Fellow GenX Creatives: We’re Not Alone

It’s hard to talk to anyone except other GenX writers and creatives about career turbulence, pitfalls, and entire teams or departments being laid off, though unfortunately, federal workers are now getting a taste of this kind of professional uncertainty. People outside the creative industries sympathize, however they don’t entirely understand, and how could they? How do you explain this Rust Belt experience in media; how the Internet and now AI have completely, indelibly altered your career, that you have 30 years of experience but your income has tanked; that freelance word rates have remained unchanged since the Clinton administration; that you earned more at age 26 working at a dot-com and being handed fistfuls of stock options that you had no idea what to do with, but thankfully you did smart things like pay off student loans and invest.

There’s loss. There’s arrogance. There’s anxiety. There’s grief. There’s need.

Career is identity for so many of us. It is purpose, so when your industry bellies up, what do you do? Who are you, and who do you want to be?

All of this is captured in a fantastic New York Times article about GenX creatives feeling their careers bottom out that I happened to read hours after I walked out of an AWP panel last Friday, March 28.

So, allow me to back up a few hours here and lay out the day, because it was a fair amount of career disillusionment, as well as relief, all in one afternoon.

I walked in late to a panel about pitching Hollywood. There was one moderator and two panelists. One panelist is someone I’m going to call Accomplished Old White Guy, who told the audience what he thought was a funny story about how he pitched a project that he eventually got. He said he told producers how he was a middle brother, had to navigate complicated family dynamics, the funny shenanigans that ensued, I’m assuming in that “Malcolm In The Middle” kind of way, and he got the job. “Fake it til you make it,” which is a motto embraced by many in Hollywood and elsewhere, and I get it. Capitalism is rough. Everyone wants in.

And yet.

Accomplished Old White Guy then admitted he has no brothers, and that he used the stories of his friends to engage producers. “Exaggeration,” he called it. He laughed. Audience members laughed. I silently seethed because the truth is he was on a panel joking about lying.

How many non-white, non-guys could have gotten away with that in what is basically lying during a job interview because for those who don’t know, that’s what pitching is: selling the idea and hopefully landing the job.

I got up and walked out. Goddess energy, warrior energy, you name it; I was fired up. I opened the door and a middle-aged blonde woman was walking in; a sister from another mother. Maybe she’s chasing the dream at 50, too. I said to her, “This guy has no integrity.” That’s all I said. Her eyes went wide. The expression on her face was “WTF is going on?” I exited the room. I mean, it’s Aries season, right? I just had a birthday, and being an Aries means not tolerating the status quo.

A few moments later, this woman approached me in the hallway as I was checking the schedule. She asked what happened. I told her. She looked disgusted, like she immediately got it because women have to work harder to get any gig. We just do.

Back home from the Los Angeles Convention Center, I read this article about GenX creatives losing work, losing income, losing their sense of identity, and all the grief and confusion that follows. I know this road very well. The third paragraph of this piece, written by Steven Kurutz, was the equivalent of the best therapy session you could have, where you go through half a box of tissues bawling with release because finally someone acknowledges something you’ve been voicing and carrying and losing sleep over for years. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this seen:

“If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.”

What’s described in this article is 100 percent my journey. I began my career as a newspaper journalist. I wrote for magazines and dot-coms and then pivoted to copywriting. I freelanced for CondeNast and earned $2 per word. I freelanced for Newsweek and earned $1 per word. I freelanced for U.S. News & World Report (online) and earned 25 cents per word. Freelancing can be lucrative but you are at the whims of industry swings far beyond your control. The instability is exhausting.

At my staff writing jobs back when staff writing jobs existed, my bosses were old white men who drank too much, complained about their wives and children to subordinates, who commented on female co-workers outfits, who said things that would now get them reprimanded or possibly fired by HR, who took the young men reporters out to lunch to groom them while the young women were put on night shifts and not given much to do. Remember Mad Men? Nothing about those office scenes felt fictionalized to me.

Continuing on the old white guy path, my college professors were mostly old white men who had enjoyed illustrious careers in newspaper journalism. They repeatedly gave the same advice on how to build a portfolio, never once considering that one day, a platform would matter more than a portfolio or that technology would write better poetry than some English department hopefuls. And sometimes I bristle when I recall my professors’ dismissiveness and arrogance toward anything that wasn’t the path that had made their own careers. And sometimes I think, how could any of my professors have known how big the Internet would become, what AI would do, that the industry that afforded their retirement would no longer exist? Did the people of Pompeii know what would happen when Vesuvius erupted? Again, there’s only so much we can predict, and as I’ve learned from L.A.’s love for astrology, most of it is off.

It would be easy to slide into professional bitterness: the white male privilege, rapidly-changing technology (though isn’t that the very nature of technology—that it moves fast?), or this didn’t happen, that didn’t happen, this publication closed while I was pitching them, that publication fired half its staff and ohmygod, this website has zero budget. I grew up in rural upstate New York, a 10-minute walk from a slaughterhouse, where I would buy green glass Coke bottles for 25 cents and see pigs dangling from the hooks in the background. There are many times when this is how my career felt.

And yet.

While a smooth, linear career might have been preferable, I have learned resilience and how to pivot and more importantly, how to advocate. I have written about my zigzag career here, and maybe, like others quoted in this New York Times article, my destiny was never meant to be linear. Maybe I’m supposed to witness, write, and speak up against bullshit. I’m glad I told that woman entering the panel what I thought. I can’t and don’t and won’t lie during job interviews, or well, anywhere. I’m an Aries, and the goddess-honest truth is that lying makes my stomach churn. I can’t do it, it causes side effects, and I won’t tell anyone I’m a troubled middle child to get the gig. A favorite professor of mine once told me he thought I would’ve clicked with Che Guevera. I would love for this to be true.

Working as a teacher emphasizes advocacy and integrity. Writers, I get it; there’s less to go around and we’re all hungry to have our words and ideas devoured. Who doesn’t want to be professionally valued? I love having readers, and I love having readers comment on my writing, the good, the bad, the in-between. And, I love being in the classroom trying to encourage 12-year-olds to want more for themselves, to grow up to be the kinds of professionals who don’t feel compelled to lie on a panel and who genuinely desire to lift all boats and who don’t want to slash entire departments due to budget cuts. Moving between these two worlds, teaching and writing, has restored a balance I greatly needed. Teaching is way more than a biweekly paycheck and employer-funded health insurance. I actually give a shit–despite the Monday through Friday 5:15 A.M. alarm. There are so many creative industry GenXers who have done similar pivots and have found a path equally rewarding.

All that said, among the many things I appreciated about Kurutz’s reporting was the acknowledgement of grief, of seeing something many of us spent decades of blood, sweat, tears, sexism and all kinds of isms building no longer being an option–not because we weren’t talented enough but because the infrastructure no longer exists. And that’s something I hope to teach my students going forward: be flexible; be ready to pivot; be inclusive; think wide. Yes, the future is yours, and yes, the future will always, always surprise you. Be ready to speak up.