I know Dublin is expensive and I shouldn’t be surprised by the IT, but what is meant by ‘a creative life’ here and why is it associated with being able to eat out for breakfast?

9 comments

  2. A ‘Creative Life’ used to be associated with the very opposite- people essentially taking vows of poverty to pursue their artistic visions

    Now it means people who work in the ‘creative industry’- advertising etc, who aspire to the height of metropolitan consumerism

  3. You could just… Ya know.. Read the article and find out what she means instead of getting upset over a headline?

    It’s a piece is about the expectations of a generation who lived in a very different country to the one their children live in and the disconnect therein. Going for breakfast and a stroll is a framing device.

    >My friend ventured that, by and large, our children are a bourgeois lot. I didn’t know if I agreed with him about that; it seemed like an off-key assessment. I certainly wouldn’t like to be beginning again in Dublin now. I couldn’t imagine trying to make a creative life in this city of overpriced eggs and aesthetic clinics, big data and even bigger rents.

  4. That makes absolutely no sense; the mortgage value of a used tent couldn’t possibly cover an entire breakfast.

  6. The serious answer is that artists generally thrive in poorer societies – this is limited to developed economies – and struggle as societies become wealthier.

    Putting it broadly, you can take any “creative” job, be it acting, writing, music, etc, and broadly identify four groups of people:-

    1. The successes;
    2. People who work or are trying to work in the sector but require supplemental income;
    3. People who have jobs outside the sector but engage with it;
    4. People who haven’t made it.

    So “4” are the people who give up. Most people will realise early on that life as a rock star, footballer, etc, isn’t going to happen for them. They don’t really count. “1” are the opposite. These are the people who really did make it. Generally speaking, they make enough money from their job – or it allows them make enough money elsewhere – to be financially comfortable all the way up to being rich. U2, Enya, etc.

    The difficulty lies in group “2”.

    Let’s take as an example acting. Fassbender and Farrell are similar in age, both in their mid-40s. Farrell’s big break is Tigerland, so he’s about 25 when he can be said to have “made it” and starts getting big roles. Fassbender’s career is similar in timeframe, albeit he goes “mainstream” a little bit later.

    Both men were presumably comfortably living from their mid-20s as actors.

    Taking that as a crude baseline, that gives you a period of 18 to 25 where you need a way to live. Most young people nowadays will probably be in college until 21 or so but there’s still the spectre of several years without any income to face into.

    This is where things become difficult.

    If you’re living in a poorer city, such as Dublin or London in the 1990s, when the economic booms hadn’t really kicked in yet, then the amount of money you need to live is relatively low.

    Where the cost of living is low, people can easily pursue creative roles on a modest budget.

    As the cost of living increases, they need more money which requires more time.

    Ultimately the amount of time required to earn money will make pursuing creative roles effectively impossible for most people.

    This means that the only “creatives” will be:-

    1. Those rich enough (or with parents rich enough) not to worry about money;
    2. The exceptionally talented;
    3. The lucky.

    Most people involved in creative roles aren’t actually good enough, but the number of talented people that will be uncovered will be reduced as the economy does well and places to live become more desirable and thus more expensive.

    To summarise it cynically, why bother trying to be an actor if you can’t afford it and being an accountant would pay you more anyway? (As we don’t have time to discuss “mid-tier” or “jobbing” actors, etc.)

  9. If you read the article it’ll say so. The headline is more abstract than it seems.

    Even just off the headline; creative life generally earns less and eating out here now costs a bomb? I guess that was it.

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