Speaking as having heard similar stories, I might as well ask, how common is it amongst artistic types around here for your parents to wildly under-estimate how much time it takes to make a living as an independent artist?
Like, thinking of examples, my dad’s writing off my Patreon as a career option because “You’ve been working on it for two years and you haven’t even gotten close to making enough to live on,” and @bogleech and @bonelessnerd have both mentioned personal stories of their parents being wildly out of touch with the amounts of resources/access it takes to get one’s art on mainstream store shelves.
I wonder how much of that sort of experience of parents being out of touch with how artistic labor works is universal; in a way that royally fucks over a lot of people in a business that requires massive amounts of unpaid labor just to gain some degree of success by convincing the people who support them that it should happen a lot quicker than it does and if it doesn’t it’s not worth supporting because it’s not a “real job”
Probably doesn’t help that both my parents keep talking about how they were out of the house and self-sufficient before their twenties; whereas the current view from the generations growing up in our current reality is Nobody Has Their Shit Together Until Their Thirties, and it’s immensely difficult to convince somebody who grew up in the former of the latter...
