If there is a better community to ask this question, I'm all ears.
I majored in history because I like history. With a major like mine without a doctor thesis you can only work as a teacher and children are mostly idiots. You could try academia, but the ROI here is so much below zero it doesn’t make any sense.
As a child I was musically gifted but my parents never considered music as something worth following or studying. As an adult I bought me a classical guitar 12 years ago and a grand piano 5 years ago and started playing. I learned to play both instruments on my own.
Don’t think for a moment my technique is good enough to start studying at a conservatory for either instrument. I already rehearsed for a piano professor and he told me I must have invested an insane amount of time, that my technique is simply not good and if I want, he knows of 2 colleges that offer preparatory courses I could attend to.
I work as a firefighter and none of my coworkers even suspects I majored in history or that I’m capable of playing any instrument, it’s something I don’t talk about with any of them because I don’t believe they would understand and they’d start with intrusive questions I hate (if you are so talented like you claim and have a major in history, why are you wasting your time as a firefighter?). I already tried to find a decent job with history and failed. It’s something I don’t want to repeat with a possible major in music. Firefighting, as tiring and unfulfilling as it is, pays my bills and has given me a financial independence I never had, but I never saw myself here.
The curious thing is I have enough money to stop working and covering tuition fees and lodging for 4 years plus the preparatory year, but I don’t know if choosing this path would be the stupidest of decisions ever made. If I work part time, I don’t have to spend my whole savings.
Working as a firefighter I feel I’m wasting my life, I don’t want to be a firefighter till I retire, but this job has given me financial stability and I dread losing that.
I do my job and when I’m not very tired at home after doing the laundry, buying food and cooking, cleaning my apartment, walking a bit to disconnect... I play. It brings me joy but as of now it’s only a hobby. To even monetize it I would have to at least have a bachelor.
Is this what it looks like?
I write and release music. It’s not spectacular music, but it’s mine and I give each track my best before I send it off into the world. It earns me dust; I do not expect to ever make any kind of meaningful pay from it, and that’s fine because I don’t do it to make money. I do it because it’s in me to do it, because I love the craft, and I love the challenges of learning audio engineering and production.
In a past life I was actually a professional musician. I made money playing, giving lessons, conducting, a tiny bit from writing but not much…and as fun as that was it’s really a grueling lifestyle with lots of time away from home and I don’t have it in me to do that anymore. And no one wants to see my squishy dad bod prancing around on stage.
Now I work a quiet job in a materials testing lab. I spend my day torturing little pieces of metal and my evenings in my studio at home. Only one or two people at work know about my former life as a musician and are aware of the music I record. Most people just see me as the little happy lab rat that I am and I’m completely okay with that.
Similar story.
I make music and keep exploring all the ways I can creatively express myself in a medium that I only halfway know (still studying scales constantly but that’s ADHD) but I started in audio engineering, that just became sound design then I decided to make electronic hip hop and since I live in the south - I decided to rap on it. I plan on learning to sing this year as well just to expand my skills.
All in all, I’ve made enough to support the hobby and have met my favorite musicians from networking and weirdly enough, might collab one day soon but I still won’t make a lot from it but younger me would love my music so I release it.
I work in sales as my day job which isn’t doing hot due to tariffs and shit, so I may have to figure out how to make money in music one day soon haha.