must also be reserved for misfortune. We are the cause of neither.