Giving Up Is the Most Productive Thing I’ve Ever Done
March 3rd, 2025
Once, I would’ve told you the character trait I’m proudest of is my ability to hustle. In my early 20s I had this unshakeable confidence that I was destined to be a career musician—and it was mostly because I believed in this ability. I believed in my music, yes, but more importantly I felt ready and able to outwork everybody else. I’ve driven 9 hours in a day for a gig the same night, slept on floors between back-to-back shows, slogged through all-day cold email marathons soliciting press and radio airplay, and attempted to be a full-time music marketer while working a 9 to 5. I used to brim with pride hearing others talk about how difficult it all must be.
And I wasn’t alone. Talk to any DIY musician with a dream, and they’ll be chomping at the bit to prove how hard they’re willing to work. You’ll uncover an attitude that wouldn’t be out of place in a high-achieving corporate setting: hustle, win, be a go-getter. Prove yourself and earn your place.
It’s ironic that artists, historically at the core of counterculture, have so openly embraced today’s all-consuming economic culture. You might imagine we rejected the rat race in favor of a life of reflection and finding meaning through art. In reality, we built an even bigger and meaner rat race for ourselves, and we’re proud of it.
I’ve gotten to know the dark side of this mindset quite intimately since those years. In 2019, my ambitions collapsed in the face of a chronic illness that I still can’t explain. Yes, this was probably in part because I pushed too much without listening to my body, but that’s not the whole story, and that lesson isn’t the point here. The point is that I was forced to spend nearly five years debilitated and unable to leave the house. I couldn’t process sensory experiences without pain or spend time with others in meaningful ways.
Still, looking back, I think I suffered more due to hustler psychology than my declining physiology. It was the fact that I couldn’t work that devastated me. That’s what I would cite when I wanted doctors or friends to understand how desperate the situation was.
As a maximalist lifestyle measured by work hours crumbled into an illness-ridden, economically worthless one, I felt my hustler mindset curdle from a source of motivation into shame and self-loathing. Yet I clung to those feelings, revering them as the last remnant of my former identity. I couldn’t do the work, but maybe if I hated myself hard enough, I could still say I was a musician in spirit.
For me it was illness, but the music industry today is practically designed to bring artists to their breaking point one way or another. I promise I’m not writing to bemoan the collapsing economic model of music-making, but to get where I’m going I need to quickly restate the obvious: making a living as a working-class musician is harder than it’s been in generations.
This is largely because music today is worthless. Once, if someone wanted your music, they’d have to buy the record: on vinyl, then cassette, then CD, then iTunes. With today’s streaming platforms paying as little as $0.003 per stream, music itself has negligible material value to an artist’s business—something UK chart-topper Lily Allen noted when she joined OnlyFans in 2024, tweeting, “Imagine being [an] artist and having nearly eight million monthly listeners on Spotify but earning more money from having 1000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet.”
In practice, this means musicians now have to be more than musicians to make ends meet, monetizing everything other than their music: merchandise, behind-the-scenes content, perhaps feet pics for the boldest among us, and of course, ticket sales, the most physically taxing and least scalable part of the job. Simply put, there’s a lot more work to do.
Further upstream, digitization has democratized artistry. In the age of TikTok and “For You” algorithms, a kid sitting in a bedroom recording with GarageBand can break through almost as easily as a major-label-funded artist.
It’s a triumph, certainly, to have overthrown the industry gatekeepers—but those gatekeepers used to do a lot of work. Work which artists must take on as the price of this democracy. Now, the willingness to endure years of extraordinary labor is one of the only criteria left to separate the few from the many.
Despite all of this, the artist keeps keeping on, because the artist’s curse is an unquenchable drive to create whether or not there’s money to be made. While it slowly depletes their health, their dignity, and their bank balance, they will continue to create. Should we be surprised the market learned to exploit that, as any functioning market would?
And so, finally finding ourselves at a dead end, we artists take pride and solace in the last piece of dignity the American economy can offer: our own suffering.
With nothing else to show for our efforts, suffering is how we legitimize ourselves. We get caught up comparing how little we sleep, how intense our touring schedules are, or how little time we have for friends and hobbies, unthinkingly embracing this rampant belief in American culture that unless you’re suffering for your work, you aren’t taking your work seriously. Hard work becomes synonymous with suffering—the practical suffering of labor, and the psychological suffering of punishing yourself for disappointing results.
What would happen if we took a moment to ask the obvious question: what is so important to justify such extraordinary, self-imposed suffering? What are we chasing, really? There’s the obvious answer: one shouldn’t pursue money and success at the cost of happiness and fulfillment, because of course money can’t buy happiness. I believe that. But I would take it a step further: speaking only in terms of professional success, our blind, self-abusive efforts are counterproductive.
Because maybe the work in front of us isn’t a battle to be won. Maybe it’s better thought of as a question to work through. Instead of going red in the face pushing on a door that won’t budge, perhaps if we decided opening the door wasn’t so important after all, we might take a moment, step back, and find a sign that says “pull.”
I think part of why we fail to do this is because there’s extraordinary risk in that moment of stepping back. What if the sign says “locked” instead of “pull”? Even more frightening: what if you realize there’s a big part of you that doesn’t actually want to open that door at all? You might take a different path and wind up in a similar place, but what if you wind up somewhere completely new and unknown?
In short, you risk becoming a different person, and often, laboring through the path we’re on is more comfortable than questioning who we are.
How does this play out in the real world? To answer that, I turn to two archetypes one finds among DIY musicians. There are those raised on stories of the rugged, up-and-coming touring musician, packing their schedules with hours-long bar gigs in front of indifferent crowds, or wedding sets playing someone else’s favorite songs—both easy to book, but also exhausting and creatively stifling. It’s a surefire recipe for burnout and cynicism. These road warriors typically dismiss social media as inauthentic but never find the time or headspace to explore it creatively themselves.
Then there are folks with a softer approach—folks I didn’t used to take very seriously back in the day. They’ll promote their single with a laid-back but genuine social media campaign, maybe playing one or two shows a year for a modest but dedicated group of friends. While they might define a few goals as guiding principles, the approach is built much more around seeking fulfillment in the moment—making meaningful connections, celebrating with friends, and sharing art without fixating on outcomes.
And yet, these small, intentional steps can build over time—into a community, a body of work, and a career that grows organically rather than being willed into existence through brute force. The road warrior might be closer to surviving off music income, but who’s really living the dream? Who’s building a career on their own terms? Who’s enjoying themselves?
I often feel a little foolish reflecting on my own road warrior years. (Remember those all-day cold email marathons? Don’t send cold emails.) These days I’m trying to learn from those calmer artists I once dismissed. It’s a harder approach for me—I’m naturally kind of an obsessive person—but it’s working in small ways. I’m making music, I’m happy, and I’m trying not to want too much.
I also think about my illness, and the years I wasted stubbornly stewing over unrealized dreams before recognizing that healing required forgiveness, space, and peace of mind. I found those things eventually, and my health and lifestyle have improved in ways I once believed impossible.
The journey isn’t over—my life is different than it was, and many things that were possible for me in the past aren’t today, though I think the reverse is also true. Even so, for a while now each year has been better than the last. And there’s a profound sense of patience and humility that comes with the idea that this journey continues, the healing continues. It gives me comfort on bad days and blunts my anger and frustration during bigger setbacks. It’s a feeling I cherish and hope to hold on to. And it’s a feeling I could only have found by stepping back, questioning my ambitions, and rethinking where fulfillment really comes from.
It’s the stepping back that’s the crux of this, I think. The letting go. The giving up. Our self-imposed suffering is justified as the work required to reach some goal—but that implies we already know exactly how to get there. We act with this baseless confidence that step 1 will lead to step 2, and eventually to our vision.
In reality, life is full of surprises, and when we walk through it trying to fit every emergent event into our plans, we sap the beauty and magic out of it, mistaking opportunities for obstacles, and often winding up disappointed even in success because things didn’t go exactly as we expected. It’s a ham-fisted way to move through the world, and honestly a little uninspired.
Giving up isn’t about despair, it’s about curiosity. By unmooring yourself from a fixed goal, you allow unfolding events to surprise you and spark that sense of wonder. And more to the point, you respond to those events coherently and intentionally because you’re experiencing them authentically in the present, instead of measuring them against the plans in your head.
As artists, I think we will only find our way forward by untethering ourselves from ambition. There’s little to be gained fighting an economy built to stifle us. It’s like pushing on a locked door. And after all, art isn’t a fight—it’s a dance. It is fluid, unstoppable, and will always find space to exist.
And while I’m sure a model for working-class musicians that balances fulfillment and economics will soon emerge, I can’t pretend to know what it is. I am confident about this, however: our future will be discovered by the curious, not the angry or blindly determined. I think it starts when we stop chasing success. Maybe art needs to become smaller before it gets bigger.
Because at the end of the day, none of us really know what success looks like. The more you try to define it, the less room you give it to organically evolve into whatever it’s trying to be. The only certainty in uncertain times is that the path forward is going to look different from anything that has come before, and different from any plan inspired by that past. Our task, then, is to abandon those plans. Let go of our dreams. Give up. Then take stock, and see what grows in the empty space left behind.