I relate to this so much. I used to watch Christopher Nolan's The Prestige and chide myself for not being more like Christian Bale's character, willing to orient my entire life around my art and materially suffer as a result of it.

But then I came to realize that the normie artist grind is its own type of struggle. A more comfortable struggle for sure, but a struggle nonetheless. Writing on nights and weekends after long hours of PMC nonsense is incredibly difficult and requires a discipline and strength of spirit others don't have. It is a lifestyle choice of its own kind, in the same vein as Cormac McCarthy living out of motel rooms.