The Gen X Career Meltdown - The New York Times
it’s the end of work as we knew it<br>and I feel...<br>powerless to fight the technology that we pioneered<br>nostalgic for a world that moved on without us<br>after decades of paying our dues<br>for a payday that never came<br>...so yeah<br>not exactly fine.
Listen to this story with Steven Kurutz’s commentary about why he wrote it.
In “Generation X,” the 1991 novel that defined the generation born in the 1960s and 1970s, Douglas Coupland chronicled a group of young adults who learn to reconcile themselves to “diminishing expectations of material wealth.” Lessness, Mr. Coupland called this philosophy.<br>For many of the Gen X-ers who embarked on creative careers in the years after the novel was published, lessness has come to define their professional lives.<br>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.<br>“I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over,” said Chris Wilcha, a 53-year-old film and TV director in Los Angeles.<br>Talk with people in their late 40s and 50s who once imagined they would be able to achieve great heights — or at least a solid career while flexing their creative muscles — and you are likely to hear about the photographer whose work dried up, the designer who can’t get hired or the magazine journalist who isn’t doing much of anything.<br>Gen X-ers grew up as the younger siblings of the baby boomers, but the media landscape of their early adult years closely resembled that of the 1950s: a tactile analog environment of landline telephones, tube TV sets, vinyl records, glossy magazines and newspapers that left ink on your hands.
When digital technology began seeping into their lives, with its AOL email accounts, Myspace pages and Napster downloads, it didn’t seem like a threat. But by the time they entered the primes of their careers, much of their expertise had become all but obsolete.<br>More than a dozen members of Generation X interviewed for this article said they now find themselves shut out, economically and culturally, from their chosen fields.<br>“My peers, friends and I continue to navigate the unforeseen obsolescence of the career paths we chose in our early 20s,” Mr. Wilcha said. “The skills you cultivated, the craft you honed — it’s just gone. It’s startling.”<br>Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It’s as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted.<br>Karen McKinley, 55, an advertising executive in Minneapolis, has seen talented colleagues “thrown away,” she said, as agencies have merged, trimmed staff and focused on fast, cheap social media content over elaborate photo shoots.<br>“Twenty years ago, you would actually have a shoot,” Ms. McKinley said. “Now, you may use influencers who have no advertising background.”<br>In the wake of the influencers comes another threat, artificial intelligence, which seems likely to replace many of the remaining Gen X copywriters, photographers and designers. By 2030, ad agencies in the United States will lose 32,000 jobs, or 7.5 percent of the industry’s work force, to the technology, according to the research firm Forrester.<br>Last September, Ms. McKinley co-founded Geezer Creative, an ad agency intended to be a haven for Gen X talent. “We’ve been absolutely bombarded by creative folks over 50 — or even approaching 50 — because they’re terrified,” she said.<br>The shedding of jobs and upending of longstanding business models have come at a bad time for Gen X-ers. The cost of living has skyrocketed, especially in coastal cities, and the burdens of mortgages, children’s college tuitions and elder care can be heaviest in middle age. Retirement isn’t that far off, theoretically — but Gen X-ers are less secure financially than baby boomers and lack sufficient retirement savings, according to recent surveys.<br>The old economy still holds sway in a few places — legacy media companies that didn’t get devoured by the internet, film studios that remain flush with cash. But even at those businesses the number of jobs has gone down, and the workers are uneasy. What’s to prevent their little island from going under with the next wave of change?
“The cruel irony is, the thing I perceived as the sellout move is in free-fall.”<br>— Chris Wilcha, film director
‘Death Throes’
Steve Kandell couldn’t believe his luck. Growing up as a fan of punk and alternative rock in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s, he had been an avid reader of music magazines — and now here he was, working for Spin, the Gen-X successor to Rolling Stone.<br>He assigned and edited...