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I’m trying to decide between pursuing a career in comedy or applying to med school. I’m in my mid-20s and am still young, but I feel like I’m at a crossroads. I don’t want to (and don’t think I’ll be able to) split my time between both and feel like I need to go all out to truly succeed in either field. I desperately crave financial stability which is not ideal for pursuing comedy. Should I risk it all and pursue my passion, or “play it safe” and try and guarantee my chances of owning a home and retiring at a reasonable age? If I do choose the stable, traditional career path, am I betraying my inner artist?
A little story that’s boring because it’s about me…
Back in the aughts, when we used flip phones, listened to the White Stripes, and asked each other what the fuck was going down at the World Trade Center, I worked as a writer/editor in the communications department at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. And I liked it. I liked the work and the people I worked with even more. I also liked biweekly direct deposits and having an actual office to myself and the editing projects that would be waiting for me in the morning right where I left them the night before. People stayed at that school a very long time. A few graduated from it and then retired from it 40 years later. But I moved to New York seven years on at age 34 with no job waiting for me, in comedy or anything else. You don’t know me, but this is very much not me. I will never romanticize the ice-cold pipes or the millipedes in the basement apartment I lived in.
And at this moment when comedy writing is in a state of—here’s an upsetting word you should get used to—contraction, I sometimes imagine a world where I stayed in Boston and advanced to something like Director of Communications. Yes, there would be hassles and the occasional structural upheaval, but I’d still have a pretty reliable place to go without the angst of chasing down freelance clients or wondering which AI startup had finally perfected the means of making me fatally obsolete.
This is the part where I say I don’t regret leaving for a minute, and on balance, I guess I don’t. But I left Berklee when I did simply because I had to, like I didn’t even have a choice. It actually felt miserable. In that moment, however, I had to test myself, which is weird because I honestly don’t enjoy testing myself all that much. I, too, crave financial stability, and stability in all forms. But I was certain I would regret not trying, even though I wished I was someone who wouldn’t.
I guess my question for you is this: do you have to do it? Ultimately, will not trying be spiritually intolerable for you? Could you really go all out in medicine knowing you’d left comedy untouched?
So, how about this? Give yourself a couple years not to succeed, because, oh man, it’ll likely take so much longer than that if you’re going to, but to make progress, however you measure it. And then assess. Soldier on or get yourself to med school. After all, you won’t be so much older, and barring some global radioactive incident, the human body will not have changed all that much. And, by the way, even if you do follow through with med school and a career in medicine, it doesn’t mean you have to shove comedy into traffic. It just means you’ll have to treat your rare personal time as the scarce resource it is. Or you can scrape back lots of time by just being a dangerously negligent doctor. Sure, you might prescribe the wrong antibiotic or perpetrate some sort of amputation whoopsie, but you’ll make incredible progress on your pilot.