Artists take the non-essential jobs top spot in The Sunday Times ‘Essential Workers Poll’ (15th June, 2020). They chose to convey this message with an illustration that they literally needed an artist to create …sigh.
A smartly dressed man holds a clipboard at the pearly gates of our new post-apocalyptic world. He glances at the snake queue in front of him and cross checks his giant list as people roll slowly through:
Stanley: Stanley Jones. Primary school teacher.
Clipboard Man: Thanks Mr. Jones, on you go.
Jessica: Jessica Pemberton. Nurse.
Clipboard Man: Welcome to the new world Ms Pemberton!
Felicity: Felicity Hendricks. Illustrator.
Clipboard Man: Sorry Felicity. Back of the queue please.
So there you have it! Coronavirus – ‘the great leveller’.
Now that we’re able to absolutely differentiate between essential and non-essential work, we can really get cracking on our new utopian future. A world where those who contribute to the bricks and mortar (or bricks and clicks?) of society are rewarded, and those who do not, are not. Simple!
When I was around 15, a school careers advisor recommended I take a test that would help me to make decisions about my future. It was lengthy. A few hundred questions that delved into my various interests, personality, and the viewpoints I might’ve held about the world inside my 15-year old brain. At the end, a printout of the results were handed to me containing the career path I was most suited to based on my answers. Number one on the list? You’ve guessed it! …Funeral Director (I kid you not).
I have nothing against anyone who wants to pursue a career in funeral direction (go for it!) but the bigger point is that I strongly suspect a whole host of creative jobs were just not on the menu that day.
Loosely translated, if you love to paint, or dance, or sing, or play the piano, that’s all well and good but those options just don’t make for a viable career.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had to justify my career choice to people who were living, breathing versions of that career guidance software – and let me tell you, it can be exhausting. Well, it’s taken almost 40 years but I know you’ll be delighted to hear that I’ve finally come full circle. The next time a loaded question like: ‘Still doing the dancing are you?’ is thrown my way, I will simply respond ‘Yes. And you’re still at those hard sums are you?’ - or similar.
I’ve just googled ‘jobs in cyber’ - I have to be honest Fatima, I don’t know you but I’m going to take a punt that when you’re ready to get yourself a ‘real’ job, I’m just not sure ‘cyber’ is going to be the one.
We live in a society with a value system measured largely by wealth. Unfortunately, contentment in the work place just isn’t a currency most people are familiar with. If you’re earning a six-figure income, have a beautiful home, flash car and an all-inclusive family trip to Mauritius every year then you are well and truly winning at life (social media does absolutely nothing to quash that belief – but that’s a whole other blog post!). Just never you mind that every Sunday night you get that all-too familiar pang deep in the pit of your belly that tells you it’s Monday tomorrow. Brush that right under the carpet and go again!
But even if you’re in a job you love in an industry revered by society, what is the trade-off for working hard if there’s no music and dance and books and art and theatre and film? What’s the point? And I mean that quite literally. What is the point of being a sentient, living, breathing entity that thinks and loves and hurts in a world with no art.
Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, art, design, innovation and creativity are sewn into almost every facet of our lives, the very best of which have this astonishing ability to make us laugh, cry, heal and feel in a way that traditional academia rarely does. And yet. Despite the gigantic impact artists and creators have on the world, there is still a buzzing stigma loitering around these so-called ‘hobby careers’.
Talk of change has been rife this year and while I appreciate there’s a long ol’ list, I’d like to add to it. Irrespective of the monetary attachment to the jobs we do and the contributions we make, we are all essential and deserve to be respected and valued accordingly.
We need cleaners, retail workers, doctors, solicitors and marine biologists but we need dancers, writers, musicians and trapeze artists just as much – because frankly, without them the world would be a lot less fun.
So whether you’ve been gifted a brain that has the ability to understand quantum physics or whether you can confidently stand in a room full of people and make each one of them laugh so hard that their faces hurt, there really is a place for all of us. And anyway - as any good funeral director will tell you – life is way too short to do things solely to appease society and its expectations of you.
That’s all.