My Son Said That Being a Writer Was Not a Real Job. That Made Me Chuckle, and Then I Felt Sad

My eight year old son Declan recently said to me, “I wish you weren’t a writer. I wish you had a real job.”

It made me chuckle and also hurt my feelings because while I do consider being a writer a real job I knew exactly what he was saying.

When I was a boy, I thought that being a writer was both a real and very good job. I remember how impressed I was to discover that in addition to teaching six graders, directing a class production of The Diary of Anne Frank that I was fired from for improvising and wise-cracking and overseeing the impressive ecosystem he had built in the school basement, my sixth grade teacher Mr. Gutnik was an author.

He’d written a young adult novel but the book of his that captured my youthful imagination was an educational book called Simple Electrical Devices. It didn’t matter to me that Simple Electrical Devices sounded like the driest, most boring book ever written. I was just impressed that someone that I knew had written a book that got published.

That alone was an incredible achievement to my twelve year old brain. I couldn’t even imagine how blown away I would have been if Mr. Gutnick were also the world’s preeminent author of books about my hero “Weird Al” Yankovic.

I not only thought that Mr. Gutnik had a real job; it was just about the most impressive job I could think of.

Then again, Mr. Gutnik was a teacher. He was a very good, very committed, very idealistic teacher. That’s what paid the bills. That was his sizable contribution to society and my life. Putting out dry technical books was just a pastime.

I am not a teacher. That is a very real job. I should know. I come from a family of teachers. And I understand all too well how my son could look at what I do every day and not think that it was even a job.

For starters, I work from home. That wasn’t always the case. For eighteen years I worked at an office at The Onion and then The Dissolve. That made it seem like a real job. I also collected a paycheck and had insurance.

Is writing the captions for a coloring book somehow not considered a real job?

I had bosses. I had coworkers. All of those things made it seem like I had a real job.

Also, people knew The Onion. They knew Pitchfork if not necessarily The Dissolve. The same is not true of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. Though I’m lucky to have help from my Travolta/Cage podcast co-host Clint Worthington, my webmaster Romy Maloon and my new publicist Jason Webber, this is largely a one-man operation and that one man has a LOT of problems. A LOT. I should know! I’m him and that dude is all kinds of fucked up. He doesn’t even have a real job!

For a long time I felt like I was getting away with something being a full-time pop culture writer. How insanely blessed am I that my livelihood consists of writing about whatever the hell I want for an appreciative and loyal audience?

For the last couple of years, however, it’s felt like I may not be able to get away with what I’m doing for much longer unless things get a whole lot better and, after a solid half-decade of zero growth and just barely keeping my head above water, I might need to get what my son and society considers a real job in the not too distant future.

What keeps me up at night is not that my eight year old off-handedly said that he didn’t think that being a writer was a real job. No, what terrifies me is that somewhere deep in my soul I similarly fear that I don’t have a real job either and that my days of getting away with it may be drawing to a close.

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