The next Jeff Bezos is wearing a jersey
Mountain sized contracts in the NBA, and the sports world at large, got me thinking ‘bout money shame.
Welcome back to BasketballandFeelings, your favorite safe space to break bread about your feelings. Alright, so this has been a big week when it comes to salary in the NBA. But also money in sports in general.
I forget the guy’s name but some soccer player was given a contract this week where he is being paid close to $800,000,000 — eight hundred million — dollars — to play one season of soccer - for one season! That news dropped the same week we find out that Jaylen Brown is getting a historic $300 million dollar Super Max Contract Extension from the Boston Celtics. So not quite the eye popping figure of the soccer stud, who was offered his deal by a group out of Saudi Arabia, but still fucking scary.
Congrats Jaylen.
Fairness is sort of a weird concept in the NBA that has taken on some momentum post Jaylen Brown deal, many have taken issue with the fact that Jaylen Brown is far from the best player in the NBA, much less on his own team, and yet there he is being compensated like the last player in the world. Many critics failing to see that Jaylen’s contract is nothing in comparison to what some other guys are going to get when it comes time. That’s how much money is circulating around the NBA these days. 🏀🤮
This is all fascinating stuff now being endlessly debated throughout every other basketball venue and platform, but there’s something else that happened this week, something that the world needs to know about. The other day on Tik Tok…
I joined a lively debate loosely connected to the WGA Strike. A professional screenwriter who I admire responded to a comment about side-hustles from one of her Tik Tok followers. To summarize, she was feeling triggered by a comment that asked if screenwriting was her full time profession.
Replying in a very authentic way, she seemed genuinely perplexed why someone from her audience would even ask the question to begin with.
I get it, (these questions can be very frustrating) and “her people” are well aware of the amount of time, attention, focus, and care she gives to her profession. Out of everyone in the world, her followers on Tik Tok had to know that she had no time in the day left for anything but what she did as a screenwriter, and on some level, she took their curiosity as an insult.
So let’s talk about it. Here we have a screenwriter triggered by a question that puts into debate her professional identity as a writer. Many of her followers who commented, also screenwriters, agreed. A few screenwriters in her audience opened up about the fact that they too held side-hustles, sometimes shamefully, hiding their side professions from the world at large, in case, god forbid, someone found out they were copywriters. The general air of the Tik Tok post and the comments left by her followers was one of disbelief, shame, and finally, camaraderie, we deserve to live in a world where we don’t need to do anything else to live.
To be clear, I favor a world where this is true. I want all artists to be compensated fairly, especially the successful ones who have earned their stripes, but I took issue with the shame I saw splattered in the comments from these up-and-coming screenwriters.
For one thing, not all art forms are compensated equally. Screenwriters are making way less money in 2023 than they were in 2013 and 2003, but they’re still making significantly more than poets, who have to find all kinds of creative ways to support themselves through side-hustles. That could mean teaching or jewelry designing or Substacking, or even screenwriting. When I socialize with other poets, I don’t get the sense that there’s any shame around their side-hustles.
Do poets want more money? Who doesn’t? But shame? Nah, I don’t see any of that when I’m in these circles.
As poets, we don’t really have the choice. We’re used to scrounging for dollars, and working in an art form where money is as far removed from the idea of “success” as the ocean is to a chicken. So we find other ways to make money, and more importantly other ways to define our success. It has a lot more to do with the community around what we create, than how much we make with our creations.
That’s what was so striking about this Tik Tok post and the comments from her followers. There was this biting shame by many in the comments, as if they were “better than” having a side-hustle.
I’m reminded of Ted Chiang, the sci-fi author of Arrival, who still works as a technical writer.
I’m reminded of a screenwriter on Twitter from a week or so ago whose viral tweet about the WGA Strike “exposed” the fact that despite her years of success, she had never left her job as a waitress, which she confessed was far more reliable.
I’m also reminded of the world famous painter Mark Bradford, who worked in his mother’s hair salon into his late 30s.
They almost felt sorry for themselves, these screenwriters, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them. Because at the end of the day, and honestly, this took me a long time to learn, the value of your work can’t and doesn’t have a single thing to do with the amount of money you earn.
Artists are not in the NBA. We don’t practice our crafts within a meritocratic bubble that makes calculating our value easy as a click. Ours is a far more ambiguous form where value can mean a single person listening, watching, reading, or jerking off to your stuff. It’s way bigger than a tweet or even a 360 slam dunk.
So I don’t want to pretend that money doesn’t matter. Of course it does. But it’s far from the only measure, and certainly shouldn’t be used as a measuring stick that sparks shame if you don’t have it.
All art forms are incredibly valuable. Done at the highest level, extremely beautiful and important.
The NBA sits at the center of a commercial volcano and some art forms are outside of any kind of commercial system at all. There’s valuable lessons to be learned from that dichotomy for people from all walks of life.
Great write up. The lens of basketball brought me to this page and breakdown of JB's new contract, but I resonated a lot with the analysis of money & art.
It's tough to monetize art. This is coming from a writer and actor that is also a business executive and doing an MBA. Today, art must come with a level of entrepreneurship -- an ability to understand the economics within the world of art and how to get your piece. It's tough. But there is no shame in that. I feel like most artists have other means of income, and that shouldn't be looked down upon at all.