Pay The Artists

There’s something we need to talk about.

Right now, somewhere, an artist is staring at a blank page, a canvas, a cursor blinking in the dark, throwing themselves headfirst into the unknown, with no guarantee that the work they produce will pay their rent, feed their family, or even be seen.

This is not a hobby. This is a life.

Most artists I know are not treating their passion as something they return to after a day at a desk. They are the desk. They are the work. They’ve built their entire existence around the act of creating, because for them, there is no other way.

A 9-to-5 isn’t just inconvenient for a true artist. It’s neurologically at odds with how they’re wired. The creative mind doesn’t clock in. It doesn’t compartmentalise. It lives inside the work, constantly, restlessly, in a way that doesn’t fit neatly into a job description or a performance review.

To dismiss this as impracticality is to misunderstand the nature of creativity itself.

Art is a dance with mystery.

You don’t know, when you begin, whether the thing you’re making will be received. You don’t know if the vulnerability you’re pouring onto the page will resonate or land in silence. You don’t know if this piece, this one, the one that cost you something, will be the one that sustains you.

And yet they keep going.

That takes a particular kind of courage that the world doesn’t always know how to reward.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m fortunate. I’ve built a business that provides for me financially, which means my writing supplements my income rather than being the thing standing between me and survival. That privilege is not lost on me.

But I would love, genuinely, to dedicate my life entirely to writing. To give it everything, the way so many artists I admire already do.

The fact that I can’t yet, and the fact that so many artists are doing it anyway, under financial pressure and creative uncertainty, makes me want to say this clearly:

We need to do better by them.

Here’s the simplest thing you can do: if you consume someone’s work and it moves you, challenges you, makes you think or feel or see differently: pay for it.

Most artists offer a subscription. A newsletter. A Patreon. A paid tier.

You subscribe to Netflix. You subscribe to Spotify. You pay, without much thought, for the platforms that deliver content to you. Consider extending that same logic to the humans creating the content - the original thinkers, the ones generating the ideas that eventually filter into everything else.

The writer whose newsletter you forward to friends. The musician whose songs you play on repeat. The poet whose words you screenshot and send to someone who needs them.

Pay them.

Not because they’re asking (though they are, quietly, by putting the option there). But because original thought, original feeling, original art: these are some of the most valuable things in the world, and we’ve somehow convinced ourselves they should be free.

Whilst some of us consume art from the comfort of home, at the end of a structured day, many artists are throwing themselves wholly and fully into their craft because that is the only way they know how to survive.

That deserves recognition. That deserves remuneration.

If there’s an artist, writer, or creator whose work has meant something to you, then go and find out if they have a paid subscription. Consider this your reminder.