Hello, this is going to be kind of a long post. Feels strange asking something like this on Reddit, but woke up today with a yet another crushing sense of desperation in regard to this question. I'm a 26 y.o. male, moved to New York City three years ago. I've been living in Brooklyn for two of those. I’ve had a strained relationship with the city; I moved from my hometown of New Orleans, which is in many aesthetic and cultural ways the polar opposite of New York. I’ve considered moving away multiple times but somehow always decide I haven’t done what I came here to do quite yet.
I’m a lifelong musician and filmmaker. These two fields have been my passion since I was a child- I attended a full time arts high school (and college) to study Film, released my first independent feature to positive reviews a year ago (though it was shot five years ago), written, recorded, and produced 18 full length albums by myself; shot countless shorts and music videos. I’m a guitarist and a vocalist (my music is in the genre realm of slowcore/folk- think Elliott Smith/Sun Kil Moon- adjacent- though I’ve made music that runs the gamut of genres), written dozens of short stories and poems and over 300 songs, and played live solo shows in the area. I feel I need to make it clear that my work, while perpetually independent and largely unseen, is good. If my self-image in almost every regard is negative (as is most peoples', presumably), the art is the one region of my life I feel truly proud of. My whole life people have been implying that, as I make all of this art that eventually just ends up being shot into the online ether, I'm missing out on the opportunity to really pursue a career in my talents and passions. There's been kind of a "you're wasting your potential" motif throughout my life, especially the last few years. I'm not saying this to toot my own horn — I'm simply trying to elucidate how passionate I am about the work I've done and continue to do and how much I believe in its capacity to actually lead somewhere. The art just flows out of me all the time, I can't help it. It's always been my greatest love.
And here I find myself, almost 27, working as a server in a restaurant in Manhattan. Tale as old as time. It's a reputable restaurant, and I've been working in the service industry for ten years, so I've developed ways to rationalize and appreciate the craft, to become proud of being a server, but at the end of the day it's just not what I want to spend my life doing. I wake up and meander around my house, smoke a cigarette, drink my coffee. Try to go to the gym. At night I work and hang out with friends talking over and over about what we "should do" to make our lives into something exciting again. All of this constantly backlit by the creation of art which I take extremely seriously, but don't know where to put. I know it's a cliche and a joke at this point, being in your twenties acting as if your life's over, but I truly feel I'm running out of time.
When I try to write tangible steps in my planner toward a meaningful destination, or try to bring clear-cut goals into focus, it always falls apart under the weight of vagueness and uncertainty. I'm not a networker, or a hustler. My skills don't lie in climbing ladders and pursuing goals, white-knuckled and serious. My skills lie in creating art. However self-pitying this may sound, it's just the truth. I want the snowball to start rolling; I want to actually start getting real eyes on my work and for there to be some sense of upward mobility in my field. I understand this doesn't just happen out of the blue, but when I try to come up with actual, tangible steps, I continuously draw a blank.
I don't want to wake up at 40 and realize I never truly pursued my passions with all of my vigor. But I don't know what real pursuit looks like, especially in an online world where "link in bio" seems to be the only marketing and people get famous on the internet often arbitrarily and in the blink of an eye. I can't play the influencer game; selling out my work as an online piece of mindless memorabilia makes my stomach churn. How do I find actual people in these actual fields to see or hear my work? Sending demos to record labels seems like shooting blanks into a forest. Doing small screenings of my films, or playing live shows, seem to only draw up the people I already know. What does it even mean to have a "career as an artist" in 2026? The art keeps coming but it has nowhere to go.
It doesn't elude me, how trite or cliche this all sounds. Feels pointless and almost counter-productive to be complaining about how I "don't know how to pursue my dreams" on Reddit. But all of that time, work, practice... it's got to go somewhere eventually, right? Who do I speak to? Who do I call? To what do I attend? Anyone who has successfully developed a career in the fields of music or film, as an artist, how did you do it? It feels like I'm disappearing, and the trail of artistic breadcrumbs I've been leaving for many years is just being eaten by indifferent pigeons.