Day job

03 Nov, 2025

Disclaimer: I feel that it’s important for people to be honest about their financial situations when talking about anything related to money or job stuff. I’m married to someone who makes enough money that if I didn’t work at all, we’d still be able to pay our bills (if we lived very frugally and didn’t put away any savings). We also have people we could move in with, probably for free or very cheap, if our situation ever got dire.

After several years of full-time freelance composing, music implementation, and music production, I started a part-time day job a couple months ago.

I won’t dox myself by saying exactly what it is, but it’s a non-teaching role in academia. It’s also something that directly helps people. No job is perfect, but I like it a lot so far.

I’ve been feeling so many things. Happy that I found something that’s a good fit. Disappointed that I wasn’t able to make full-time freelancing work for me (at least for now). Relieved to have a stable source of income. Envious of people who live in countries with governments that actually fund the arts and indie projects. Angry at the general state of the economy and the world.

I could spend a really long time talking about how bad things are in the games, film, TV, and music industries, but I wouldn’t really be saying anything that hasn’t been said already. I’ll just do some bullet points instead:

• The vast majority of the money funding projects comes from giant studios who really only care about making a profit.
• Low wages, crunch, and layoffs are common. For freelancers, there’s not much work available, and most of what’s available pays peanuts.
• A lot of studios are champing at the bit to replace artists with AI as soon as they can.
• A large portion of people are only interested in whatever mass produced pop music, Marvel movies, army propaganda first-person shooters, or reality TV shows these giant studios tell them they should be enjoying, and therefore don’t monetarily support indies.
• Sex pests and abusers generally continue to have thriving careers even after they’re called out, while their victims get pushed out of the industry.

What else is there to say? Things are bad, and all of my friends who work in games, film, TV, etc. agree. It really eats away at you. Some people are better at navigating this than others. I am not good at it.

I’ve already been taking an unusual path in life for a long time by pursuing composing as a career rather than a normal job. But I’m discovering that even within this specific niche, the most common paths to “success” aren’t working for me.

I’m bad at networking events. If I go to one, even a generally pleasant one, it saps all my energy in a way that I can’t fully put into words. I’m very introverted and socially anxious, and my ADHD means I easily get overstimulated if there are too many conversations going on around me.

I’m bad at social media. I don’t want to be an influencer. I don’t want to make videos of myself playing instruments or explaining my composing process. I resent that it’s something I even need to consider doing.

I’m bad at hustling. I know people who force themselves to do several networking things a month and post regular videos on instagram despite hating it. Or who always have an album they’re working on, who are constantly updating their website and reels. Who are attending and maybe doing talks at multiple conferences per year.

I don’t have it in me. I can’t bring myself to keep it all up with any sort of consistency. Especially in an industry when I’ve been cycling between extremely slow periods and burnout, where I have to work so much harder than a cis man would to prove myself, where I’ve experienced real, tangible harm.

It’s just all too much. As much as I didn’t want to admit it to myself, it’s been making me miserable for a long time.

Sometimes when I’m at a networking event and feeling absolutely rancid vibes, I wonder if trauma may be causing me to project or exaggerate a bit. After all I have had some traumatic shit happen to me, including, as I’m sure some of you might remember, something involving a former friend who was also a composer/industry colleague.

I think the answer to this is yes, but also no. Trauma and the games industry are now inextricably linked for me. Which means that for the past year or so, I’ve been doing a lot of exploring re: “is this particular games industry related thing actually unsafe, or is my nervous system just going haywire?”

But here’s the thing: my trauma is my alarm system. It tells me when something is wrong, when something is off, when something is rotten at its core. It occasionally gives a false positive, but it usually doesn’t. I know I’m not the only one who, deep down, can sense something dark and horrible and malicious at the heart of the entertainment industry.

Like any industry, there are a lot of good people working in games and film. And like any industry, there are also people who will not hesitate to exploit others in order to get what they want. It just seems like in this industry, we’re expected to just accept it more than in other industries, because we’re working so many people’s “dream jobs.”

I used to think that the best way to come out on top of the situation I was put in was to eventually have a more successful career than the composer who assaulted me. But I don’t think that’s it anymore. I think the way to actually win is to build my life in the way that will make me the happiest.

I used to say that music is the number one thing I care about.

I’m realizing it isn’t, though.

It’s up there, but I care more about being a good person, showing up for the people I love, and just generally trying to enjoy my life as much as I can while I’m here. I don’t want to destroy my mental health, body, and relationships by working 80-100 hour weeks. I don’t want to smile and nod while some random dudes at a meetup talk about how inspirational Danny Elfman is. I don’t want to hold back from talking about the harm major studios in the film, TV and games industries are causing for fear of getting blacklisted.

After all, people who call out abuse, inequity, and/or people’s complicity in these things are often seen as contrarians, downers, difficult to work with.

It’s ironic, really. Composing is something that requires digging down deep into your soul in order to bring more beauty into the world, and yet some degree of soullessness often seems to be a requirement to be able to do it for a living.

All that being said, music is such a sacred, exquisite thing.

It’s one of my favorite things in the world. I am so, so happy to be able to create it. I can’t even begin to describe how it feels when I really get into the flow of composing. It’s like the music is writing itself and I’m just the vessel. I intrinsically know where to take the piece, to let it exist in the form that it deserves to exist in.

And I’m at my best when I’m composing a score. Being able to write music for someone’s film, game, animation, whatever it may be. It’s one of my absolute favorite ways to spend my time and energy. I love being able to bring my musical voice to something that inspires me. I’m always so honored when someone chooses me to help bring their creative vision to life. I love the collaborative process, bouncing ideas off each other, coming together to create something that none of us could have made on our own.

I could gush about this for hours. It’s such a beautiful thing. Making and collaborating on art is one of the most amazing things people do. I truly think it’s what makes us human.

But I think for awhile, making music had become linked to the toxicity of the industry for me. I recently went through a several months long period of making no music at all, because I just couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm to do so.

About a month ago I rewatched Kiki’s Delivery Service and decided to keep count of how many different times I cried while watching it. The final count was nine. I cry every time I watch it, but this was excessive.

I realized I needed to change my approach. Something I love as much as making music being seemingly inextricably linked to something that has brought me so much stress wasn’t healthy for me. I needed to separate them.

Thankfully, I had already started at my current day job. At the time I saw having to get a day job as a sort of defeat. My dumbass mid-to-late twenties self thought that having a day job meant you hadn’t truly “made it” as an artist, and although I haven't really thought that in a long time, that critical voice will still come up sometimes.

But music work had been slow for awhile. So I figured I’d just get a part-time job to have some stable income until the industry was in a better place, and I’d work my butt off in the meantime to try to get as much freelance work as I could.

Something interesting happened almost instantly, though. As soon as I started at the day job, I felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. Having an income was no longer dependent on me going to networking events or making social media posts! All I had to do was show up and do my work, and I’d get a paycheck every two weeks for around the same amount of money!

So after The Incident (crying nine times while watching Kiki's Delivery Service), another thing occurred to me too. Although I hadn’t had much work recently, I did really enjoy all the projects I’d composed music for in 2025. What if I could just… keep doing that?

It was a coincidence that all the projects I worked on this year were good ones, but what if I could be more deliberate about making that happen going forward? What if I were to only work on projects that appealed to me instead of taking anything that paid enough to help pay the bills? Focusing on quality over quantity, with another stream of income taking away the desperation I’ve been feeling for so long? Could this just be my reality from now on?

I think maybe it can.

It’s only been a few months, but I feel so much more at peace than I have in a long time.

Three mornings per week, I hop on the bus and zone out while listening to music or a podcast. I get to work, clock in, and chat with my very cool and nice coworkers. The work itself is sometimes boring and occasionally a bit stressful, but overall I enjoy it. I never do any work outside of my scheduled hours, and exactly every two weeks I get a notification that a direct deposit hit my account.

During October, I got the first big music job I’d had in awhile. It was for a project that I really liked, made by a musician friend of mine who I always love collaborating with. I loved it. Between that, the day job, and other various life things, I was really busy. But it was so rewarding. It brought back my creative spark. I’ve been slowly starting to work on my own projects again.

It’s still a bit early to say whether I’ve definitely found the solution to my problems. I just started this day job in late August.

But I think I now understand something that I sort of knew before but didn’t fully grasp. Our capitalist society sees being able to do your art as your full-time job as the ultimate measure of success. But that’s just not realistic for a lot of people, especially with available jobs being so few and far between right now.

I think the key is trying to build your life in a way that will bring you the most joy and least misery, regardless of what people say you “should” be doing. In a perfect world, I would be one of those lucky composers who makes a decent salary solely working on really cool indie projects. (Well, actually, in a perfect world there would be no money or bills, but let’s not get into that whole thing). But the world is not perfect, so I need to do what I can to build my life in a way that works for me.

And at least for now, that involves stepping back somewhat from the industry. Only going to events that actually appeal to me. Posting my work only when I genuinely want to share it. Only taking composing jobs that I really want to work on, knowing that this could mean a lot less composing work for me overall (not that there’s been much recently anyway!)

I’m not leaving. I’m just being a lot more selective about where I spend my energy. I’m learning to listen to myself.

#freelance life #industry thoughts