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Ibram, I promise this is no lecture, I just want to share my brother's experience with you, since he could have said your last post word-for-word about about 5 years ago.
He knew what he wanted to do, photography. (I'm guessing your dream is music, but I could be wrong.) He assured us he would never, ever want to work for a place that valued a piece of paper over a genuine assessment of his skills and intelligence, so it wouldn't matter that he didn't go to college. Now, five years later, he is still trying to get his life moving in the direction he wants it to go, and he (quite surprisingly) admitted several things to me recently:
1.) He never expected life would be so damn expensive.
2.) He realizes now that even if he had gone to college just to barely scrape by like he had been doing in high school, that would have at least been another 4 years of complete financial support from our parents while he continued to hone his photography skills.
3.) "Selling out" his art by doing weddings, portrait shots, etc. turned out to be far worse on him emotionally than a day job, because at least he can rationalize away the day job without souring the experience of what he loves.
4.) He never realized how many relatively decent day-jobs there are, where one can have a desk and an internet connection and few responsibilities.
5.) He thought everyone else in the "rat race" completely bought into the philosophy. He never dreamed that the bosses of the above jobs wouldn't care about their job any more than he does, and thus wouldn't be interested in taking the time to assess his knowledge and intelligence, and would instead just take the first application candidate with a piece of paper saying they graduated so they can get back to surfing the internet all day.
6.) He never realized how much better a "rat race" position would still be compared tp food service and retail--which, as it turns out, is just another rat race after all, except it pays a lot less and you actually have to work.
He said overall (and he waxed eloquent for quite awhile, having a bit of a mid-twenties crisis over all this by now) that he really wished he had believed my father back when he told him, "You will have to work, I mean really work and not just do what you love, for many years of your life if not all of it. The only question is, how bad do you want it to suck?" He didn't understand at the time that what made high school so annoying was that the teachers cared about whether he did well, and nagged him about his grades, whereas in the real world people just blew him off and never gave him a chance to prove how smart he was in the first place.
Anyway, end of pretend-non-lecture. Don't take it from me, take it from another hyperintelligent, idealistic young man still dedicated to following his dream.
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