JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

When this pandemic is over and we have settled into our new and hopefully improved (kinder, more equal or at least less ridiculously unequal, and less destructive to the planet) world, will I miss this strange, quiet period? Will this confinement seem like an idyll?

Working from home, away from the glamor and the perks of the job, unable to spend the salaries you have traded your freedom for on designer fashions and tchotchkes, breeds disillusionment. You see your job for what it is, and contemplate leaving it for something more…creative. Speaking from the other side of the divide, where you can do whatever you want as long as you don’t expect any sort of financial security, I have to say: Don’t quit your job. In more visceral terms, of course, but these times call for kindness. Let me talk you down from that economic ledge.

A recession is coming. Jobs will be scarce. If you can’t stand corporate employment anymore, at least wait to get laid off, maybe there’ll be a severance package. It is not the time to ditch the job that pays the bills to follow your dreams—not because the pandemic has put the economy into a coma, but because there is no such thing as “the time to ditch the job that pays the bills to follow your dreams.” There is no perfect time to do art. Art has nothing to do with your convenience. You make a living, and you do your art at the same time. Your art is better for it, because it comes from the pure need to make something. Because you just have to do it.

Lockdown may end, or not. Enhanced quarantine may be downgraded to less enhanced quarantine, or regular quarantine, or not. We may be indoors until June, or we may be able to go out, or not. That is what I got from the news.