People who reach their late 20s and realise the dream job they had since childhood isn't going to pay that much money for them, so they retrain as a corporate lawyer

i am kind of doing this, but with finance and not lawyering. hello age of 29.

I need a lottery ticket.

burt you have many opinions on this subject!

ladiesandgentlemen4U

i am kind of doing this, but with finance and not lawyering. hello age of 29.

Apparently, I am, too (financial systems, specifically, at 30). Except that I kinda don't care what I do for a living as long as I don't hate it, it doesn't necessitate acting like a shitbag, and it pays a wage that's comfortably above mere subsistence level. Yes, thank you: I will run SQL queries all day if it means I can buy a new computer and travel out-of-state on occasion and get my teeth fixed.

What's the collective noun for a glut of lawyers, I wonder?

-- Neil S, Friday, 20 June 2008 10:43 (5 hours ago) Link

A "bar."

bad girl

I got you all beat, I ditched college three years in and enlisted. I saw the writing on the wall. Also I sucked at college.

gnarly sceptre otm. dream job to me is no job, except ppl send me checks.

my job pays pretty well, but sucks beyond belief. And if that's going to continue to be the case, I might as well be making for real $$$. It looks like every option involves more school though :/

axioms of experience:

idealism is much easier in a state with socialized health-care and semi-decent public transportation than in the wild and wooly west

it's easy to condescend to those who have made pragmatic concessions for financial gain from a youthful position before which such concessions are ever presented.

I want to try to make some kind of case for the argument that life need not be a choice between irreconcilable career extremes in the end. I have in mind the specific example of a friend who tried for years to be a pop star singer-songwriter, then was finally forced to give it up and become a full time lawyer - not corporate, but reasonably well paid, dull, government work. For a while he was very depressed about the situation, and heavily in debt.

Eventually, he picked up his guitar again and gave it another try - and failed again - and returned to law. At this point I think he was on medication, and had some real problems with anger - he was very upset and frustrated about the situation. Via a music connection he had made, and at her suggestion (and somewhat against his own will at first), he picked up his guitar for a third time and started writing children's songs for kids acts. These acts are, I am told, relatively unaffected by the downturn in the record industry due to falling CD sales, as young kids can't operate an iPod or computer, so CDs and DVDs still sell very well in this market. Right now, there a lot of money on the table for one of these acts. Various extremely large media entities are getting involved to make movies, dolls, franchises and so on for this act. Nothing's actually happened yet, but it's his songs that the act are performing, and of course as a result he has a good chance of getting into the songwriting business at a high level.

Now he spends his days in the world of music as both a lawyer and a songwriter, gets to travel, makes enough money from his legal work to live reasonably well and expects to be making plenty of money from his childrens acts - if not this one, then another - in due course. Best of all, he can write Motown and soul influenced pop songs much like the 50's music he always loved, as this is the kind of music that kids just love to jump around to (many of us still do). I think some careful and canny manouvering, plus the kind of luck that comes with persistence and intelligence, got him very close to something resembling his dream. He really was down in the dumps for a good five years before it all started to fall into place. Now he's off the medications and his teenage sunny disposition has returned. It is very gratifying for me to see this all happen, as he is one of my best friends.

Now to be very blunt, this is not quite the dream realised: it's something nearby, and more realistic and humble. Certainly he is not the pop star he dreamed of being as a teenager, and no doubt others are living his abandoned dream to a higher level. However, he's now 40 years old, and on his way, with a bit of luck, to becoming either a professional songwriter or a respected music lawyer who also has a nice sideline hobby writing music on commission. He also knows enough about contracts to negotiate good deals for himself and his music friends and clients, and what he is learning on the job is invaluable, genuine, field expertise. The cogs are all turning together, and there is observable synergy between these two, once apparently mutually opposed, professions. It's not a bad result - in fact, it is a highly sustainable one.

Perhaps I'm being presumptious in implying that something similar may be possible, mutatis mutandis, for the rest of us when we are forced into similar career swerves, but I really think there is something valuable to learn from this guy's example.

guys being a musician/writer/artist etc has as much meaning (or whatever the fuck you want to call it) as being a lawyer ie none. youre not special for "following your dreams". in fact youre probably a huge pain in the ass to most people around you.

wtf does that even mean

plenty of people, artists and non-artists alike, are huge pains in the ass to the people around them.

i think about this like 40 hours a week

im only 20 so im gonna bookmark this now so i can remember to bump it in 4 years

sunny successor otm

i dont think its a matter of "feeling special" at all-- idk why sunny brought that up

Sunny Successor a bit harsh, I think, but still kind of otm. You have every right to give a fantasy career a try, and you have to believe in what you're doing if you're going to go that route. But to be self-righteous about it is ridiculous and extremely obnoxious, because what you're doing is as selfish, if not moreso, than any other career. You're not making some great contribution to society (unless your art is awfully fucking good), and there's already a glut of people doing what you're doing in most cases.