If there is a better community to ask this question, I’m all ears.
I majored in history because I like history. With a major like mine without a doctor thesis you can only work as a teacher and children are mostly idiots. You could try academia, but the ROI here is so much below zero it doesn’t make any sense.
As a child I was musically gifted but my parents never considered music as something worth following or studying. As an adult I bought me a classical guitar 12 years ago and a grand piano 5 years ago and started playing. I learned to play both instruments on my own.
Don’t think for a moment my technique is good enough to start studying at a conservatory for either instrument. I already rehearsed for a piano professor and he told me I must have invested an insane amount of time, that my technique is simply not good and if I want, he knows of 2 colleges that offer preparatory courses I could attend to.
I work as a firefighter and none of my coworkers even suspects I majored in history or that I’m capable of playing any instrument, it’s something I don’t talk about with any of them because I don’t believe they would understand and they’d start with intrusive questions I hate (if you are so talented like you claim and have a major in history, why are you wasting your time as a firefighter?). I already tried to find a decent job with history and failed. It’s something I don’t want to repeat with a possible major in music. Firefighting, as tiring and unfulfilling as it is, pays my bills and has given me a financial independence I never had, but I never saw myself here.
The curious thing is I have enough money to stop working and covering tuition fees and lodging for 4 years plus the preparatory year, but I don’t know if choosing this path would be the stupidest of decisions ever made. If I work part time, I don’t have to spend my whole savings.
Working as a firefighter I feel I’m wasting my life, I don’t want to be a firefighter till I retire, but this job has given me financial stability and I dread losing that.
I do my job and when I’m not very tired at home after doing the laundry, buying food and cooking, cleaning my apartment, walking a bit to disconnect… I play. It brings me joy but as of now it’s only a hobby. To even monetize it I would have to at least have a bachelor.
Is this what it looks like?
I write and release music. It’s not spectacular music, but it’s mine and I give each track my best before I send it off into the world. It earns me dust; I do not expect to ever make any kind of meaningful pay from it, and that’s fine because I don’t do it to make money. I do it because it’s in me to do it, because I love the craft, and I love the challenges of learning audio engineering and production.
In a past life I was actually a professional musician. I made money playing, giving lessons, conducting, a tiny bit from writing but not much…and as fun as that was it’s really a grueling lifestyle with lots of time away from home and I don’t have it in me to do that anymore. And no one wants to see my squishy dad bod prancing around on stage.
Now I work a quiet job in a materials testing lab. I spend my day torturing little pieces of metal and my evenings in my studio at home. Only one or two people at work know about my former life as a musician and are aware of the music I record. Most people just see me as the little happy lab rat that I am and I’m completely okay with that.