- John Adams
I do soulless and artless crap like programming so my kids maybe don't have to. I'm doing it to acquire "fuck you money" so my kids can come out of the womb saying "fuck you" and then they can go pursue more virtuous, noble, artful things.
I have plenty friends who do art or art-adjacent things (such as design) as a full-time job, and some of them are actually doing quite ok financially (even among non-design people). Let me tell you, working a full-time employment in those fields tends to be a soul-suck to the level you cannot even probably imagine. You know, quite often (but not always), how exciting and fun programming for your own side-projects feels in comparison to programming for pay? With "more artful things", it is just like that, but with an even higher gap of suckiness. Of course, unless you are in the top 1% (or maybe even 0.1%) of the art world in terms of career success.
I am not saying that your child shouldn't choose "more virtuous, noble things" just because of what I said. Quite the opposite, I believe following what you truly want to do is the move (which is how I went into programming around a decade ago, back when both I and my parents had zero idea that it actually paid well and had good employment prospects). Can I claim that I enjoy my work all the time? No, but outside of a few short bad stretches due to a specific work environment I got myself into (and which wasn't representative of programming as a field in general), it has been generally ranging between "fine" and "interesting". If you expect any profession to be all entirely creative fun and joy, with no occasional "meh" component of work whatsoever, you are deluding yourself.
The grass is often greener on the other side of the fence. But it tends to become blinding neon green level of brightness when one doesn't have much (even second-hand) exposure to the realities of that other side.
The comment you're replying mentioned "fuck you money" for their offspring. That means said offspring will not need to work to make a living.
That didn't change the fact that the art jobs they were doing were soul-sucking, even when they were working solely for themselves (literally just working on art pieces to try to present and/or sell as a part of their own business or for art galleries). Which was evident to me, based on how they would have multiple "burnouts" per year where they stop doing anything at all.
Imo being successful in art is like being successful in other fields with a long tail-end of success (where the top 1% or 0.1% is doing great, and very few actually care about the works of the rest), such as film/athletics/music/etc (with the only difference being that art seems to be more difficult to break through without pre-existing financial means).