Honestly, this is such a huge letdown. "Just keep putting up with things" is the absolutely worst thing you could tell people.
Lots of people have repeated this sentiment but I really don’t think that this story has a message, at least I did not interpret it that way. This story, overall, is intended to depict failure — it’s a story about failure. There’s no moral communicated, it’s just two people who made decisions that seemed reasonable at the time but turned out to have bad consequences. But that’s fine, since it’s made quite clear by the story that they had no way of knowing.
Another way of putting it, it’s art without hope. I will acknowledge that this genre is controversial in and of itself, but personally I think that it can be very enjoyable and empowering to read in its own way.
The sense of betrayal is justified. I do think it’s funny though.
Well the author might not have intended to leave a message, but there's nothing in the story that challenges the "you can't just do what you love" line and the ending is still supposed to be positive, since after their return to Tokyo all the problems just stop being problems for no reason whatsoever, like the agony is mysteriously gone and all that's left is a decision to keep grinding and passively accept the current state of things. They're portrayed as being happier at the end of the story and no longer struggling, just regularly getting tired at most. This story focuses on interpersonal drama, while ignoring larger factors as if the hardship they had to go through in an attempt to survive was just a fact of life that magically happened itself into existence for no reason and couldn't be challenged. And besides, the real issue is unrelated to their character flaws or any decision they made, since they were forced to respond to an environment they did not create and then implicitly blamed for consequences that were to some degree imposed on them by the economical and political reality of the world they live in, so it's quite shitty that the author just destroys their life and then we're supposed to think that it was their fault or mistake somehow when they did no wrong and were never given a proper chance to build their life how they wanted it to be. "Do something else 90% of the time so that you can maybe spend the rest on what you love" is absolutely a statement that is made and followed by the two of them, which then leads to the aforementioned positive outcome where the anxiety and stress is basically over and the two are somehow no longer affected by the same issues that prompted them to leave Tokyo. Even the "it's a story about failure" point is invalid, because Magia Record is also a story about failure and it absolutely does have a solid message in it. So I don't know how this can be called anything but a politically and morally compromised failure to write a story worth engaging with. I know the author has experiences and reasons and so on, but there are better things to do with writing than bringing people down with you and drowning them in the exact same thing they likely already had to suffer since forever