I’m very confused. I love dance so much that I’ve been working towards a career in it since forever, but now I wonder if it is just a fun hobby. I’m not sure I can make it as a dancer, as I feel I’m not that good and I keep getting injuries. I’ve also heard that dance careers are hard and the working environments are not nice. How do I decide if I want this as a career or just as a hobby?
Eleanor says: Great question. Not, do I be a dancer, but, how do I decide whether to be a dancer?
The pros and cons you probably know. Creative fulfilment on the one hand, financial insecurity on the other; feeling passion about your work versus a long career timeline. You can put the pros and cons in two columns and spend an awful lot of time just staring at the tally. How are you supposed to weigh “artistic fulfilment” against money? Injury against passion? What kind of standardised unit are these things meant to share?
“Do I chase my dreams” decisions are so hard, partly because they only deal in possibilities. You can’t decide to be a professional dancer. You only can decide to try to be a professional dancer. And you can decide how much else you’ll sacrifice to improve your chances. But that last, crucial distance between trying and succeeding can only be bridged by luck.
So it’s not quite a decision about whether to be a professional dancer. It’s more like a gamble. What are you willing to bet? This can be a more helpful way to think about the choice than weighing the pros and cons.
It’s not just that you may get injured or you may succeed. It’s also about which kind of misfortune you’d rather avoid. What do you most want to guarantee you don’t face: injury, or the regret of not following a passion? An unstable career, or a boring one? You see the pattern. “What do you want” and “what would you most like to avoid” turn out to be slightly different questions. When deliberation stalls on one, it can be helpful to switch to the other.
Because I think we live in a pretty strive-y culture with abundant “go for it” cliches, let me add two notes of caution.
One is, your priorities may well change as you age. Even though it’s really hard to imagine being some far-off future self, try to notice any ways your decision now could stop you revising your priorities later. For instance, say, financial security doesn’t matter tremendously now. That’s fine but to some degree you can’t take it back. Compound interest won’t let you. A future self who values financial security more than you currently do may wish the decision had been different. Same with injury, having a family, where you live; we weigh things differently in different chapters of life. If you’re going to take a gamble that may complicate a future self getting what they value, I think that’s worth being careful and clear eyed about. You’re your best protector.
The other is that turning the activity you love into the way you make money can alter the activity. You have to compete, and apply for money, and get noticed by the people distributing the money, and you internalise their standards of success. Over time you start to make creative choices for the bills. That needn’t outweigh the passion. But if you make dance your job there will be times where it feels like nothing but hard work.
There is a world in which dance can be part of your career choice without being part of your livelihood. In that world, you figure out a job with the kind of hours and income that enable you to dance for joy.
This letter has been edited
