Escape the rat race and 9 to 5 - follow your dreams, says writer Lisa Fouweather

Fearing the unknown/liking that which is familiar to us, we value having a regular income, working regular hours, and, in turn, having a routine.

The sense of safety and security that comes with being employed by someone else is why so few people are self-employed.

With pension and career prospects and progression and a salary, knowing exactly how much we will earn each month and what our workload will be is nice.

Nice (adjective)

Making English teachers across the world squirm, 'Use a better word.'

It's comforting.

Nothing more, nothing less, is that what we were really put on this earth to do though?

To live a life of 'niceness?'

With so few years in a lifetime, 73.16 years being the average life expectancy globally, our time here is over in the blink of an eye in comparison to the 13.7 billion-year-old universe.

We therefore should not be spending what little (and oh so incredibly precious) time we have here saying no to opportunities because we fear the outcome.

Try, fail, try again.

If you do nothing, nothing will ever happen.

This is the catch-22 situation that will all too often arise in self-employment, particularly in the arts, whereby, if you're not writing, making, painting, designing, or creating then you're not earning.

With no safety net, the onus is entirely on us to put the work in in order to make it work.

This is why the arts as a sector is so unequal, filled with such privilege, because in order to make art you need to have ample time, space, and money set aside, something which the working class, all too often, simply do not have, as statistics by the ONS highlights.

Research conducted by the Office for National Statistics found that the proportion of working-class actors, musicians, and writers has shrunk by half since the 1970s.

If you're not creating then you're not earning, but how can you earn from creating when you have no money to begin with?

How can you afford to do art as a job if you have no money?

You can't, which is why there is such a discrepancy in the arts when it comes to the middle class vs. the working class.

Whereas middle-class artists have the financial means to focus entirely on developing their craft without worrying about how they will pay the bills, working-class artists don't have such a privilege.

For the middle class, art is a job, and a respected job at that.

For the working class, they're lucky if they can call it a hobby.

'If only...'

Not being in a position, unlike their middle-class peers, to undertake unpaid internships and projects for exposure, as well as spend hours of unpaid time applying for funding, can make it too precarious for working-class artists, nearly 80% of whom live in poverty, to continue.

The need for time to dream, and space to think and create often simply isn't there, and so they have to put their art on the back burner and pursue a 'normal' job that promises security instead.

Security does not breed space for day-dreaming.

The universe, our home, is shrouded in so much mysticism and mystery, yet still, we live as though work is life.

The reality though, away from all the capitalistic rubbish that we are fed via the media, is that we were not born to be money-making robots for money-guzzling corporations where profits are always (and openly) prioritised over people.

We were born to bring the creator's vision to life, to be physical manifestations of the metaphysical.

To escape from the rat race and the constraints of the soul-sucking nine-to-five.

To dream of a more just and beautiful world.

We were born to create.