‘What a brutal business’: pop stars on life after the spotlight moves on

Colleges certainly do. There is no market economy in giving out loans but yet there are no price and quality controls on the receiving end of the money.

The lifestyle certainly isn't lavish in the sense that pop star lifestyle is, but taking out many tens of thousands of dollars in an attempt to become a librarian (one friend of mine did just that) is just stupid, financially speaking. Short of having family bail you out or marrying a high income earner, you're a prisoner to loans that's cannot be discharged via bankruptcy.

In the 1980s, the State of Alabama was sued by prisoners who claimed their prison cells constituted cruel and unusual punishment. One of the defenses the state used was that the student dorms at Auburn University were not only more bare than the prison cells, and lacking in basic amenities like air condition that the prisoners were demanding, the students had to pay to live there (the state won). Apartment complexes in Auburn and other college towns now are in wars with each other over the most attractive amenity packages for their residents. Because so many students take the largest loan amounts offered instead of just what is needed, a huge industry has popped up to convert that loan money into the type of experiences that appeal to those in their teens and early 20s. The lifestyle experience of the contemporary university student is nothing like those of the era pre-easy money loans (that is, when the government start guaranteeing and later issuing loans directly).

I live in Boulder, and it's really all over the place.

There a lot of kids just scraping by.

But there are also a lot of kids who don't work, but rent >$2k a month apartments and drive Audis and BMWs.

Obviously their parents are funding them, but I'm pretty sure they take out a lot of loans, too.

Like you, I write because I must. I don't choose to write. It just happens. I can choose whether or not to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard, but I can't choose not to create the stuff that I write.

If I'm stuck somewhere with no writing utensils, I write anyway, constructing stories and lyrics and essays and explanations in my head, storing it up as best I can for when I can write it all down. It isn't even mostly in words. Most of my thoughts are visual-spatial, and only get translated into words when I have writing utensils.

I make pictures, too, and songs, and software. Similarly, I don't decide to do it or choose to do it; it just happens all the time, like it or not. If I don't have any tools to work with, that doesn't make it stop. It just makes it inconvenient, and it means that a large amount of what I create is likely to be lost before I can get it transcribed. I don't lose it all. The especially memorable bits stick, which means that doing without tools for transcription has benefits. It filters out the less memorable stuff.

My openness score is in something like 97th percentile, so somewhere around 97 out of every 100 randomly-chosen people score lower. Most people are not in my situation. More generally, highly-creative people are in the minority. But I think you can recognize them if you look. They're the ones who are always compulsively creating stuff.

The other topic of the blog post is a claim that, not only is art not optional for artists, it's not optional for the human species, either.

I don't know why art is necessary for us, but if it wasn't, then we wouldn't find it everywhere we find modern humans for all of our existence. Art seems to be older than fire, and every culture has it (so far as I know). I don't know what we need it for, and I'm not sure anyone else does, either, but apparently we need it for something.