Nick Cave is expressing a personal loss, and I believe that he truly feels that loss. But to me, this letter reads roughly like: "if I were the server or the bouncer instead of the performer or the writer, all of humanity would cease to have meaning". Which is perhaps true, for Nick Cave. But it also betrays something grotesque and profoundly wrong about his view on the relationship between paid labor and the human soul.

It's a wonderful thing to find meaning in one's work, and for the things in which one finds meaning to be well-compensated. But it is no birthright. Contrary to Nick Cave's view, I can absolutely assure you that non-artists in HR departments and nursing stations and factory floors and classrooms often live full happy human inner lives. Those lives are of their own making and do not derive from the artiste class's output.

Manual production of high-quality clothes, tables, and glassware used to be the norm. Generations of people found meaning in these crafts before the industrial revolution changed the economics. People still do these things, only in rare cases as their primary way of making a living. Most art does not sustain developed world middle class existence. Most art is hobby. And that's okay.

The creation of software and AI systems is itself a form of craft-work and soul-work, which many engineers and scientists relate to the same way that Nick Cave relates to music. It is unclear to me why Nick Cave's striving is more important than the striving of engineers and scientists, or why his feeling of what humanity is, is more important than theirs.