The question is: how do you make a living doing what you love?
A second question is, why is this such an issue? In particular, I’m considering the ‘what you love’ category to be about one of the arts, rather than something with an established career path. There are known, established ways to become a psychologist; and you can’t do it any other way. Most musicians don’t go to conservatory and most artists don’t go to art school. They have to make it on their own — and many of the most successful come through some ‘unofficial’ method. If you make it to art school or conservatory the chances are you had some support and started reasonably young. What about all the people who were conned out of their dreams?
And how exactly how does this happen?
There used to be a book called World Military and Social Expenditures, which demonstrated that by a factor of about 20 to 1, our society spends its money on the military; that is, on manufacturing death. Can you imagine how much in the way of art, food, health care and humanitarian aid you could get for $8 billion per month (our current Iraqi and Afghani war budgets, not including the normal military budget)? [In numerals, that is $8,000,000,000.00 per month.] There is something here about cash flow, and something about our values as a society. Both of these guide our consciousness in the direction of both military values and budgets; we all have to pull our weight to support this incredible outpouring of energy, which basically goes nowhere; and in truth these are not the things that most people love.
To get here, we all go through an indoctrination process, mostly in school, that guides our feelings and experiences in the direction of giving up creativity, curiosity and passion and adopting another set of values.