DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: Hey Doc, so I feel like I waste years basically doing useless crap. I went to college for essentially visual arts (the only “skill” I’ve had) and even then I doubt my skills aren’t that good compared to other fellow artists who entered more advanced sophisticated programs like animation and illustration, where I tried to enter and failed miserably by submitting the necessary portfolio. Said rejection hurts so much it just made me never want to pursue any career in the arts because deep down a part of me knows he’s not good enough and those two rejections are proof of that.
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Now that I’ve essentially spent 4 years of my life getting stressed and depressed for essentially a worthless degree and debt. Now I’m working menial minimum wage jobs that frankly just souls sucking and tiresome (Line cook, waiter, bartender, cleaner, barista, etc.), jobs that require no talent and easily replaceable, essentially for high schoolers or high school graduates and only requires doing the bare minimum of skills and like you yourself said YOU DONT GET COOKIES FOR DOING THE BARE MINIMUM.
Now Essentially feeling the sting of regret not just because I got my worthless degree with worthless skills but because my friends and colleagues are pursuing actual careers that actual get good pay because they have useful skills. Mostly union jobs mostly tradesmen like welders, construction workers, plumbers, truck drivers, carpenters, nurses, firefighters, engineers etc.. Real jobs doing real work that’s actually valued by other people and society. It makes me turn both red and green knowing that I wasted so many years on something so worthless. There is a small part of that still thinks I can get a career doing art work IE Tattoo artists but it just feels like cope or delusions and I’m scared to pursue it because it’s gonna open of the scar of rejection.
What do I do? How I stop feeling so worthless and actually amount to something? Stop feeling like in beneath my colleagues and move forward without being delusional?
Sincerely,
Worthless Wagie
DEAR WORTHLESS WAGIE: Hoo kay, there’s a lot to unpack here my guy, but I think you’re probably gonna want to just throw the whole suitcase away.
A lot of this is coming down to matters of perspective and how you choose to see the world. You’re choosing to see things in a very narrow, very limited way and in ways where you’re allowing your frustration to cloud your judgement.
I’ll start with an easy one: you’re misunderstanding the point of “you don’t get cookies for the bare minimum”. That’s not about so-called “unskilled jobs” (which is just a classist idea that’s more about what jobs are ‘important’; try running a fryolator with no training), it’s about people who think Not Being The Worst is something that makes them dateable. Being “a nice guy” isn’t a value add, it’s “yes, we expect that from someone we would want to date”, much as “doesn’t explode when you start the engine” or “doesn’t electrocute you if you touch the exterior” are baseline expectations for a car.
Unless you’re buying a Cybertruck, anyway.
So maybe you shouldn’t be using that to punch yourself in the nuts.
But speaking of nut punching, the real place to start, I suspect, is to tell you that you give up way too easily and way too quickly and I’m wondering how much research you’ve done in terms of careers in any creative medium.
I’m going to be painfully blunt here: if two rejections are enough to wreck your entire world, then you really aren’t ready for life in creative fields like writing, illustration, filmmaking etc. Anyone who’s made a go of it as a professional artist is both laughing and shaking their heads in rueful remembrance because, frankly, two rejections is, quite literally, nothing. One of the most common cliches when it comes to anyone trying to make it in a creative field is the comment about being able to wallpaper their house with rejection notices… and it’s a cliché because it’s true. Trying to get published, trying to get acting roles, get your screenplay out of the slush pile, get your film made, even getting into art programs means getting very comfortable with the idea of rejection and getting rejected constantly. I would say it’s part of paying your dues, except that implies that there’s a fixed number where, after you’ve passed it, you no longer risk getting rejected again and that’s not the case at all. It’s simply this: every field has it’s gatekeepers, and getting past them is often as much about luck as it is about talent.
And yes, I understand that this sounds elitist and exclusionary – and to a limited extent, it can be – but at its core, it’s simply about limited resources. No publisher, no agency, no production company or art program has unlimited resources, able to accept all and sundry who might want to take part. Every art program has a limited number of spaces for students; every publisher has a finite amount of money, personnel and room in the publishing schedule; every gallery only has so much room. Someone is going to be in charge of deciding who does or doesn’t get one of those openings, and they’re going to have criteria for what does or doesn’t make a good fit for them. That criteria is going to vary – whether they think it’ll make money (or enough money), whether they think that person is the right fit for the course and so on.
But here’s the thing: that acceptance or rejection doesn’t mean that they’re right, that what they accept is objectively good or what they reject is objectively bad. I mean, someone greenlit Gigli. Someone said yes to the Borderlands movie. Someone decided that it was a good idea to give Ben Shapiro a platform. Meanwhile, Stephen King was rejected by 30 publishers before Doubleday gave Carrie a shot, and Louisa May Alcott was told to stick to teaching because she sure as hell couldn’t write. Van Gough died in poverty and obscurity, an artist who was seen by the art world as being one of the most mediocre painters of all time. Hell, she may have descended into TERF madness, but nobody can deny the vice grip that JK Rowling’s books have had on pop culture… which is why her story of being rejected for years before anyone picked up Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone is the stuff of publishing legend.
This is why luck is as much of a part of success in creative fields as talent; someone has to be see your potential and be willing to take a chance on you. It just means that someone in the decision making process made a call based on their opinion and judgement… and that means that it’s all down to what one person or a small group of people think.
The fact that other people don’t see it or don’t want to take that chance doesn’t mean you’re The Worst. It’s just, like, someone’s opinion, man.
This is why part of success is simply not giving up in the face of obstacles and why knowing how to handle rejection or failure are critical to improving. OK, you got rejected… so now what are you going to do? You can give up, sure. Or you can decide to apply elsewhere. Or you can say “OK, so what about my work wasn’t to their liking and what can I do about it?” Then you can apply those lessons and try again. Or you might say “well, this didn’t, so I’ll put this one aside and try again with a different project.”
Sometimes the answer is “ok, I’m not ready yet, I’ll go work on my skills and try again”. Other times the answer is “well f--k you, I’ll find someone who does get it”. And still other times it’s “ah, I see what they had an issue with, let’s work on that…”
This is why it all comes down to how badly you want it, how much you’re willing to do to get it and how much you believe in your ability to succeed. If one or two rejections is enough to throw you out of the game entirely… well, as cold as it may sound, maybe this just wasn’t for you. And that’s ok! Not everyone wants or needs to get metaphorically punched in the face repeatedly. For some folks, that’s just a price they don’t want to pay and that is fine. Others are the sorts of mad bastards that’ll take the hit and say “thank you sir, may I have another?” And still others are of the school of “if God closes a door, blow a hole in the wall because f--k you for putting this wall in my way.”
But there’s a difference between saying “ok, this isn’t for me after all” and letting it wreck your entire life and worldview.
I mean, I’m going to get personal here: I spent more than two decades pursuing a career as an artist and illustrator. Over the course of that time, I was rejected more times than you’ve had hot dinners, even had people tell me to my face that I should give up. Hell, I had a teacher in college tell me that she’d rather see me cut my fingers off with tin-snips than call myself an artist.
I have thrown the equivalent of a down payment for a house into degree programs, courses, self-publishing efforts… and I never made it. I self-published a couple comics, worked very briefly as an animator and eventually just left the field entirely. And if I’m being honest? I don’t regret it; I never had the talent or the skill and I’m ok with that. I realized my talents and passions lay elsewhere.
And even then that didn’t mean that I was done with rejection; any author or professional writer who’s been on the Query-Go-Round with agents or who’s submitted proposals and pitches to editors is going to be getting rejected on a daily or weekly basis. Accepting it, rolling with it and working around it is part of the gig. As the song goes, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.
The same thing applies to “wasting” time and money on your degree. Let’s leave aside questions about how over-inflated the cost of a college degree is (and the subsequent devaluation of anything that isn’t a post-doc) and instead focus on whether you “wasted” your time and money by pursuing a degree that hasn’t led to a career in that field. The idea that a degree only has value if it leads to a particular career in a particular field is a very late-stage capitalism belief, where the only point of education and learning is to make money… and probably for someone else. In reality, that time and money only “wasted” in as much as you think you’ve wasted it. If you want to define “wasted” as in “I’m not going to earn back the money I paid in by getting a career using this degree”, then yes, it was a waste. If you choose to see it as “I learned a lot about something I’m passionate about and it has enhanced my life in many ways”, it absolutely wasn’t a waste.
Again: I’ll point to my own experiences, with the amount of time and money I spent pursuing a dream that I eventually gave up on. Would I like that money back? Oh, sure. But I honestly don’t regret the time or effort I put into it. It didn’t pay out, but I also have no regrets. I learned a lot about myself and while I may not be an artist, all of my education and experiences gave me a deeper appreciation for the art I love, even when I’m not capable of creating it.
And an education’s applicability isn’t always going to be a one-to-one ratio in terms of one’s career. People in STEM fields love to s--t on liberal studies, but liberal studies are, in point, about learning how to learn, having a broader base to work from and how to collate disparate factors into a cohesive whole. It’s easier for a generalist to join a different field than it is for a specialist to become a generalist.
But none of that is going to matter because you’re mostly using all of this to, again, punch yourself in the nuts. That’s all this is: sweaty nut-punching because you had a set-back and you let it convince you that you have no agency and no control. The rejection hurts, sure, but it’s hurting in no small part because you’ve decided that they were 100% right and two people’s opinions have more apparent weight than your own. You’re letting other people’s opinions continue to shape your life by insisting that some jobs are for babies and the poors, not for “real” people. You’re buying into the belief that your job is supposed to be the same as your value and other people have decided that these jobs have little or no value…
…right up until the services that these jobs enable are unavailable. Let’s not forget the number of people who participated in violent uprisings because they were told they couldn’t to go to Applebee’s or get their mani-pedis. Suddenly those jobs were very important indeed, so important that they wanted people to risk death while performing them.
The other part of this that you’re missing is that you’re assuming that this is The End. You’re stuck like this FOREVER. And again: you’re not. Not unless you decide you are. The fact that you’re working minimum wage or tipped jobs doesn’t mean that this is all you will do for the rest of your life. There are many, many paths open to you if you choose to take them. Each of them will come with their own costs, both metaphorical and literal, but that’s true of everything in life. You could go back to college and pursue another degree – a BA or BS, an associate’s degree. You could even just audit classes in order to learn particular skills in career paths that don’t rely on degrees. Relatively few game developers, for example, got degrees in game development or even in STEM fields; many got their start by learning to code on their own or building mods for other games. Hell, there’s a very real pipeline between game journalist and game developer. You might start as a bartender before eventually becoming a bar owner. Or you might continue to pursue a career in the arts in one form or another. These are all choices you could make, right now if you want. So too is continuing exactly as you are. But you have to acknowledge that this is a choice you’re making. To quote the bards: if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
So if you want to stop feeling like a failure, you have to choose to stop being a failure and to stop seeing this as failing. You can see it as a false start, a dead end that you have to backtrack from or as one more step on the path that’s going to put you where you want to be. You can let all of this destroy you or you can let all of it energize you, motivate you and move you forward. You have agency, you have power and you have the ability to make choices. Those choices come with consequences, but all choices do. You just have to decide if those consequences and risks are ones you’re willing to accept. But again: deciding that you’re not willing to accept them is still a choice and you should acknowledge that.
Does it mean being “delusional”? Only in as much as “delusion” means “going against other people’s beliefs”; other people may think something, but that doesn’t make it true. People still believe Elon Musk’s a genius after all.
Your life is in your hands. You can fail without being a failure, just as you can succeed in spite of yourself. You have the ability to decide how to shape it, how to direct it, what paths to follow and which to pass by. That’s all on you. Your future is your own, so if you want a good one, then it’s on you to make it.
Good luck.
Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com