"Whatever you do, don't read this..."

This was the subject line of an email I got from the big homie Chad Dundas the other day. He knew what he was doing. Contained in that email was a link to this New York Times story about the dwindling professional lives of Gen X creatives.

If you, like me, felt like you saw this story (or sometimes just reactions to it) posted all over social media last week, congratulations, that means you know people who are old enough to have owned a Game Boy but also interesting enough that they didn’t become realtors.

(Get fucked, Nintendo Switch)

The gist of it is, 40-50 somethings in America who work in creative-ish fields – advertising, journalism, publishing, film/TV, photography/design, etc. – have been watching the ground disappear beneath their feet. It’s been happening for a while now, but the rate of collapse seems to have picked up a lot in the last five to ten years. It’s not just that the jobs are few and hard to find. It’s that these industries are ceasing to exist in any recognizable form.

This is especially jarring for a certain age bracket. Partly that’s because lot of us went to college back when people still believed it was the magic escalator to the middle class. There we were taught by professors who based their instruction on their own knowledge of in a world that’s gone now.

I remember taking a class at the illustrious San Diego State University (go Aztecs) with a professor who thought we were all pretty lucky to get to learn from him, a man with experience in BOTH types of journalism careers – print and broadcast. Which is to say, he’d been an editor at the San Diego Union-Tribune and had also been a producer at a local news station. Both of those careers have mostly gone to shit. The things he had to teach us about any of that in 2001, based primarily on his experiences from 1976-1998, are pretty much useless now.

Yet here we are, still in the workforce, in the prime age range for buying houses and saving for retirement (ha!) and raising children who need braces.

That’s the other kick in the teeth about the timing of this grand economic shift. Your forties and fifties are supposed to be some prime earning years, especially if you spent your twenties and thirties working your way up in your field. Then the field turns into a death swamp and, well, fuck. What then?

It’s interesting, though, that the article chose to focus on Gen X’s experience of this. The implication is that this generation of people (though also probably the “elder millennials” who are in their mid-to-late-thirties) occupy a unique position in this period of late capitalist malaise. I guess it’s kind of true. In a way.

A lot of the older generation managed to hold on to the edge of the cliff until retirement age. They might also be the last generation of Americans for whom the promises of pensions and social security and a soft retired life at the end of the rainbow actually came true. Now they’re running the government and trying like hell to pull that ladder up after them.

And the younger generation? Well shit, they’re worse off than all of us. But there’s this bizarre sense that it’s somehow not so bad because they never had a chance to expect better. I mean, yes, we’ve been handing them bowls of shit to eat since they were doing mass shooter drills in their schools. But at least we never told them it would stop as they grew up with the worst parts of the internet beamed directly into their brains.

It’s those of us in the middle who are really feeling sorry for ourselves. We were given certain hoops to jump through. We were told there’d be a treat on the other side. For a while, maybe, there were. Then one day we jumped and, what the fuck, no more treats?? If not for the hip dysplasia (staying with the dog metaphor for now) and the teeth dulled by age and lack of use we might freak out and bite somebody over this.

But the other caveat from that article, in addition to the specific generation stuff, was the focus on creative industries. It’s not chefs watching their career fields vanish. It’s not carpenters or nurses. It’s the writers and designers and creators of various stripes.

As a person who’s spent almost his entire adult life in sports media, scratching and clawing to hang onto a dwindling square of it, I felt this. But I also have to admit that I chose this. I made a conscious choice to pursue this. It wasn’t because it seemed like a stable and safe career path. Even 20 years ago that wasn’t true, and it probably shouldn’t shock me that it has only gotten less true.

That doesn’t mean I can’t still wake up at 3 a.m. worrying about imminent industry collapse. I assure you, I am entirely capable of staring up at the ceiling while picturing a bleak future in which I’m draped in rags, asking people on the street if they can spare some cash in exchange for 2,000 words on the history of the light heavyweight title. (Though one of the best pieces of pithy Instagram screenshot advice I’ve ever received is that you should never believe anything you tell yourself about your own life between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.)

Once dawn breaks and my rational brain clocks back in for duty, I try to remind myself of two things: 1) Creatives aren’t alone in this. I know bookkeepers and software engineers who are feeling the cold, robotic breath of AI on the backs of their necks and they’re freaking out too, even if they never really liked their jobs to begin with, and 2) Even if it’s really as bad as it seems and the end is actually fucking nigh for your career field, maybe be grateful you got to do it for as long as you did.

Because a lot of younger people didn’t, even though a lot of them would probably been just as good at it. You could have been selling insurance or stocking shelves this whole time. And wasn’t that the thing you were trying to avoid? When you went into this shit in the first place, it wasn’t because it looked like the safest harbor. It was because you wanted to at least try for a career that meant something to you – and you got that. You don’t know how much longer it will last, but neither does anyone else. Not really.

The other thing that brings me comfort is when I look around at the other creatives I know and see how many of them have managed to sustain and channel their creative energy into something even as powerful forces conspire to destroy it. They all have their own projects and passions. Stuff that’ll probably never make any money but so fucking what? Is that all you wanted out of your life? Of course it isn’t. If it was, you would have gone into banking or some shit. Instead you wanted to create and to care, and so you did. They can stop paying you for it but they can’t stop you from doing it unless you let them.

I think sometimes of a line from the big homie Rainer Maria Rilke, who met with his share of career setbacks but kept on trucking in his own specific German poet kind of way:

But those dark, deadly, devastating ways

how do you bear them, suffer them?

– I praise.