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Most people trying to make it as rappers and streamers probably don't actually have a powerful skill set that could be swapped out for a strong income elsewhere, so the people I feel really bad for are the postdocs plugging away in research labs well into their 30s, making a pittance and crossing their fingers that they'll finally get an academic offer. Academic research isn't quite as extreme of a rockstar profession as rapping, but it is actually a gamble with enormous opportunity cost relative to other options that high-IQ people that are willing to work long hours can take.
The biggest piece of advice I can give to talented young people is to stay flexible, that you don't actually know what your dream career is when you're choosing the starting path as a teenager.
Agreed, tenure-track professorship is a high-risk, high-reward strategy.
I agree that most of the people trying to make it as rappers or streamers would probably not be able to carve out an impressive income elsewhere, but I imagine most of them, if they really applied themselves, could probably work their way up to being a supervisor at a big box shop or similar, a far superior outcome than squandering your twenties on a futile quest to get your mixtape out there and still being an unemployed nobody with no assets at the end of it.
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