It has always bothered me that artists are expected to suffer for their art. This is only partly due to the fact that I am a person who has always been deeply involved in the creative arts, especially as they relate to writing and music. It is not only that many people think that great art can only spring from intense suffering (and not merely from intense creativity or highly accomplished skills of observation and analysis), but rather that many people seem to expect that artistic people should live in extreme privation and abject poverty. To be sure, the stereotype of a poor starving artist afflicted with some dreadfully incurable disease like tuberculosis or AIDS or in the grips of addiction to drugs and alcohol is a common one, and often an accurate enough one. But even those artists who do not have any death wish or incurable illness that will soon remove them from the world of living are expected to take some sort of vow of monk-like poverty as a result of having chosen a creative pursuit as their livelihood. Those artists who manage to make a living are viewed as being somehow unworthy of support because they have sold out their true calling as impoverished creatives to live lives of comfort or even affluence. This is especially true for those artists who began outside of the mainstream and whose fans often expect that their commitment to authenticity also includes a commitment to living miserably.

Why is this the case? We do not expect bankers or engineers to suffer so, though there seems to be a bit of an edge when we think of doctors and ministers and their fondness for golf, since these professions are support to involve a high degree of care for others. And while some artists are fortunate enough to have enough fans to be able to rise above the poverty that many face, and others who manage to live comfortably while teaching university classes or hosting reality television shows, there are some professions that are viewed as requiring the same sort of vows of poverty that is much more difficult to escape. Included in these is the profession of social work, in which poor civil servants seek to help out equally poor people trapped in generational cycles of poverty and misery, and are expected to sacrifice their material interest in order to do work that is socially meaningful. It is little surprise that such work often leads people to burnout at alarming rates, because the burden of caring for the less fortunate is a heavy and unrewarding one for those who have such idealism in the first place. We might even say, if we were cynical people, that the system of demanding suffering from creative individuals and those engaged in social work are deliberate ways of punishing idealism by exploiting the people who have it and rewarding those who operate cynically for their own self-interest.

In many ways, it appears as if a large part of society–including the people who structure pay scales and deal with contracts for creative works and with creative people–are under the opinion that a substantial amount of the income that we receive from work is a recognition of the suffering that such work does. Much work involves a great deal of violence done to our feelings of human kindness and to our own personal dignity, and our living well as a result of being willing to sacrifice in such areas is considered to be just compensation for this. Those jobs that carry with them some degree of nobility and honor and value that is intrinsic to the task itself are viewed as providing some sort of compensation already, and so are judged as less worthy of compensation. A dangerous job requires hazard pay, and a humiliating or degrading job requires some sort of compensation for that loss, but jobs that are judged as honorable and noble on their own merits and do not involve high degrees of risk to health and life are in many ways their own reward. Where people are unwilling to compensate others for doing what is humbling and degrading, they must find people they can exploit cheaply to fill such roles. If such people could not be found and no honor could be given to such people for doing what was unpleasant and undesirable, then salaries would have to rise as a result of the scarcity of exploitable labor. Similarly, if idealism and honor and the intrinsic value of certain kinds of work was no longer judged as being its own compensation, then people might not be willing to submit to the losses of rights and dignity that come in the normal work experience, and that would greatly endanger the ability of companies to find people willing to work at all under corporate structures and regimes as they now exist.

This is perhaps too big of a problem for people to want to think about. We demand the suffering of artists and social workers in large part because of the suffering we ourselves feel. To the extent that we all found ourselves with a great deal of freedom in how we lived our work lives, doing meaningful tasks with a high degree of dignity and honor in how we were treated within the workplace, with a high material reward as well, we would feel less of a need to punish those whose jobs are meaningful, whose creativity is rewarding apart from the income that they make with suffering in dire poverty in order to pursue such personally and socially rewarding tasks. The lessening or removal of our own suffering at the hands of unjust authorities in our lives would likely, one would hope, diminish our feeling that suffering was required of others. When suffering seems to be our lot, though, we naturally demand that the suffering that is inflicted on us be a general condition that all suffer, and we strongly resent those who seem not to suffer, because they are somehow escaping the cruel human condition that we find ourselves under with little chance of escape. Let us live and behave so that we neither suffer nor inflict unnecessary suffering, and that we do not feel as if the folly or crime of idealism and creativity merits suffering as a compensation for others doing what we secretly wish to do ourselves.