Munich musician: I’ve moved back in with my parents
mainThe Abendzeitung is running a series of how citizens are coping with Corona.
At the start of the outbreak, enterprising bassist Julia Hornung, 30, was a busy musician with a two-room apartment and an artists’ agency of her own that supplemented her sessions income.
Three months into the pandemic she sold the flat. Now she’s getting worried about the long term:
You feel really bad when the industry is shut down and you don’t know when and how it will start again. What if the same thing happens again in twenty years? Then I’ll be 50 and probably have a different standing and different living conditions. I doubt whether I can and will continue to do this all my life. I try to process my fears about the future, try to get everything back on track. So I started cycling a lot to clear my head. I bought a bike with my savings and go on long tours….
Read on here.
See Julia at work here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgS-JeUH7vI
This is the predictable consequence of governments only screeching “stop the spread”, making poor decisions to close too many areas without providing reasonable sick & dead data and not having a financial plan in place for those they’re denying income to thereby starving them to death.
Music is not a reliable source for living anymore. Ok, it never was, but in the last decade, orchestras and other jobs in the industry are falling apart all over the globe. This pandemic showed this even to the “untouchables” in top 1% positions. Although I still have a “nice” full-time job in music, I’m not going to pursue it 100% anymore. I’m starting law school in order to have a backup plan when (not if) things go south. Good luck to us all.
the only solution is to look for a change 0f job
which is easier said than done.
Especially when one is older as in over 50. It’s career curtains for nearly all older workers as employers have no interest in us and we therefore are plunged into poverty and then homelessness. It’s happening to me. Living wage jobs are nonexistent save for a very few highly specialized things. It’s enough to make one want to end their days on a regular basis.
In many parts of the world, family members of different generations live together as they cannot afford to live in separate abodes. There is no shame in this and it actually creates some nice social benefits. We all may find this to be the New Normal and look at it as a gift of sorts in a decade or so.
it depends if one wants privacy.
When your family member gets sick and needs care and it’s unaffordable you then can lose your career-income because you have to become the caregiver. This is what nobody realizes. It can happen in the blink of an eye, in places like the USA especially. This is how I lost everything at age 53 and now I still cannot support myself two years later with a living wage job. I mention this only so that people will start to realize the elephant in the room. It’s a ticking time bomb for so many families who don’t even realize that it is.
i have been made redundant twice. the firms
went bust i came out with one weeks wages
then i found a civil service job. which was good.