My observation is that a lot of teachers knew they were going into a profession known for low pay but lacked the financial literacy and practical experience at college age to understand that “low pay” meant “struggling to survive” rather than “you’re not going to own the biggest house on the block.”

As a result they walk out of school with debt, find it difficult to find a position (because e.g. some high school level positions in the US have very few vacancies), and end up taking whatever they can get or if they cannot get anything in teaching take some other low-wage job after following their passion led them to a short-term dead-end.

i think maybe better advice is "work really really hard and find the closest commercially viable approximation to your dream"

there are plenty of stable, well paying jobs for all sorts of different skill sets in the entertainment industry. becoming a key grip or an audio engineer isn't a high risk career trajectory. the bigger problem with creative fields is that most of the advice kids are getting is misinformation coming from people who have to idea what the industry actually entails. the quality of art education in the us is fucking abysmal. imagine if you had english teachers who only cared about slam poetry and discouraged students from learning functional writing skills or a music teacher who never taught meter. i never had a single art teacher who taught any representative drawing fundamentals or even hinted at what was required to become an employable commercial artist. anything even remotely representative or commercial was frowned upon.

>Putting out advice, "don't do risky stuff" also doesn't harm real risk-takers because they won't take that advice anyway.

maybe but when you're only ever told not to do something it doesn't exactly give you a strong footing to take smart risks and further sets up passionate but under informed kids to be exploited because no one ever taught them how to value their work.

> i never had a single art teacher who taught any representative drawing fundamentals or even hinted at what was required to become an employable commercial artist.

Wow, never realized the schooling situation was that bad in the arts.

> because no one ever taught them how to value their work.

That's a great point, though valuing one's work is bloody hard at any stage of life.

If we're honest with kids, it's going to be hard to get them to do anything.

"Well.. Tina's going to get a great job whatever she does, and however little effor she puts into it, but it's because her mom's a doctor and they have a lot of money. It doesn't matter if she owns an iPhone X and doesn't do homework. You need to, and it doesn't matter if you really love cooking because chefs make like $10 an hour and you need to pay rent so you need to go into investment banking even though you hate math and Excel."

Then we'll wonder why teenage suicides are sky high... oh gee i wonder why...

Ah, but she's uphill on that investment banking job as well - she's looking at vast odds for getting into Harvard. Tina's mom went to Harvard, so she's legacy and has classes to improve her SAT and her grades from her private school Ivy League feeder are artificially inflated.

Investment banking is certainly metasyntactic here. You could just replace it with chemical engineering or B2B marketing or construction management or something else sufficiently dry and lucrative.

Ultimately the reason that we view some jobs as more fun than others derives to some extent from the natural human tendency to build a sense of identity by pretending our work is more interesting than everyone else's; the caricature of the soulless office worker is intentionally, not unintentionally, dehumanizing, because it's necessary to reinforce the narrator's pride in their own work. People in visible professions inevitably present their professions as being admirable while trying to present themselves as admirable. The age of mass media creates the illusion that whatever is being talked about is in fact more interesting than what isn't being talked about. Which actually makes the world a better place, Fallout or Tide? Which generates more fame for its creators? The only complete solution requires the nomenklatura to relinquish--or be deprived of--their privileged position in the collective unconscious. (Woe on the invisible.)

Not that that's particularly easy. The kids aren't stupid. Everyone knows that being, say, an artist, doesn't just pay off in terms of money, but in the way people interact with you. The people chasing these rewards aren't unpaid; in fact, they go to great lengths to ensure they do get paid, in precisely the way they seek to be. The lionization of indolents makes people seek indolence--and why shouldn't they?

Years ago, I had the occasion to drive across the country with a traveler in my passenger seat. We spent dozens of hours discussing philosophy, law, farm work, and how to determine which cigarettes in an ashtray are still safe to smoke. When we passed through Denver, hundreds of miles from either our origin or destination, he recognized some of his friends walking on the sidewalk of an overpass; we met up and enjoyed chips and soft drugs by a creek under the bridge. My erstwhile friend is still hopping trains and sleeping outside to this day. As they say, "be careful what you wish for--you might just get it".

If we'd be truly honest with kids, we'd tell them that most of them can't become investment bankers either...

Actually, prostitution is relatively safe and predictable way to make good money, in countries that have the appropriate legal framework.

You can probably make as much as a software consultant if you play your cards right, get a nice house in the countryside and retire at 30.