God, It's Brutal Out Here

It’s an ugly scene in the world of professional creatives. Most of the people I know fall into this category — some are in media, some are in television and film, some are graphic designers. Each of our industries carries its own issues, but the stories I hear (and experience) over and over again are largely the same.

There is insufficient work in the fields that once sustained us. The people in control of our livelihoods are obsessed with efficiency, with algorithms, and with squeezing the most product out of the least amount of labor. It’s a systemic problem that feels incredibly, excruciatingly personal when you experience it on a personal level.

There is an excellent story in the Wall Street Journal this weekend about the bottoming-out of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. That world is sort of far from my own, but only on paper. Their issues are different from what I experience in journalism — the union strikes of screenwriters and actors two years ago took people out of the market temporarily and the moguls of their industry only punched down harder in response.

People thought that the professional insecurity would be temporary and would lead to a more sustainable industry. Instead, it’s left people stranded and struggling, unqualified and unconsidered for work in more traditional fields, and with a fading recognition of the person they were in the career they had just a few years ago.

Here’s a simple chart that depicts many factors:

It’s quite difficult to imagine that this chart will ever skyrocket the way it plummeted. We live in a hollowed-out ecosystem where media consolidation and an efficiency mindset means that the breadth of work that once existed in creative fields will never return.

The creative world is cooked. It’s time to find a new job. But without a return to higher education or a trade school, it’s tough to translate creative skills into dependable, routine work.

I know that other industries have undergone their own apocalypses in the past, and for those who made different career choices than we did only to wind up with the same existential hell, I have to say: It’s unfair, it’s impersonal, it’s not nice to know other people have been here in the flames of professional hell.

There’s a robust creative pride in making it into an industry where everyone knows the opportunities are slim and the glamor of the job title outweighs how brutally unlucrative it can be. Now, many of us who had once made it are living the lives our career critics said we would find.

one of us has since found a w-2 job

Multiple people in my life have described the last year or two of their careers as “financially catastrophic.” People are looking for creative ways to stop the bleeding: Using their tech gear or computer skills to work in adjacent industries, running their own personal gig economy, and feeling the bone-breaking squeeze of financial and housing insecurity.

Some people I know are trying to pivot their skills to better suit the coming demands of the industry (i.e., some of them are giving in to AI and working to beat their colleagues who are slower to accept that this may be necessary). People are taking steps backward when they can, but it’s difficult to be hired in an early-career role when the person who is hiring you knows you’ve made a mid-career salary.

Other people I know are trying to dig into the trenches where they once found flakes of gold. They’re scraping and scraping the soil looking for a deeper level that may contain the abundance they once knew. I think those trenches are as dead as the moon that circles around us. Where we thought we’d find revelation, we’ve only found dust.

I’m thinking now of Kaleb Horton, an esteemed magazine writer who died last week. In March of this year, he posted this on Blue Sky:

“Alright: I have to get a job in Los Angeles. I am out of time and my salary goal is low and I’ll do anything. My resume is 10 years of feature writing and four years in film/TV development. Nothing has panned out, not even retail. What do I do?”

Horton had at least one fantastic piece that ran this year about George Harrison and F1, but he was the type of writer who people would want to read on any topic. There are pros and cons to being a generalist versus a specialist, but to those of us who know this industry, we know the only con here is the one that leaves writers like Horton incapable of telling stories that bring our lives meaning, perspective, and entertainment.

What do I do? It’s the question I see running as an undercurrent amongst trained, diligent, passionate people who were optimistic enough to value creativity enough to orient their lives toward its pursuit.

I can speak for myself: When I lost my job at a newspaper this time last year, I thought that I’d find a safety net. I’d spent over a decade in journalism, I live in New York, know seemingly everyone in my field, and I have a wide array of interests. I anticipated finding a staff job in 2025, when the financial year turned over.

Then, when I realized those opportunities no longer existed and I had fumbled away the last full-time job in journalism, I anticipated finding freelance work. I have done this, to an extent. I have written large features for high-profile publications and my year of work is impressive and privileged. But the assignments are hard to get and rarely add up to the rent.

(A common suggestion I’ve heard is to leave New York, the most expensive city in the country. I’ve pursued that a few times, but the reality is that it is easy to be professionally forgotten when you’re out of the epicenter of your industry, and my entire support system and life is here. Leaving for a viable opportunity or time for recuperation is one thing. Getting out because anywhere has to be better than this place isn’t quite working clearly toward a solution.)

The biggest positive outcome I’ve experienced throughout this process has been the demolition of my ego and pride. I think I’m less of an asshole now. Humility is essential when desperation comes to town.

The experience of the lack of work and lack of hope that sufficient work will ever return is impossible to describe to those who don’t live it. My friends in comfortable staff positions in media live in fear of layoffs, yes, but they criticize me when I describe our industry as irreparably broken and no longer a viable career outside of a full-time job.

I didn’t recognize the desperation of the industry when I was in staff jobs, though losing my job five years ago would have been a different story than the one it was when I lost mine last year.

The emotional distortion that comes from spending every second of your day passively (or frantically) worrying about finding work makes it nearly impossible to think clearly.

I’ve watched a broad shift toward class descent amongst my friends in creative industries. Where we were once financially solvent (or something close to it), we’re now crashing toward our class floor. Mid-career creative people who were once able to live alone and spend on small luxuries sometimes are sliding back into shared living situations with other people who are, typically, pretty broke themselves.

There’s a knot in all of this, though: We are, for the most part, people who have the general opportunity to climb the economic ladder again. We’re penniless but privately debating the concept of poverty. Most people I know still use the word “broke.” The prospect of ascension makes it feel inappropriate to call it anything else.

But every time I hear one of these stories that sounds like my own, I watch as the person’s face falls into a state of embarrassment. We were once exceptional, people who beat the creative odds. We’d emerged victorious over the consistent urging to pursue a real career, a real-person job. Quickly, we’ve become a class of cautionary tales. The exceptionalism swings the other way, now.

In many ways, the ubiquity of this struggle makes it easier for me to deal with. Shame is a distorting factor and people tend to keep financial and professional issues to themselves. But it’s an unavoidable topic in my social circles: Answering the basic questions — Where do you work? Where do you live? What do you like to do with your time? — now requires an emotional hoist. Typically, it comes with an explanation of the careers and lives we had in the recent past.

The demolition of my own career that coincides with the demolition of creative industries as a whole has caused me so much shame, recrimination, and existential terror that I’ve been too emotionally compromised to actually figure out how to solve it. Now, accepting that it’s a widespread issue, I feel a bit like: whatever. Look around. The gang’s all here.