Listen & Draw - Artist In Retirement: IF You Are NOT a Pro, THEN You're Not An Amateur Either!
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Transcript
Artist In Retirement: IF You Are NOT a Pro, THEN You Are Not An Amateur Either.
This podcast discusses a third option, and what that means for you.
Are YOU a pro, or, are you an amateur? Chances are that you either get paid for your art, in which case, congratulations, you are a pro, or, you don’t, and you have been manipulated into believing that you are, therefore, an Amateur. In this podcast episode, I am going to argue that there is a third category, the one YOU may belong to, and I will discuss why that matters for you.
In this podcast, I am going to argue that if you are retired, you are neither a pro nor an amateur. And it is important because it is important to have the right mindset. I will argue that there is another, third category, something else, and I will talk a bit about why that matters.
I will also talk about “finding a new purpose”, in quotes, and why that may be different from what you think.
I will specifically NOT be talking about the financial side of things and I will just assume you found yourself in a place where you have enough money to live off of without having to work, with a lifestyle that is affordable.
I hate it when YouTube videos do this, but I found no other way in this case because I want to discuss something else first, but the main part that answers the question in the title of this podcast episode is only at the end. So I hope you keep listening. And drawing!
Because this Practice Drawing This podcast is designed to listen to while drawing. Please also check out the Practice Drawing This website which is packed with free resources you can use for drawing practice.
First, a relevant bit about me. I stopped working in 2008 and became a stay-at-home dad while my wife continued making a career, a setup we were both happy with.
Does this make me a retiree? Well, yes, and no. I stopped working way too young to be seen as a retiree, and MY WIFE still works! And we have a child! So it’s not like we can sell all our stuff, buy a camper van and carelessly travel the world! And taking care of a child IS work! And quite hard work in the first few years!
But I did find I had a lot more flexibility, and more and more time as our child got older. And that part is similar to being retired: you suddenly have a lot more time on your hands as you don’t have to hold down a time-consuming job.
And what do you do with that time?
How do you find a new “purpose in life”, in quotes?
One thing I have only recently come to realize is that such a question is very much rooted in ideas about how WORK gives you meaning in life, a sense of purpose. You work for money, of course, but work provides you more than that. You become a part of professional communities, you gain respect from peers, work gives you status, social interactions with other people, goals to work towards, feeling useful to others, like customers, and being needed by others, like colleagues and bosses.
All of that falls away when you stop working, and, so, naturally, you go in search for something to replace that empty space in your life, that space that used to be filled up by a job for decades.
It’s not how you start your “retirement”, in quotes, by the way: the first weeks or months are your honeymoon period. It feels like a vacation. But eventually, you might end up not feeling as well, as if something is missing.
Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning is a tremendous book. The central theme I remembered from it was that in order to have a satisfying life, you need to have things to look forward to. When you are younger, there is plenty to look forward to: your next promotion, your current project becoming a success, your vacation, marriage, your child and their stages of growing up, your next home, et cetera. As busy as your life is in your 30s and 40s, there is also much to look forward to, to live towards.
Most of that falls away when you get older and stop working: your children are grown up and have left home, you don’t have a job, so also no next promotion, successful project, et cetera.
But here’s the thing! When you were a child, you didn’t have projects and promotions and children to watch grow up. And you could still be happy! This part may be different for you, but I was a happy person.
As a child, you do have things to look forward to: the test grade, the holiday, finally getting the bike or guitar you wanted. For me, it was finally getting the computer I wanted, seeing the first computer games I made published, or generally programming, seeing something cool happen on screen after a few hours of work.
But there was little status, and little money-earning involved.
And THAT was a realization I came to recently. With the Practice Drawing This website, I was still searching for meaning as created through work. Not the money part, but showing what you made. That is something I didn’t do before I started to work! I did publish games, but stopped doing that after I had succeeded a few times, looking for new challenges again after that. You do need exciting new things to look forward to, no matter your age. I did code for money during my university studies. I needed the money, and it was a very convenient way to make money. And I learned a lot. I decided NOT to go for a PhD after my Master’s, because I had seen the method of doing research. I understood it, and it was just going to be a lot of hard work without learning much new after that. Status was never a thing for me. And so I started to work as a software engineer in a business.
And that is where I changed, I think. What other people thought of what I made started to matter more to me.
I only recently realized this. Maybe my early 20s me had a better understanding of what life was about! Maybe I had to become that person again that made things purely for his own enjoyment. It regularly accidentally ended up finding an audience anyway.
That I am making this video is clear proof that I am not there yet. My 20s self would not have been on YouTube, or any of the social media platforms, for that matter. My 20s me, if he were here now, would have obscurely been tinkering with something, far away from the limelight, happy to just be making things that pleased him and maybe ONLY him.
This may not be entirely true for you; maybe you shouldn’t return to the you you were in your twenties. But my point is that your job changed you as a person, and you need to go in search of the person you want to be again now that work has fallen by the wayside.
I’ll come to the part the title hinted at next, but if you find yourself in a retirement situation, this might be a good thought experiment, what would your younger self, the teenager or the you in your 20s, the person you were before your work, jobs, careers changed you, have done in this situation? Maybe it’s true for you, too, that your younger version understood better what living was about.
And here comes the part that answers the question raised in the title. When you are retired, you are not an amateur and not a pro, but then, what are you?
The word “amateur” is usually reserved for someone who does an activity without getting paid for it, in their spare time, next to their paying job. They don’t make money with their activity, and they can only do that activity if time permits, if they have spare time next to their main activity, which is the job they make money with, a job they need because they need to be able to pay the bills.
The Amateur is time-constrained.
A Pro, in contrast, does make money with that activity, and they usually spend a lot, if not all, of their time doing that activity they make money with to help them pay the bills. That said, they are constrained creatively by what the customer wants.
So both amateurs and pros are constrained, one by money and the other creatively.
But here’s the thing when you go do that thing in retirement: since paying the bills is already handled through your retirement or some other way, you can spend as much time on it as a pro, while making as little with it as an amateur while you even keep creative control!
I want to repeat this for emphasis: when you retire, you can afford to spend as much time on an activity as a pro while making as little on it as an amateur while you even keep creative control!
There are no creative or time constraints.
So which, then, are you?
I came up with the word “Autonomous” for that.
The Autonomous are people who don’t need to make money but who still do need to have activities in their lives. As such, they are a third category, next to the Amateur and the Pro.
Aristocrats were people who had a lot of money and who didn’t have to work. That allowed them to become scientists, setting up entire expensive laboratories in their vast homes. This was before the universities, before Scientist was a paid job. That made them Autonomous.
And here is one important thing I want to highlight, one thing that might make you consider becoming Autonomous like that yourself: because they didn’t have to make things that catered for a market, they were free to explore new directions, and sometimes made revolutionary new discoveries.
For example, Henry Cavendish was incredibly wealthy. He turned his massive inherited estates into personal laboratories. Not having to make money, he often just tried things out for fun. He discovered hydrogen and with that the composition of water, and literally weighed the Earth using a custom-built torsion balance in his garden shed.
Antoine Lavoisier was a wealthy French nobleman, and is widely considered the father of modern chemistry. He used his vast fortune to commission incredibly precise, expensive custom glass instruments. He discovered the role oxygen plays in combustion and helped construct the metric system.
Ada Lovelace received world-class private tutoring in advanced mathematics, which was unusual for a woman at the time. She later published the world’s first computer algorithm, a century before the first computer one was even built.
At the age of 38, Michel de Montaigne retired to the tower of his family’s massive chateau, surrounded himself with a library of 1,500 books, and spent the rest of his life writing down his thoughts. In doing so, he essentially invented the modern essay (from the French essayer which means “to try”)
Julia Margaret Cameron was born into wealth. She took up photography at age 48 when her daughter gave her a camera. Not tied to commercial pressures, she intentionally ignored the technical “rules” of the day, using soft focus and long exposures to create deeply emotional, psychological portraits of famous people, elevating photography from a neat chemical trick into a fine art.
There are many more such examples of people who could wander off into uncharted territories and discover incredible things they are now famous for, simply because they had the time and resources because their hands weren’t tied by having to make a living.
In other words, it gave them the freedom to try things no one else was trying.
But you don’t have to be an Aristocrat to become Autonomous and enjoy these advantages. If you are a retiree, you, too, can have these advantages usually reserved to the Aristocrats. Which is why I would call this type of person an Autonomous, not a Pro or Amateur, or Aristocrat, because not all Aristocrats do anything useful with their freedom, or maybe even most don’t.
Pros and Amateurs have done great things, too! But there are certain advantages to being an Autonomous and having the best of both: being able to spend a lot of time and other resources on something without having to make money with the activity.
Artists like Cézanne and van Gogh, who weren’t Aristocrats because they weren’t that wealthy, did have wealthy family, so they were Autonomous too, allowing them to pursue the new directions we know them for today, whereas we know precious few of their contemporaries who were the pros of their time.
Free from having to adhere to the requirements of the Parisian salons, Cézanne instead chose to go outside and figure out how to regain control of compositional design now that they had discovered that outside lighting was very different from what they had thought: with the invention of the tube of paint, they could paint outside, and that the lighting was much flatter and much different from the strong contrasts created by studio light, which had given them opportunities to control tonal composition, a luxury they didn’t have outside.
Van Gogh revolutionized painting as a means of conveying emotional mental state. Most modern artists are indebted to these two, and not as much to the peers of their time who just painted the then popular reclining nudes and portraits.
These Aristocrats and Artists were neither Pros, as they didn’t make money with it, nor would I say that they were Amateurs, considering the vast resources they brought to bear.
They were Autonomous, that’s a different category.
And this is why I mention this: you can get into the mindset of an Autonomous, too, and try new directions no one else has taken yet! You don’t have to be as wealthy as the real original Aristocrats to do this. All you need is the time afforded by not having to work, as retirees or stay-at-home dads or moms or children can. More on that later.
I try to do things no one is trying on the Practice Drawing This website. I have variable 3D models, photos of statues from many angles, a Perspective Game, Assisted Reality for artists that lets you compare your drawing to a reference photo using your mobile, and lots of other resources you won’t find anywhere else. I am also examining what memory drawing does for one’s drawing abilities. It is my attempt at finding groundbreaking new things, a freedom I have because I don’t have to think about making money. I am sure that when one of these things takes off, someone will monetize it, but for now, these things are unproven and so people who need to make money are not trying it. They can not even afford to try it.
THAT, as I see it, is one of the main advantages of entering a field like an Autonomous instead of like a Pro or Amateur: you can afford to try new things no one else is trying, and maybe strike gold, intellectually, or, financially, and worst-case, you had a pleasant time pursuing these things.
One important aspect of being an Autonomous is that you are an outsider. The original Aristocrats, the wealthy ones, were outsiders by nature, being that rich was just for the few. Cézanne and van Gogh were outsiders, shunned from the Parisian Salons where you had to be if you wanted to sell work. This is the hardest mental change you need to make maybe: at work, you were an insider. You fit in. You did work others approved of. People admired your abilities maybe even. As a retiree, you are an outsider. Discussions about work, mortgages, pension funds and such don’t relate to you anymore. You really are an outsider. Maybe that makes it easier to really become one mentally, too, to embrace it and do radical new things. The original Aristocrats were born outsiders and were used to it, but we, when we retire, we have to get used to it, all our reflexes still come from the habit of trying to fit in at work. If you let that go, you can do radical, cool, new things.
The Autonomous are outsiders who bring the resources, financially or otherwise, and perhaps even education of a Pro to the table, with the freedom to apply these vast resources to an original unproven new endeavor.
Something else to ponder: it’s not just retirees who are Autonomous. It’s anyone who doesn’t have to hold down a job to make ends meet. This includes stay-at-home dads (or moms) like me, but this also includes children, and even the teenagers and some people in their 20s, like I used to be. I minded my own business until my mid 20s, just making things I found cool, then I had to get a job to make ends meet, and then I became a stay at home dad, and it took me quite some time to discover that I had to unlearn the reflexes that work had hammered into me. As I mentioned earlier, I have not fully transformed back to my old self yet. That person would not have made podcasts. But I am getting there, focusing on what I want to make again. And maybe I end up doing that in obscurity like I did until my mid 20s. I realized only recently that I have to undo all the changes work caused in my psyche and that I have to return to being the person I was before my mid 20s.
Maybe you do, too? Or maybe not, but it is very likely you have to find the person you want to be again.
We start Autonomous as kids, and after a life time of work, we hopefully return to being happy Autonomous again, realizing that we are, actually, better off as Autonomous in our situations. As children, we did know how to live like an Autonomous, and later, after we stopped working, we seem to have to rediscover that.
Maybe, after we retire, we can continue the thing we did as a hobby, as an amateur, during our work life, but this time like an Autonomous, or maybe we can finally do the thing we have been putting off our entire lives, and this time have all the time for it, without having to make money with it. Not like an Amateur, not like a Pro, but like an Autonomous.
Yours sincerely,
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