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 have a bachelors of fine arts in painting, and I'm dang good at it. I even have two portraits I painted of Patrick Mahomes that he signed and resold at his charity galas, so somewhere on this planet two of my paintings bear the signature of the world's premier athlete.
I'm a working artist and I get 15-20 commissions a year, but it's not my main job, and I'm fortunate to have a primary job that I enjoy, pays really well, and has benefits.
I wouldn't have that if I were primarily focused on being an artist.
I also like that, as an artist, I have no one to answer to and my vision is my own, because I hate the gallery system. Mainly, though, I hate how much harder its become for the art community in general, with people losing jobs to AI Slop, arts endowments being cut or eliminated, and tuition for art school skyrocketing. The reason I didn't go for my masters was that my graduate TA's in art school had come from big schools in NY, Chicago, and LA with six-figure debt and they were making $20,000 a year teaching college courses.