Doing capitalist work as a creative person

Max Freedman (they/he) is an award-winning writer and editor who has been interviewing people for The Creative Independent since 2021. They run the newsletter Lavender Sound, which is about music by and for LGBTQ+ people, and all writing in the newsletter is by LGBTQ+ people. When they’re not interviewing people, writing, or editing, they’re often trying to get attention from their dilute tortoiseshell cat Mobi, cooking or baking something vegan, or getting involved with organizing in Philly, where they live.

As creative people, when we’re young, many of us swear we’ll never work traditional capitalist jobs, especially in sectors like finance or tech. God forbid! Instead, we say we’ll always be artists. The implication, to an extent, is starving artists—but hey, if we can make a living from our creativity, even better.

And then adulthood sets in. We realize that due to capitalism and, in the U.S., the lack of a social safety net or fundamental rights like free universal healthcare, making a living solely on our art isn’t nearly as easy as we dreamed of. Within these systems we’re stuck with—but that aren’t inevitable or permanent!—a good quality of life isn’t necessarily compatible with our creative output being our sole income stream. After all, there are only so many years of living in Brooklyn apartments with mice and cockroaches that even the most ardently anti-capitalist of artists can take. I may or may not be saying that from experience.

Most of us are intimately familiar with the tug of war between a life of pure artistry and feeling safe and secure in one’s home, body, and mind. Many of us understandably let the latter prevail. In doing so, we typically take one of two paths. The first is that we take low-wage, sometimes uninspiring service jobs that, if you like your coworkers, can actually be pretty enjoyable—but if not, they can be an absolute drain. The second is a career in which we leverage our artistic talents to provide capitalistic services such as graphic design, copywriting, and the like. The Venn diagram between creativity and capitalism has a surprisingly beefy middle. We’re contributing to marketing, that most capitalist of things, but we’re probably enjoying ourselves, since we get to be creative.

I took the second path. I would love to solely write my Substack and interview artists here at The Creative Independent, but under capitalism, it just doesn’t work like that. Even if I do choose to un-pause paid subscriptions for my Substack, the income from that wouldn’t be nearly enough to live on. I’m one of just dozens of people who interviews artists for TCI, and I’m not interested in taking work away from other interviewers. So, instead, I have a part-time job writing and editing for a cannabis digital marketing firm alongside some freelance work writing and editing blog posts and web pages for brands, with a bit of journalism for arts publications that subsist on ad revenue. In other words, my creativity occurs mostly within capitalism.

I’m lucky that my paid work is aligned with my values. None of my writing is for brands involved with or creating AI, war, genocide, crypto, and other nauseating, world-destroying ills. But I still feel some shame that I’m not living as a full-time music writer, journalist, or critic working primarily in my field of passion, even though all my paid work is indeed creative and I genuinely enjoy all of it. My impostor syndrome manifests whenever someone asks me what I do for work. I preempt potentially being called out as a bad person who gave up on art and took a traditional job by saying, “Technically, it’s marketing, but…”

Should I feel this shame? Do I really need to preempt this callout that nobody has ever lobbed at me in real life? Do you need to feel any shame or make any caveats when talking about your “real” job? I’m here to reassure you that taking a traditional job, as a creative person, is okay.

Why having a traditional job is okay

The inescapability of capitalism is neither your fault nor mine. None of us can opt out of it. I hope you’ll join me in unlearning the idea that I’m inauthentic because most of my creativity occurs within capitalism. I mean, hell, full-time artists also function within capitalism. I’m listening to Olivia Rodrigo as I write this, because of course I am. Even though she’s one of the most acclaimed and popular artists and feminist activists of the 2020s, she still has to sell records and concert tickets. She can’t avoid that, and if she did, people would lose interest in her and her work. Other than pure self-expression, what’s the point of art if not to reach and connect with people?

Outside the mainstream, independent and smaller profile artists operate within capitalism, too. If they don’t, they have jobs through which they make ends meet, or they have rich parents. When I interviewed feeble little horse’s Lydia Slocum and Sebastian Kinsler for this very site, I learned that the band is now their full-time gig. They’re not touring stadiums or cracking Billboard’s Hot 100 chart (though a fan can dream!) so they really have to sell enough records and tickets, and get enough streams—the operative word here being “sell.” From the top of the ladder to the very bottom, we’re all being creative while still having to partake in capitalism, and that’s not a judgment on any one of us. It’s a judgment on the system itself.

Novelists sell books; visual artists sell home decor or make tour posters for bands. Since we can’t avoid capitalism, taking a creative job within it is the best we can do if we lack the constitution to tolerate a mind-numbing, soul-crushing, uncreative, ultra-capitalist job, which many of us indeed can’t tolerate because, well, we shouldn’t have to.

Why you’re not a fraud for taking a “real” job

You lose none of your authenticity, moral compass, grit, or fortitude if you’re working a real job (assuming it isn’t morally indefensible like, say, writing copy for Amazon or designing websites for Lockheed Martin). That’s true whether you’re leveraging your creative talents at your job, or simply taking your job to achieve the financial stability to be creative after-hours.

Last month, in Jun Chou’s TCI interview with the successful writer and novelist Katie Yee, she spoke about balancing her day job at the Brooklyn Museum with her writing. At no point while reading the interview did I feel any negativity toward Yee. I was impressed that she has a job at a museum—pretty cool in my opinion, even though I’m not a huge museum person—and can still balance full-time work with her artistry. I’ve always had trouble with that myself, which is why I work part-time plus freelance.

Yee certainly isn’t a fraud, and neither are you. To paraphrase yet another TCI interview, when I spoke with Alif Hilal f.k.a. Lyra Pramuk, she said that creativity is a necessity, not a luxury. In that regard, it’s a double-win if you get to be creative at your job or you find a 9-to-5 that affords you the time, stability, and mental health to work on your art outside it.

What to do if you still have impostor syndrome about this

Writing this helps me feel less impostor syndrome about having a capitalist job, and I hope that you feel the same after reading it. But if not, there’s an easy solution. Start a new creative hobby and don’t monetize it, or, if you do, never plan for it to comprise a significant portion of your income. Most importantly, answer only to yourself with this hobby.

I turned off paid subscriptions for my Substack, Lavender Sound, for all of 2026 so that it would feel deeply like my hobby and my most authentically me creative outlet. That decision helped re-inspire me, but the thing about a creative hobby is that creating something takes time. At the moment, that’s not time I’m spending on work that pays me, and I don’t have to explain to you that money is tighter than ever for most people in 2026.

I don’t have any expectation that Lavender Sound will ever earn me substantial income, and that’s exactly the point.

I may offer paid subscriptions again in 2027, though without any paywalls, and only so that fans of my writing can financially support my creativity. I don’t have any expectation that Lavender Sound will ever earn me substantial income, and that’s exactly the point. I mean, yes, “pay people for their work” is a vital mantra that somehow still isn’t heeded often enough, but it’s okay for me to earn my income primarily through creative yet inevitably capitalist work that isn’t exactly what I envisioned myself doing. I do still like it, and it’s in a morally neutral if not positive field.

If you want to go further than me and extensively detach your creativity from capitalism, try taking up a creative hobby that you can barely, if at all, share with other people. Cooking and baking come to mind—who are you doing that for besides yourself and your friends? (I sure hope you’re not charging people when you bring food to a potluck or host a dinner party!) If you’re not running a restaurant, cooking and baking can truly be just for you. I know it’s exactly that for me.

Not much else is just for oneself in this world. Under capitalism, we produce profits for companies and see only a fraction of it ourselves. That truth might be easier to live with if you happen to be leveraging your creative talents to produce those profits. If not, you might find this reality more tolerable if you cultivate a hobby just for yourself outside work. Either way, at the end of the day—or even during your workday—you’re still creating. That’s the part that we should remember is important.