Comment by throwawayoldie
2 days ago
Other examples: Baruch Spinoza, lensmaker by day, philosopher by night. Philip Glass: moving man, plumber, cab driver, and avant-garde composer. E. E. "Doc" Smith: food engineer and science fiction writer. Franz Kafka: administrator in an insurance company, and writer of history's weirdest books. Wallace Stevens: insurance company executive and poet. William Carlos Williams: doctor and poet. And these are just off the top of my head.
This is messing with my head. I love Spinoza and Kafka and couldn't imagine them as anything else but being full-time thinkers and writers.
Personally, the line between 'administrator in an insurance company' and Kafka's works fits neatly within my mental model of the world.
Which makes me wonder what he called the kind of experience a person has when dealing with an insurance company: the word "Kafkaesque" didn't exist yet.
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Who told you they weren't? Are you only a programmer or a thinker about programming while at keys?
i think by full time they meant sitting around in some dingy room, smoking cigarettes and positing/thinking rather than filling most of their days with other activities that have nothing to do with this craft (and i would say to posit well, you need life experiences and they did exactly what they needed to do to become legendary)
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Bukowski: pickle factory for a while then 13ish years at the united states postal service
and a lot of his work revolves around working at the post office and pickle factory
Anthony Trollope worked at the post office, Andy Weir was a programmer until he hit it big with The Martian.
Wilfred Owen: soldier and poet (whose poetry was ignored/neglected until the 1960s)
Robert Frost was an insurance guy or something
No, Frost was a teacher and a farmer to make money.[1] Tom Clancy was an insurance agent.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Frost
Was thinking of T.S. Eliot
Just took a look at Wikipedia. No mention of insurance, but he did write much of his early work while farming during the day. As did Robert Burns.
Was thinking of T.S. Eliot, worked at Lloyds but in banking not insurance.