2AM 4/26/25 currently struggling with and doing a writing-based assignment for a class, and remembered a quote that would shape a large theme for my story- "funny how we get attached to the struggle" and stumbled across this article. Love the analysis of the game, especially how the gameplay mirrors madeleines mental struggle. The parts connecting it to the writing experience feel so real. Im a high school junior who has no idea what to do in college or beyond that despite my good grades, mainly because everything im interested in is basically guaranteed 0 pay and unemployment. i wanted to be a writer of some sorts for a bit but i read the book "the death of the artist" by william deresiewicz for the same class im doing this writing assignment for (we were told to pick an issue-based nonfiction book), and i was basically like "damn, i guess i dont wanna be a writer anymore." can feel so much of the struggle described for writers and artists in that book here. But i also see the beautiful writers mind connecting and deeply evaluating ideas across multiple levels of reality that first pulled me into writing and the english language. Just want to say that this article has been great and thought provoking, and that celeste is a beautiful game that tells all of us to keep going in whatever struggle we have.
Hey pal, thanks for this lovely comment. I'm 33 now but I was in exactly the same spot as you at 17--no direction, no sense of how to wed my interests to a stable life. All I can say is: Go for it. Pursue your passions. Figure out what makes you feel glad to be alive. You only get one chance. The world will beat you down if you let it. Reading the classics saved me, have given me a grounding for my life that makes it meaningful and keeps me from despair. Maybe the same is true for you or maybe it's something else, but you need to find it.
We are living in a period of extreme employment austerity. It's widely agreed by people my age but totally unacknowledged in the broader culture that there just are no jobs. If you expect to find a job that actually respects and uses your college degree, good fucking luck. One of my best friends, incredibly smart guy, told me once if he could do it all over again he would get a history degree. Instead he studied finance and got a good job in his field. After seven years they just laid him off. See ya, bye! I don't think there's a sure path to financial stability anymore so you might as well make the most of your one life.
yeah imma be real im kind of an idiot and i dont really understand the 2nd paragraph but the 1st one feels super real to me. from 7th grade i wanted to major in psychology, and i took ap psychology 10th grade (last year), excelled in the class. loved it. averaged a 100 year round and got a 5 on the ap exam. Only problem was my teacher was SUPER critical about majoring in psychology and spoke on how it was trending towards more of a medical study than a social study, stating neurology or using your psych major to go to med school would be better for the future instead. I dont want to become a doctor. He was an important teacher to me, i had him for 2 years in some other class so i took what he said seriously. he also gave this advice "dont get a job doing you love, get a job doing youre good at" because trying to do the things you love for a job allegedly kills your love for it (think like tieing extrinsic motivation to something youre intrinsically motivated to do harms your love for it), i haven't been able to find out if this applies to me just yet.
Combined with developments this year, my love for writing and stuff in that field has remained but my confidence in it has declined. I know writing is a 100% learnable and improvable skill, but i just have so much doubt going into any form of an english major that i was once confident in doing, including journalism, due to a combination of tons of things already described and stuff like ai and personal capability and financial stability. im lucky to have pretty rich parents and ones who will generally support what i do as a career, and friends at school, because right now im everyones person except myself. In many ways ive been deducing that i wont or cant be who i really want to be within a million different parts of life, and have been trying to cope with that. the last part of me from before this process that i feel is still holding on is writing. i cant shake the feeling that no matter what i do for a living, because there can be millions of things, the presence of writing and personal expression is what would give me joy in it.
sorry that this reply is super rambly and ineffective because it feels like you've given knowledgable and heartfelt advice. but its 1:40 am and ive already wasted enough time writing this teenage-era comment to someone nearly double my age. rn i have to start working on the writing assignment that brought me here again, so late because ive pushed it to the side- i have another project, a much more soulless one, due for my history class on the exact same day as this one, and some part of me told me that my time would be better spent grinding the history project instead idk why. Just know that ill be reading the comment and the article and processing all of its meaning, someday
One is—you are good at what you write about, imho, but this is a particularly awful time to be a writer without a lot of bylines, because almost all the entry-level publications are dead now. The feeling you are feeling is shared by basically everybody right now who doesn't have a good staff job, and those people live in fear of getting fired.
In that sense, it's actually not a bad idea to think about a job that would just let you write what you want, because there's a lot of freedom in just not being dependent on the ecosystem right now. It could be a job in a totally different direction, like being a mortician or whatever. I'm going through the same thing. Because…
Two—this feeling doesn't get better, ever, I think. There are paragraphs from this that could have come straight from my one am monologues and then I find myself in here as somebody who seems to be doing OK, etc. It's just kind of a lonely and difficult way to live. As long as the work itself is life-giving in some way, you should keep doing it, even if it's something you do in the mornings before you go off to your wage paying job and even if you feel like everything's going into a void. You're right that you have some objective numbers to look at here but you're wrong that if they were bigger you'd feel better about it (imho).
Three—you are really good at writing about video games (see: this post), and many, many people are not good at writing about video games. I don't know if that's what you want to be good at per se—something I've found about myself is that sometimes it's hard to respect your actual talents—but you should value that about your work.
Thanks Barbara, I really appreciate this comment. Sucks to hear you’re feeling similarly. You’re totally right that the numbers being bigger wouldn’t change how I feel—really helpful to be told that. It’s a small thing but it’s hard not really having other writers in my life to talk to about this stuff so I don’t know how extremely normal it is to feel this way. Anyway, time to look up how much morticians make haha
2AM 4/26/25 currently struggling with and doing a writing-based assignment for a class, and remembered a quote that would shape a large theme for my story- "funny how we get attached to the struggle" and stumbled across this article. Love the analysis of the game, especially how the gameplay mirrors madeleines mental struggle. The parts connecting it to the writing experience feel so real. Im a high school junior who has no idea what to do in college or beyond that despite my good grades, mainly because everything im interested in is basically guaranteed 0 pay and unemployment. i wanted to be a writer of some sorts for a bit but i read the book "the death of the artist" by william deresiewicz for the same class im doing this writing assignment for (we were told to pick an issue-based nonfiction book), and i was basically like "damn, i guess i dont wanna be a writer anymore." can feel so much of the struggle described for writers and artists in that book here. But i also see the beautiful writers mind connecting and deeply evaluating ideas across multiple levels of reality that first pulled me into writing and the english language. Just want to say that this article has been great and thought provoking, and that celeste is a beautiful game that tells all of us to keep going in whatever struggle we have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keIWG6hSD7Q (similar idea i think)
Hey pal, thanks for this lovely comment. I'm 33 now but I was in exactly the same spot as you at 17--no direction, no sense of how to wed my interests to a stable life. All I can say is: Go for it. Pursue your passions. Figure out what makes you feel glad to be alive. You only get one chance. The world will beat you down if you let it. Reading the classics saved me, have given me a grounding for my life that makes it meaningful and keeps me from despair. Maybe the same is true for you or maybe it's something else, but you need to find it.
We are living in a period of extreme employment austerity. It's widely agreed by people my age but totally unacknowledged in the broader culture that there just are no jobs. If you expect to find a job that actually respects and uses your college degree, good fucking luck. One of my best friends, incredibly smart guy, told me once if he could do it all over again he would get a history degree. Instead he studied finance and got a good job in his field. After seven years they just laid him off. See ya, bye! I don't think there's a sure path to financial stability anymore so you might as well make the most of your one life.
Sorry to plug my own writing but I wrote something else in the same vein a few months ago and thought you might get something out of it: https://theunderline.substack.com/p/its-always-been-impossible-to-grow
yeah imma be real im kind of an idiot and i dont really understand the 2nd paragraph but the 1st one feels super real to me. from 7th grade i wanted to major in psychology, and i took ap psychology 10th grade (last year), excelled in the class. loved it. averaged a 100 year round and got a 5 on the ap exam. Only problem was my teacher was SUPER critical about majoring in psychology and spoke on how it was trending towards more of a medical study than a social study, stating neurology or using your psych major to go to med school would be better for the future instead. I dont want to become a doctor. He was an important teacher to me, i had him for 2 years in some other class so i took what he said seriously. he also gave this advice "dont get a job doing you love, get a job doing youre good at" because trying to do the things you love for a job allegedly kills your love for it (think like tieing extrinsic motivation to something youre intrinsically motivated to do harms your love for it), i haven't been able to find out if this applies to me just yet.
Combined with developments this year, my love for writing and stuff in that field has remained but my confidence in it has declined. I know writing is a 100% learnable and improvable skill, but i just have so much doubt going into any form of an english major that i was once confident in doing, including journalism, due to a combination of tons of things already described and stuff like ai and personal capability and financial stability. im lucky to have pretty rich parents and ones who will generally support what i do as a career, and friends at school, because right now im everyones person except myself. In many ways ive been deducing that i wont or cant be who i really want to be within a million different parts of life, and have been trying to cope with that. the last part of me from before this process that i feel is still holding on is writing. i cant shake the feeling that no matter what i do for a living, because there can be millions of things, the presence of writing and personal expression is what would give me joy in it.
sorry that this reply is super rambly and ineffective because it feels like you've given knowledgable and heartfelt advice. but its 1:40 am and ive already wasted enough time writing this teenage-era comment to someone nearly double my age. rn i have to start working on the writing assignment that brought me here again, so late because ive pushed it to the side- i have another project, a much more soulless one, due for my history class on the exact same day as this one, and some part of me told me that my time would be better spent grinding the history project instead idk why. Just know that ill be reading the comment and the article and processing all of its meaning, someday
I have a lot of thoughts about this subject haha.
One is—you are good at what you write about, imho, but this is a particularly awful time to be a writer without a lot of bylines, because almost all the entry-level publications are dead now. The feeling you are feeling is shared by basically everybody right now who doesn't have a good staff job, and those people live in fear of getting fired.
In that sense, it's actually not a bad idea to think about a job that would just let you write what you want, because there's a lot of freedom in just not being dependent on the ecosystem right now. It could be a job in a totally different direction, like being a mortician or whatever. I'm going through the same thing. Because…
Two—this feeling doesn't get better, ever, I think. There are paragraphs from this that could have come straight from my one am monologues and then I find myself in here as somebody who seems to be doing OK, etc. It's just kind of a lonely and difficult way to live. As long as the work itself is life-giving in some way, you should keep doing it, even if it's something you do in the mornings before you go off to your wage paying job and even if you feel like everything's going into a void. You're right that you have some objective numbers to look at here but you're wrong that if they were bigger you'd feel better about it (imho).
Three—you are really good at writing about video games (see: this post), and many, many people are not good at writing about video games. I don't know if that's what you want to be good at per se—something I've found about myself is that sometimes it's hard to respect your actual talents—but you should value that about your work.
Thanks Barbara, I really appreciate this comment. Sucks to hear you’re feeling similarly. You’re totally right that the numbers being bigger wouldn’t change how I feel—really helpful to be told that. It’s a small thing but it’s hard not really having other writers in my life to talk to about this stuff so I don’t know how extremely normal it is to feel this way. Anyway, time to look up how much morticians make haha