The Velvet Coffin.

Years ago, when I was at Cal Performances, it was customary to reach out to colleagues in other venues as part of the advance work for a touring show. Over time you established good connections and were able to share the details you would never get in the tech rider (if there was one). One colleague I talked to fairly regularly worked at a venue in Los Angeles. It seemed to me that he was always rather grumpy. Not unfriendly, just unhappy. One day I casually asked him if he was OK, and what came forth was a lengthy diatribe about his horrible, multiple bosses and the toxic workplace he was in. I asked him why he stayed, and he simply said: "I'm in the velvet coffin." The pay was good, the benefits were great, and he had a family to support. So he felt he couldn't leave the job, even though he was miserable to the point where it was affecting his mental health.

The concept of having all your needs met and still being miserable is as old as time. The painting above by Evelyn De Morgan (c. 1901) shows a young woman yearning to be with the people outside dancing and singing; she is instead trapped inside with her dour old husband. In the top right corner is the bird in a golden cage, in contrast to the bird outside flying free. She was the Bird in the Gilded Cage.

The Velvet Coffin. The idiom originated with journalists at the L.A. Times in the early 1970s, when expense accounts, travel, and other perks kept the staff happy (and non unionized) in a competitive market. Author and NYU Stern professor Suzy Welch, herself a former journalist with the Miami Herald, brought the concept into the lexicon of business school lectures to describe the pitfalls of a career that may be cushy but is a mismatch to a person's goals and values. Most career guides such as Becoming You by Professor Welch are designed to help people find their purpose. These books are mostly concerned with career misalignment; you're in the wrong career, and you need to reassess your values to find your true passion. Like living the life of a banker when your passion is to be a baker.

Unfortunately I have yet to read a career assessment book that touches on the performing arts, much less nonprofit work in general. Yes, there are a few "how to" books, which mainly deal with board governance, leadership, and non-profit management. But there is nothing truly focused on career assessment for entertainment workers (we also need to differentiate between entertainment/arts workers and creatives, such as artists and performers). There are a couple of practical reasons for this. As a business sector, the performing arts is relatively small, and so career assessment for the arts is not very profitable to a publisher.

The second and more salient reason is that these books are entirely unequipped for the entertainment worker who has already found their purpose, but is trying to survive the ecosystem built around it. When your passion is already aligned with your work, the real challenge isn't self-discovery, it's self-preservation. It is knowing how to navigate institutional toxicity without letting it destroy your love for the art form. It is having the tools to map a sustainable career when the safety nets are few and far between.

In the end it might be best to step away from the industry for a bit, to regroup and reassess. If the very thing that gives you joy also gives you grief, it might be time for a pause. I had a client that experienced this phenomenon. Her job was so toxic that a path toward a different life in the industry seemed unattainable. As it happened, COVID intervened, and she was forced to take a job outside the industry when everything shut down. Fortunately for her, when things started up again she was able to land a position that restored her faith in her passion.

Ultimately, climbing out of the velvet coffin requires facing a trade-off. How much of your well-being are you willing to sacrifice for financial safety, versus how much uncertainty are you willing to tolerate for the chance to be happy and fulfilled? In the arts, where stable jobs are rare, staying in a toxic environment often feels like the only "responsible" choice. But staying isn't a neutral state; it comes at a steep, cumulative cost to your health, your spirit, and eventually, the very passion that brought you to this work in the first place.