Much of this chuntering about circumstances is simply an attempt to keep my own thinking on it coherent, as the times possibly grow more difficult. To be clear, there is a certain life associated with working in the theatre, practicing law, or teaching in an American university, and although there were very costly and difficult times in the years I spent working for those credentials and that experience, I'm not talking about those lives when I muse about what it is that's to be done now. I'm attempting to sketch a basic existence somewhere -- the sort of life and work in the context of rustication or internal exile that most civilizations would think that the state should set up when blocking someone from the learned professions on political grounds.
(Though this would occur to very few people in the present cultural context. You would have to synthesize and compare several different, and perhaps contradictory, cultural sensibilities before understanding it to be a logical reaction.)
Famously, a prominent academic who crossed one of these institutions recently ended up driving a school bus in the Midwest afterwards. It's better than an Albanian chrome mine of a few decades ago, to be sure, but I'd be willing to wager that he got the gig through personal connections.