Ep 20: The Sacrifices We Make PART ONE

In this episode, John begins a two-part conversation about the sacrifices musicians make to live this life. From missed time and uncertain schedules to the hidden strain on mental health and relationships, this episode is about learning to name the real costs, understand them clearly, and navigate them with more honesty, strength, and intention. Along the way, he shares practical tips for coping better, communicating healthier, and building a version of the music life that can actually last.

Transcript

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You are listening to the Gig to Live Podcast. Welcome everyone. I'm John Foles and I'm a full-time working musician. This podcast is about building a music life that holds up over time. It's practical, enjoyable, sometimes uncomfortable, but it's always about helping you stay in the game and actually enjoy the life that you're building. We'll meet some wonderful working musicians from time to time. So whether you're just getting started or you've been doing this for years, you're in the right spot. This podcast is for you. Hey everyone, this is John Voles. Welcome to the Gig2Live podcast. I will be your flight attendant for the day. We're fully expecting a smooth ride all the way through this podcast. No turbulence whatsoever. The weather is great. We know you have a choice of podcasts, so thank you for choosing this one. Today, this is episode 20, and for me, it's just kind of a big deal. It's a milestone, it's a road marker, and so I'm feeling good today. Thank you. I appreciate you being along for the ride with me. I was doing a gig the other night, and uh before the gig started, I was sitting outside at the outside bar at the venue. Uh sun was out, I was having a cocktail, and a friend called me. And he's a fellow musician. It was about 15 minutes from the start of the gig, and we're in different time zones right now. But he said he wanted to share something with me, and it would only take a minute. Now, I love talking to him, so it was not a hassle for me at all. Uh, even if I had just a few minutes, I loved spending those minutes with him. And I could hear the emotion in his voice when he said to me, you know, the longer I do this, the more sacrifices I make. And my heart sank just a bit, you know, because I I love this guy and I could tell that whatever he was feeling in that moment, it was it was weighing on him. And then he said, you know, John, you should talk about this on your podcast. Now, we've touched on the sacrifices we make as musicians a bit here and there through the podcast, but I haven't really dedicated an episode to it. So I asked him to tease it out a bit, you know, talk to me for a few minutes. And I can't quote him exactly, but he rattled off a list that I felt deeply. He said, birthdays, anniversaries, friends' weddings, uh, time with my family, and the list went on. And the sacrifices that he was feeling at that time were the ones we make that affect our relationships and our social time. And those things are huge. And we talked for just a few more minutes, and I had to let him go about six minutes before showtime to go tune up and hit the stage. But the conversation stayed with me throughout the night as I was pondering what sacrifice means. And I'm glad he chose the word sacrifice to describe what he was feeling because he couldn't have he could have said it another way. He could have said, the longer I do this, the more I deprive myself of things. But that's not what he said. Sacrifice is a good word because it implies that we are making a trade for something better. Sacrifice always means that we're choosing to give something up for something that is more meaningful. Now, deprivation, that that's different, right? Deprivation is is loss, and it's it's loss without return. You know, something's missing, something's being withheld from you. You know, you're being tortured, you can't reach the thing you need. It's inaccessible and it's it's out of your control. Things like not having enough food or sleep or money or safety or love or opportunity, sometimes those things are all out of our control, right? And they happen to us. Uh being trapped in a dead end situation, losing freedom uh through control or circumstance, like COVID. Deprivation usually means that we have no power, that things are scarce. And the frustration is different than sacrifice because the things you need are unreachable and out of your control. Now we know what sacrifice looks like. We read about it in stories, we see it on film, we hear stories of real life sacrifice, and when we see it in someone else, we usually applaud it. It's recognizable when we see it in someone else, and it helps us applaud them as you know, we're an omnipotent outside viewer, and we know the outcome, we know the end of the story. And sacrifice is a popular trope in stories. We love it, right? Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, uh Saving Private Ryan, pretty much every single war movie ever made. Uh Ted Lasso on TV, yeah, 1883. I loved that one, by the way. We celebrate sacrifice when the cost is real. Because uh for sacr for us to applaud the kind of sacrifice that we see in the movies, it somebody has to be hurting. It has to hurt. Uh if nothing meaningful is lost, then it doesn't move us, right? We can actually celebrate the hurt in others because we know the payoff. Uh we celebrate sacrifice when when the motive is bigger than someone's ego, right? It's monumental. It's something like love or duty or truth or protection or justice or redemption or family. We celebrate sacrifice when we see what others can't, right? As as viewers, we often know uh what like the hidden weight of their decision is, even when the other characters don't know it, right? We're the omnipotent outside viewer. But when you're in the middle of your own story, sacrifice can be ridiculously hard. It can kind of feel like punishment because you don't see the end. You know, not really. You can dream of the end, you can work towards it, you can plan for it, but you only know the pain that you're feeling in that moment. And you won't always feel the reward in real time. So we have to remind ourselves of all the tiny rewards that we experience along the way as we work towards the big rewards. Every single trade that we make as a musician has a cost. Um, even the so-called stable path, you know, a real job, a nine to five, uh, even a nine to five that feels stuck can demand a price from you over time that you severely underestimated. And it's like tiny paper cuts over time. And then one day you realize that you've almost bled out. And that's why, that's why many people stay too long in a career that they hate because the pain gets normalized and cut after cut and tear after tear until you're left crumpled on the floor, you know. Wow, I I almost said it like I have experience there. You may be in a place like I was at one time where I was trying to break free. Uh I I wanted to do what I love full time, but I was stuck in one of the most corrosive versions of a career. You know, being invited to be bold and creative, be a visionary. And actually you're being managed by fearful gatekeepers who are protective of their own status and their own image and their control. And you're told to flourish, and then you're punished for flourishing in ways that they don't control or approve of. The common the costs of us of being stuck in a nine to five, to me, are way more painful than the common costs that we experience as musicians. You know, we when we're stuck in a nine-to-five, we trade freedom for gatekeeper permission. And our ideas, you know, they may need approval from people with less courage than we have. People with no vision, people who are full of fear. And then we trade speed for bureaucracy, you know, red tape. I live by the motto the fast eat the slow, and when it comes to new ideas and getting things done, I want to move forward. I don't want to have to talk to 50 people and let them pontificate over why they think it will or will not work, and then come back to another meeting. In the system, in that kind of system, simple things become meetings. They become committees and emails and policies and delays and politics. I don't like that kind of trade. In that kind of a stuck nine to five position, you also trade creativity for optics. The questions uh stop being does this work and becomes how does this make leadership look? How does this decision affect other employees? And perception of people full of fear eclipses reality. And man, it is hard to fight that. And your creativity is murdered, sometimes with your own reputation. I don't like that trade. In a nine-to-five, sometimes you trade your personal merit for the hierarchy's ego. I can't tell you how many times I brought ideas to the table to have them repeatedly turned down, only to have those very ideas resurface as the boss's idea and watch him get applauded for them. I don't like that kind of a trade. In that stuck nine to five, you you trade truth and vision for diplomacy. You start to say less and you start to soften everything you say and navigate personalities instead of solving problems and instead of launching new ideas, you know, which really gets me fired up. You settle into status quo for fear of upsetting people so you can just do your job and get your check. I don't like that kind of a trade. In that nine to five, you trade your time for someone else's priorities. Your best hours go to agendas and ideas that you may not even believe in. And I I could go on all day about the trades we make in that kind of a nine to five. And I'm not saying every nine to five is bad. Oh, God forbid, I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that if you've been stuck in that kind of an environment, then you know the pain. And I know for a fact you don't like what you have to trade in that kind of an environment. Now the musician life is attractive, right, on so many levels because of the things that we get to trade up for. We get to trade structure for freedom, which personally I love. I have a tattoo that says freedom. That's how much I love it. Uh you get to trade certainty, which is good. It can be good, you know, stability. Uh certainty for possibility. You you trade security, yeah, for ownership. You trade predictability, which is not always bad, but predictability for possibility. You trade the mundane, you know, the day in, day out, making widgets, turning them out. You trade the mundane for meaning. You trade your weekends, yeah, you do. But you trade them for weekdays, which can be a huge, huge blessing. You trade routine, and maybe you like routine, but you trade routine for excitement. And I'm not just blowing smoke here. I mean, it's exciting to carve your own path and wake up and say, what am I going to do today? And not, you know, have to hear somebody else telling you exactly what you're going to do. You trade conventional success for personal dreams, right? So yeah, that kind of life is attractive. But even with those amazing trade-ups, we can't pretend that everything's dandy. We can't just romanticize the musician life for our for our own sake and for the sake of others. We need to be honest. So we're going to look at a top ten list. But first I want to narrow down what I think are the three biggest areas of sacrifice for a musician. And you know, as this thing is rolling on here, I'm thinking this is probably going to turn into two episodes. All right. So we may not get to the top ten list in this episode, but we'll round it out with one. But here are the the three, I think the three biggest areas of sacrifice for a musician. The first big area is what my friend was talking about when he called relationships. It's the biggest area because it it touches just everything. Romantic partners, marriage, children, extended family, friendships. And there's there's a big cost, right? The cost is connection and consistency and having a shared rhythm with people and being available for people. That is a huge area of sacrifice, relationships. But the second big area I'm going to call stability. You know, I will just say stability. Not not financial stability, but the overall encompassing whole life kind of stability. No predictability, no structure, no safety nets, no smooth planning, no regular PTO, no company benefits, no clearly defined seasons and clearly defined rhythm. That's a big area of sacrifice. And I think the third biggest area is personal time and energy. Many musicians don't just lose time, right? They they lose prime time. We sacrifice prime time, time that you know some of the muggles spend on themselves. Not for us. So we sacrifice rest and hobbies and health routines, having creative surplus, you know, margin, room for error, uh sacrificing a rhythm that doesn't jive with the nine to five work for eight hours, sleep for eight hours, world, personal time and energy. That's a big one. Relationships, stability, personal time and energy. We're gonna take a look at those three things a bit closer. All right, first, let's look at relationships. The musician's lifestyle can absolutely cost family, and not always in dramatic ways, usually it happens slowly over time. Everyone is okay with it in the beginning to some extent. It's you know, it's new, it's fresh, it's exciting. Your spouse or your boyfriend or girlfriend is coming to every show you do and celebrating everything you do. And then it starts to wreak havoc. And maybe your partner makes sarcastic comments about you being gone, or maybe you have to watch your kids cry because you can't be at their event. And it's not like you're running away. You want to be at their event. You want to spend Saturday night with your significant other, but you have a different kind of job that doesn't allow you to do all of those things. The hours that build a music career are often the same hours that build family life, nights and weekends and holidays and celebrations, bedtimes, birthdays, dinners, Saturdays, the exact windows of time when people gather are often the windows when musicians have to work. We are living in the upside down. So the sacrifice is not just missing an event. Everyone, no matter what they do, has to miss something here and there. That's just life, boys and girls, but musician life is different. It's constant. It's missing the repetition of small moments that uh create closeness over time. It's being gone during family dinners, uh evening conversations, spontaneous invitations uh to friends and to family and events with them, routine with your kids if your family's young, weekends, you know, when everybody's out making memories. If you're single, it's all of the time with friends or maybe trying to date when your interest has a nine to five. And this all matters because relationships are built less by grand gestures and special one offs, and more by regular presence. But here is another important truth, a big one. Musician life does not have to ruin relationships. It's not necessary. It certainly removes us from being on autopilot, you know. Musician life is a hands-on experience where we we have to navigate this thing. But many relationships run on routine and musicians need to run on intention. The sacrifice is real, but the big danger is not the schedule itself. That's that's just the reality. The big danger is pretending that the schedule doesn't have any consequences for us. Now, I've worked weekends my entire married life, all through raising kids. And there are a few things that my wife and I have done over the years that have saved our family relationships. And when When I talk about these things, I'm not saying it made life easy, the choices that we made, uh just easier. And I'm I'm gonna share those in a bit, but we're gonna look at the second big area of uh sacrifice a little closer, stability. Okay, let's look closer at stability. For many musicians, one of the biggest strains is living without the built-in support system that other careers often provide for us. So we may hate the dead end job, the J O B, the journey of the broke, but there are some things that the J O B provides. So musicians have no uh real predictability or steady structure or uh safety nets. And when work slows down or it gets expensive or there's an emergency, sometimes we can be in a world of hurt. And smooth planning can feel impossible, you know, like a joke sometime. And with schedule shift and bookings change and income moves in waves, and there's no regular PTO or company benefits, and no one handling our retirement plans for us or our paid sick days. Even the the year itself, if you look at the year in advan in advance, it can feel different. It doesn't have the clearly defined seasons or rhythms, just busy stretches and slow stretches and constant adaptation. It can be freeing, but it can also be mentally exhausting. Stability is a big one. Alright, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to break here and make this the end of the first part of this episode on sacrifice, and then we'll have another one that's coming up in just a few days, the second part. I heard from a few of you that you really enjoy when I keep these episodes to under a half hour. Uh, they're bite-sized chunks, and so that's what I want to do. The only difference is an interview. If I'm interviewing another musician or music personality, somebody in the biz, uh, then those usually will go about an hour. Um but for these episodes where it's just me talking with you and you listening, I'm going to try to keep them all under a half hour. And that's why we're doing this in two parts. Okay, so here's the end of part one. Stay creative, stay after it, stay hired.