If it's a job that affords you the ability to still be able to enjoy the things you want to do, then it's definitely not a wasted life. The worthiness of life isn't defined by the way we earn money.

That being said, if you're looking for other jobs that are maybe less taxing so that you can have more time to enjoy your life, and if you can afford it, you could go do something easier for sure. (I certainly wouldn't classify fighting as an 'easy' job). The security guys at my work get to do whatever basically for 10 of the 12 hrs they work, one guy is writing a book, the other guy learned different languages. You could try something like that? And then if you have energy after you can go to open mics or something to get your musical talent out in the world without feeling stressed about needing to make money off it.

There's nothing wrong with working a job only to pay the bills and seeking fulfillment outside of work. I love my hobbies, but I wouldn't want to try and monetize them because they're for my enjoyment, and turning them into a job would sap all that enjoyment out.

I think society (at least in the USA) has failed the younger generations in that regard. I remember being in school in the 90s and 00s and being told repeatedly to go to college for something you enjoy and are passionate about (also you need a 4 year degree, but that's a different conversation). You definitely aren't a failure for working a career that falls outside of your passion(s). Ask yourself what your end goal is for pursuing music as a career. Is that goal unattainable by pursuing it outside of work?

I'm not in your shoes, but I gotta be honest, of all the useless jobs out there, firefighter is not one of them. I'm not trying to tell you you should find it fulfilling, simply that in my eyes at least, it's a worthy role.

Don’t monetize your passion. Nine times out of ten, you will either starve or grow to hate that passion, and then you’ll have no passion for anything. In the case of music, pick your genre. Think of how many artists you know in that genre. Think of how many of them are making a living at it. Now imagine the number of people making music in that genre you’ve never heard of. Do searches on YouTube or streaming services for your type of music and see how many of them you recognize or have even heard of.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to make it, assuming you have at least a modicum of talent and a lot of industry connections, but it’s not probable enough to bank your future on.

Bonus round: of the people in your genre who have made it big, how many went to a school specifically for music?

Enjoy your time making and learning music. If you want to get better to enjoy playing more, seek some instruction on form or technique. Just have fun with it. Do some open mic nights. Make a band with some friends. Magic some videos of you playing on the internet.

Find something else to make money with. Do a budget to see how much money you need to make to live and be healthy. Not rich, but happy. Start seeing what professions can make you that kind of money. Do work you can stand to fund the things you enjoy.

I have a pretty similar story except game design is my passion, and graphic design is the day job.

For a long time I wanted to make games professionally, and I've worked towards it for years, even releasing a game I made with a few friends in our spare time.

I've had some realizations lately though, that the closer making games becomes to a job, the less fulfilling it is for me. I'm starting to think I might prefer it as a passtime where I can make whatever interests me instead of trying to turn art into products.

Every job has shitty parts, which don't necessarily exist when it's a hobby. For games and for me personally, it's was all the marketing and strategy around trying to get eyeballs on your stuff. I hate that part and I'm not good at it. I learned that the hard way with my released game, which very few people played even though I'm quite proud of it. It's just really hard to get noticed as a small creator with no budget.

No real advice in here for you necessarily. I just see a lot of the same yearnings and frustrations in this that I've felt and it connected with me. Hopefully this is some food for thought at least.

I write and release music. It’s not spectacular music, but it’s mine and I give each track my best before I send it off into the world. It earns me dust; I do not expect to ever make any kind of meaningful pay from it, and that’s fine because I don’t do it to make money. I do it because it’s in me to do it, because I love the craft, and I love the challenges of learning audio engineering and production.

In a past life I was actually a professional musician. I made money playing, giving lessons, conducting, a tiny bit from writing but not much…and as fun as that was it’s really a grueling lifestyle with lots of time away from home and I don’t have it in me to do that anymore. And no one wants to see my squishy dad bod prancing around on stage.

Now I work a quiet job in a materials testing lab. I spend my day torturing little pieces of metal and my evenings in my studio at home. Only one or two people at work know about my former life as a musician and are aware of the music I record. Most people just see me as the little happy lab rat that I am and I’m completely okay with that.

If I shill mine again so soon you guys are going to shoot me. But I make knives because I think it's neat and I enjoy being able to create something both useful and tangible, especially in this era of trying to turn every fucking thing into "AI."

It is staggeringly unlikely I'll ever be able to find enough buyers in my particular niche to quit my day job, and even if I do I'd doubt I'd be able to crank out product fast enough. That's still not stopping me from doing it, though. You couldn't stop me, even with a brick wall.

I think this is where the concept of a hobby really shines. Truth is, most of our passions can't pay bills. Unfortunate architecture of our human society. The best we can do is enjoy it as hobbies.

I personally love brewing coffee, but a barista just isn't a career for me. So I over pay intricate machinary and expensive beans to pretend being a barista at home and force these pour over coffee on to my wife.

I'm a musician. I soon found out that making my living as a free & independent creator is a pipe dream.

So I worked jobs. But working only for money is no fun at all.

I did all sorts of weird things for 2 decades before I finally found a job that I can actually get, and that I like to do, and that is ethically sound. I've been doing it for almost 15 years now.

I prefer to make music on my own terms, with absolutely no pressure whatsoever.

If there's some advice in this story I guess it's that you are allowed to take your sweet time with everything, and sometimes when you think "I have to make a decision" the good stuff happens while you're still working on that.

BTW, firefighter sounds like a nice job, not only the ethics of it (which is super important), also the actual work. No?

BTW again, some people say that 8h 5 days a week is too much. I tend to agree.

If anything, being a firefighter with a history major is commendable. Segue into a joke about the Library of Alexandria if they ask you about it.

I have a bachelors of fine arts in painting, and I'm dang good at it. I even have two portraits I painted of Patrick Mahomes that he signed and resold at his charity galas, so somewhere on this planet two of my paintings bear the signature of the world's premier athlete.

I'm a working artist and I get 15-20 commissions a year, but it's not my main job, and I'm fortunate to have a primary job that I enjoy, pays really well, and has benefits.

I wouldn't have that if I were primarily focused on being an artist.

I also like that, as an artist, I have no one to answer to and my vision is my own, because I hate the gallery system. Mainly, though, I hate how much harder its become for the art community in general, with people losing jobs to AI Slop, arts endowments being cut or eliminated, and tuition for art school skyrocketing. The reason I didn't go for my masters was that my graduate TA's in art school had come from big schools in NY, Chicago, and LA with six-figure debt and they were making $20,000 a year teaching college courses.

I don't have any real advice for you but I just wanted to say I have huge respect for firefighters. You are literally risking your life to save others. So, from the outside it looks like you're doing the exact opposite of wasting your life.

EDIT: Reading the other responses, I thought might as well add my own experience. I used to write. Both fiction and nonfiction, opinion pieces, short stories, fanfic, and sometimes even some spicier NSFW stuff. I'm not good at expressing myself verbally and writing is/was my way of expressing myself.

It was huge for me when I got a couple of my articles published in a printed tech/PC magazine (albeit a very small one) that I had been an avid reader of, and they even paid me a little something for them. Then I had some guy online commission a short story from me. I was so excited about it and the amount I charged for it didn't even come close to covering the time I spent obsessing over the story to make it perfect, but I still really enjoyed doing it.

Then, during covid I lost my day job and was seriously considering whether I should try freelance writing. But then AI and LLMs came along. At first, I thought it was a positive thing. Publishing online requires English, and English is not my native language, and even the very first public AI models were great for fixing grammar, typos and improving the flow of a text you give to it. But very soon I found that it also destroyed my motivation to write anything at all. Why should I spend time writing something myself when I can just describe the idea to an AI and it will write something almost as good in seconds that I would have spent the whole evening on? I got okay-ish results by taking the AI output and refactoring it to fit my style but I don't feel comfortable ever publishing anything where a major portion of the work was done by a machine rather than me.

Venting over haha. And really, I enjoy my current job in software development and it pays the bills, so it's not all bad for me. But I can definitely sympathize with you.

Pursue music in your free time as a way to get out of it all and if you find yourself spending a lot of time on it, try finding other people who do too, join together and see where it takes you, but don’t quit the firefighting job. It’s a noble thing, and if it covers you financially I feel like its the perfect setup for slowly advancing your musical skills.

I’m a photographer, at least I think I am. Others think of me anywhere from a photographer to a clueless bumbling monkey with a camera, recording visuals at random. It’s polarizing.

My work hangs in my house, the houses of others, and a few businesses, and I’m incredibly proud of it. Despite the warnings of career photographers telling me to have humility and to be quieter about my work, I’m not going to. I like my work and want to share it with people.

I guess you have to decide if you would regret it more if you didn't pursue your passion, or if you did and the financial sacrifice was too great.

I work 9-5 and in the evenings and weekends I admin, rehearse and perform comedy, music, thestre

I grew up racing motorcycles. I do a lot of 2-wheel stuff; mountain bikes, recently dabbled in BMX, and if I could, I'd still race motocross. The financial requirements of that are wild though, so I'm using these non-engined outlets to cope lol. My job is fine; it's not going to get me to a point where I can race again, but I'm not actively seeking it at this point, and the alternatives are pretty nice anyway.

I mean...yeah, this is kind of what it looks like. You find outlets eventually. It only being a "hobby" is not a positive or a negative. Get what you want from it; do you want it to be your every day thing? There are ways to work into some commercial music work; it's not great pay or easy, but that's the requirement. No bachelor's needed. But I don't think I'd want to monetize anything in the professional sense. I don't think people get into their hobbies for the great pay, but for what it provides. If you get into music, it isn't going to be glamorous unless you are lucky. It might not even bring financial stability. It's also not going to just be sitting with your thoughts and writing music; lot of marketing and self-promotion, lot of putting yourself out there to hope that people resonate with it. Lot of very long days, weeks, months, with 0 guarantee of a pay-off.

A lot of people think being comfortable is settling, and in a sense, it may be that. But it's also where a lot of people exist for a reason. I look at it as you could either raise your floor and have a lower ceiling for "true" happiness, or lower your floor and have a taller ceiling, so you have a wider range. There is no promise that you will be at the ceiling, or near it, or even above your current floor. May fluctuate wildly, you may have a very slow, steady climb. No one knows.

Firefighters also get a sweet pension to my understanding. Idk your age, but I assume late 30's to 40's, and you're staring a decent retirement in the face in the next 10 years. Lot of life left to fit in there as well, and what would be a measurably comfortable one at that. Just a stranger on the internets opinion though!

I think so, unfortunately. Please keep your financial stability. The music major route is either teaching or performance, and you’ll probably just end up with side gigs if you’re not doing either. That may be a fun outlet if you’re not committed to performance or academics, but if your regular job and domestic life are already taking all of your time, it doesn’t sound feasible. I had to make a similar decision regarding a performance major many years ago, and I regret not keeping up with playing for fun outside of the intense academic environment. My overall advice: Keep playing! Seek out private lessons in the meantime and see what happens (not the collegiate route quite yet, since that’s a separate career commitment and very intense). Keep on doing the thing that brings you joy.

Fortunately for me, one of passions is programming computers, which pays a lot of money. After spending eight hours a day programming computers - who am I kidding? I can't program my computer eight hours a day - Never could. Fortunately, my company gives me several hours of meetings every day and so I can program computers in between and not get burned out. There is the reality of having your passion and your job being the same type. You're gonna get burned out. There will be times when you have to do things that are boring and tedious and you can't put it off until later when you find the energy.

Fortunately, I have multiple passions. When I get home at the end of the day, I couldn't possibly sit down and program anymore, but I can cook a good meal for my family every day. Even cooking I have to clean up after myself, which is, let's just say, not something I enjoy. Often the rest of my family will help clean up, but I have to take a part of that.

I've been playing mandolin for almost 30 years now. I regularly hear someone who is actually good at mandolin playing. I'm just jealous at how good they are. But the reality is, because it's my passion, but it's just something I'm an amateur at, I don't have to be good. I can skip doing those three octave major scales. Many people are better than me - Many of them haven't been alive for 30 years and yet they're a lot better than me. But I can tell by listening to them play that they haven't skipped a lot of the practice that I've skipped over the years. But that's okay because this is just a passion and if I don't feel like it, well, I don't have to feel like it.

So my question is, what is your budget like? And what is your personal passion for piano? If you love piano, there are a ton of online study programs in piano. There are a lot of local music teachers who can teach you piano, the parts you're missing. Firefighter isn't the best income, but I'm sure that you could throw other parts of your life away and thus come up with the money to take a degree in piano.

You can probably find a local college that is willing to give you a music major for a small price. And since this is just something you're doing for fun, you don't have to do that piano degree in a couple years. You can take eight years to get a piano performance major (that is, as a part-time student, only take two or three credits a semester). There is nothing wrong with that because it's not going to be your income in the future anyway.

Do you really want to though? It's an option to get the music major, but you have other options. You are perfectly justified in saying, "you know what, I could do that, but I'm not actually interested in it. I'm going to do something else at a time". Maybe you decide, piano is interesting but taking up too much time and you get yourself a tatting shuttle and learn another hobby which is even more useless than any of the others. More power to you. Or you can start on the piano major and along the way you discover that there's some required class in something that turns out to be become a new passion for you that also turns out to pay a lot of money in so suddenly you switch majors to and you find a new job. Great if it happens and if it doesn't, well who cares you already have a career

I have a Patreon and I promote it sometimes. I post novels and art made by myself and collaborators. Nobody cares. I don't do endless shameless self promotion, I don't have a pretty face, I'm not well connected, and I don't have startup capital to produce the full range of things I'd like to make but can't because I need a day job and am trying to get a degree.

It's been soul crushing and every day is a struggle against giving up on it.

"...what does it look like?"

Depression.

Self taught music and "professional musicians" are completely different beasts. If you enroll in a formal course, you'll basically start by unlearning your existing habits. They'll call them bad habits. It's a long, hard road, where perfection is the expected standard. Not trying to scare you off it, just sharing my experiences in this area. It wasn't for me in the end; I decided to play music for fun instead.

Kind of random, but I'm really good at Photoshop. Editing photos, fixing scans, removing or adding objects and making it look natural, making photos look beautiful, removing blemishes, colourising, etc. It's now a completely useless skill with the advent of A.I. image generation and smart filters and such. But sometimes I still do it anyway.