Money, Money, Money

I spent a good chunk of my week devouring PDFs from philosopher Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. in an attempt to untangle my thoughts around art and money. I originally only meant to read his How an Artist Can Hack a Living: A Report, but he graciously gifted me two other texts: The Good Life and the Sustaining Life, and Money Rules for Simple Living. I felt it was both important and imperative that I write down my own thoughts on it, if only to quell the compulsion to make content for this blog.

I think a lot about what exactly a good life means to me, and how as an artist I’d be able to reliably sustain it in today’s age where AI can make ‘art’ much faster—and in many cases, much better. The looming threat that AI will replace many creative and technical jobs is very real.

I’ve tested Midjourney and Adobe Firefly: while they’re not perfect products and can’t be directed to produce my exact vision, for many who aren’t in creative fields, they can produce ‘good enough’ work for ‘end product use.’ By ‘end product use,’ I mean something that can be monetized: sold in an Etsy shop as ‘art’ by morally bereft individuals who fancy themselves as curators of good art.

But I’m not here to argue about the pros and cons of AI technology or even talk about what my concept of a good life is because, in many ways, I already feel like I’m living it. I’m here to talk about money: a topic which many people either shy away from or talk too much about.

I was born into a middle-class Chinese-Filipino family. My immediate family had a candle factory that eventually had to shut down, being unable to pivot after power supplies became more stable around the country. In it’s heyday, I was surrounded by business, though my involvement as a child was mostly limited to manning the shop, sometimes as a cashier. I was literally surrounded by money.

You could say that I grew up in relative privilege, and yes, I did. I thought money would always be a given, and I had no clue that my mom worried about it all the time. I had little appreciation for the things I had, the resources I had access to, what a privilege it was to have books and good education and STUFF. But I wanted more: I wanted freedom.

I grew up with Western ideologies: independence was meant to be sought after. I wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted, but I couldn’t do that for as long as I was still living with my family and benefiting from their money rather than my own. So, making money became an obsession for me.

Back then, the goal was clear: I needed to make money so I could live on my own, be my own person. I didn’t want to rely on my family, and I wanted to prove to them and myself that I could survive on my own and be an ‘artist.’

Spoiler alert: independence is a bitch.

My life revolved around making money to pay for rent, food, utilities, et cetera, instead of actually making art. Sure, I was able to ‘make a living’ with my skills by working in the game industry, but it was more like a long-term commission where you bring to life other people’s ideas, other people’s visions. Since I seldom had the chance to work on my own vision, I lost it—and I’m still in the arduous process of figuring shit out.

But back to money: somehow, through a bit of hard work and a lot of luck, I managed to save up enough that I don’t have to worry about money as much anymore.

BUT I STILL DO. A lot. From worrying about not having enough money, I started worrying about losing money, and as I’ve recently realized: I’m incredibly bad at money. I don’t actually know how to efficiently make it, let alone use it and I’m terribly sure that I am extremely unqualified to talk about it or give anyone (especially artists) useful financial advice.

Which brings me to the texts that Andrew Taggart gifted me, specifically Money Rules for Simple Living, which opened up questions about my own relationship with money. What is ‘just enough,’ and how can I best use it when I do have more than enough?

While I believe I’m in the ‘moderate abundance’ stage based on Taggart’s text, I need to think more on the ‘just enough’ stage as I seem to spend way too much on things I don’t even use. While I don’t want to deprive myself of good things (good food, for one, but we could argue what that means as well), I’ve given myself the challenge to stop spending on random shit—and hoarding art materials—and refocus instead on using said random shit to produce art, whatever that means to me.

Anyway, if you came here thinking you could gain some useful financial insight, I advise you to read Taggart’s texts instead. It is by far the most insightful text I’ve read about money. It doesn’t tell you how to make it, but it can teach you appreciation and gratitude for the things you already have.

P.S. Taggart operates on a gift economy: something I’ve been exploring for my own ventures. While I was gifted the texts for a small donation to read How an Artist Can Hack a Living: A Report in full, you may have a different experience, by which I mean the texts may not come free for you as they were emailed to me personally. If you’d like direct access to the Money Rules for Simple Living text, I believe it is available at this link for a small donation.