I used to work 80 hours a week regularly. I didn’t socialize much, and my relationships suffered. I didn’t sleep much. I ate terribly since I didn’t give myself time to cook healthy meals.
Working like this for so long led me to a wrist injury that still hasn’t completely healed over a year later. I was forced to take three months off completely, followed by three months of working only 8 hours a week, gradually building up to my current 30 hour work week. I’m lucky I had a decent savings to live off of, but that’s not an option for most artists.
I’m hoping to get up to 40 hours of work per week, and keep it there. I never want to go back to my 80 hour weeks. Because while I was forced to take time off working, I lived life. I had so many amazing experiences I never would’ve otherwise had. I’m the most physically healthy I’ve been in… ever? because I cook real meals three times a day, and do exercise. I no longer have a constant raging headache.
BUT I will say, it’s not just pressure from other artists that kept me working so long and so hard. See, most art jobs pay so little, you have to take half a dozen of them to scrape by (with a day job on top of it all.) We say yes to every opportunity because we need more work to make a living, but more work means more time spent doing it. I got lucky in that I was offered some higher paying gigs, so I could do a bit less work for the same amount of money.
Getting out of workoholic mode within artistic endeavors requires a major shift in the entire industry, both on the part of artists and our clients. We need to fight harder for fair wages. We need to work smarter. We need to set an expectation among those who hire us that we need a living wage to produce work for them. That means no more selling original paintings for $50 when it took you 20 hours to make. That means no more selling exclusive IP rights for $100 and 5 free copies of the book. That means all of us taking the time to study up on what our work is worth. That means breaking the weird silence we all have about how much we make. We talk about how much work we do, but never how much we make from it! That leaves us very open to exploitation. And of course, with so many artists starting from a point of poverty, many are forced to take work they know is far below value because selling that $50 painting that took 20 hours to make means the lights stay on for another month and I can’t fault individuals for surviving however they gotta. Not gonna prioritize that over the integrity of the industry as a whole. And again, there’s another opening to exploitation.
For so many, that guilt that comes from sleeping more than six hours or spending an hour cooking a meal, that guilt doesn’t come from trying to compete with other artists. It comes from knowing you could’ve squeezed in time to make another $20 and buy groceries.
In poverty mode, you do start to see every single ticking second as potential work time, and work time means money time. I was always running calculations in my head as I did any activity that was not work. “I could go see my friends for three hours, but if I work for three hours, I can probably make $30, and that’s my internet bill. I need to pay that bill. I can’t see my friends today.” “Okay, if I order a sandwich for delivery, that’s $10, but it saves me the trouble of going out, buying groceries, and cooking food, which would take me enough time that I would miss out on more than $10 worth of work time, so I’ll continue to eat shitty fast food.” This isn’t exclusive to art, by the way.
Artists, do what you can to make some free time. It’s good for you. Clients, start paying your artists more. They’re working themselves to death for your amusement. Give them a break.
