The evaporation of the Gen X creative professional
Market forces? Absolutely. But we were also misled into believing that we earned the luxury of our high expectations, like it was our birthright to be a critic or designer or documentary film maker.
Here’s something I haven’t said in a while: The New York Times recently published an article that really resonated with me.
Entitled The Gen X Career Meltdown, the article quotes multiple Gen X’ers working in a variety of creative industries who have seen their professional prospects evaporate, just as they should have been hitting their “peak earning years.”
The Times have zeroed in on my niche. Reading it, I laughed ruefully at the irony of this topic, of all topics, being published in the same newspaper that once employed me, before my own journalism career evaporated two decades ago. It made me feel like a hipster who’s followed a band for years before they hit the big time. I flamed out of my Gen X career prospects 20 years before The Times said it was cool.
Almost every person I went to university with and then socialised with in through my 20’s and into my thirties has gone through some version of this story. Here’s a sampling of the professions of people I was close with in my youth: media people (CNN, NPR, the Times, AP); graphic designers, textile designers, industrial designers, visual artists — several of whom went to one of the most famous art schools in north America; photo editors and photographers; film people; academics; web designers. The number of friends I had who did not go into creative-based fields are barely out of single digits — and most of them went into teaching kids.
Quite a few of my friends did very well. But even those who did well were keenly aware of an ever-present danger of losing their footing on the slippery ladder and disappearing into the void. We collectively had a sense, that we were not doing as well as we felt we should be. We ached to be recognised for our talents and also get good benefits and vacation time. We were almost every one of us economically insecure and demonstrably worse off financially than our parents generation.
What surprises me is that it has taken this long for the dismal job prospects of now-middle aged creatives to make the news. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been told how terrible it is out there, how much easier it was just the decade prior. In the ’80’s I was told that it was much easier it was to get into university in the 1970’s. In the ’90’s I was told how much easier it was to get a prestige industry job in the 1980’s.
And it’s not just arts grads. When I finished university in 1998, I considered law school. A lawyer friend of my father’s, who had take a case all the way to the Supreme Court, met me for dinner at a cheap restaurant in Chinatown one evening and wearily told me not to go near the law. It was terrible, she said. Everything about her seemed exhausted, demoralised, and fed up. It’s almost impossible to get hired, she told me, unless you wanted to go corporate — which I definitely did not want to do. It was very hard to make money if you wanted to practice for high-minded reasons. I heeded her warning.
In 1999, when I got hired by The New York Times, I thought I had won the jackpot. It was a truly great job and I was excited to go to work every day. But the catch was that I was a lowly clerk. The old hands would tell me all the time, had I arrived just a few years earlier, being a clerk was a clear path to being hired as a Times reporter — which was everyone’s goal — but by the time I arrived, those days were gone. I would have to go to a small paper in some Podunk media market to ‘pay my dues.’ I did precisely that. In 2002, I moved to Rhode Island and for two years I covered town zoning board meetings and local elections, got scoops — then never got hired by another newspaper again.
I was the outlier among my friend group at the time, the first one to fall out of my chosen field and spend years in the professional wilderness. It was immensely painful for me, made all the more bewildering by the fact that I was regularly told how great I was at said profession, and the fact that I had strong, relevant experience and connections.
So I have a lot of sympathy — and I mean a lot — for the people interviewed in the Times article. I understand what they are going through. I’m grateful that I went through it then, and not now. I wrote about this nearly 4 years ago, shortly after starting this Substack:
Benjamin Studebaker has found an elegant and simple way to explain our destabilising social moment. He points out that professional jobs, which require expensive university degrees, are no longer the ticket to economic stability and prestige that they once were. An ever-smaller group of professionals has managed to maintain a foothold on the career ladder, and Studebaker calls them “rump professionals.” Below them are their peers and fellow grads who did not. He calls these the “fallen professionals.”
I was one of the fallen. My past career and its changed trajectory — downward— transformed my political perspective and renewed my interest in class-based divisions. The lack of strong class analysis in the mainstream cultural narrative caused me to lose faith in the intellectual elites that I once trusted. These elites embraced shallow and misguided identity politics with greater and greater intensity, while demonising those who didn’t conform to this new ideology.
Of course, the Times article does not mention the additional horror of DEI commissars, having to work alongside woke young people, and anti-white and anti-male hiring in the workplace — which I’m sure is also making it harder for Gen X’ers to work. It’s been widely noted that today’s newsrooms are hotbeds of toxic ideologies, and the same can be said of every single creative and academic field that I am aware of. I think well-meaning liberals who went along with this destructive movement will have great difficulty ever reckoning with just how awful it was.
But none of this is about a particular individual’s experience, as poignant and revealing as that may be. Demoralisation resulting from crushed expectations and financial insecurity is a late 20th century phenomenon shared by most university educated people, and is a central factor in both our cultural moment, and our cultural decline.
This is a problem that can be parsed in many different ways. But for me it boils down to that saying: hard men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. Gen X were at the tail end of the first part of the configuration. Our grandparents’ generation were made up of the hard men who defeated the dictators of World War Two and then created two decades of prosperity for their children, our parents, who then used it to find self-fulfilment and to reject traditional values. They also gave us expectations based on their own economic realities, expectations that were no longer justifiable by the late 1980’s. Now, the economic prospects for Gen Z coming out of expensive colleges with liberal arts degrees are far worse than they were even for us. Yet the expectation inflation rages on.
I contend that we (Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z humanities graduates and indie kids) were enticed into working for industries that were never really sustainable, but Boomer Pied Pipers pretended that there would be no end to the need for scribes and critics and tastemakers and deep thinkers. We bought into it because, I mean, who doesn’t want to be cool?
We were misled into believing that we somehow earned the luxury of our high expectations, like it was our birthright to be a music critic for the Village Voice or the NME, or to be paid money to make conceptual dance art that nobody buys tickets to. As a hard-charging newspaper editor once told me about her deeply unhappy child, we were ‘all made into the stars of our own little movies’. We went to theatre camp, interned at publishing houses, made feminist zines, studied puppet theatre, only to grow up and find out that market forces don’t give a shit about our really interesting take on modernism’s influence on jazz, or our academic, ‘videographic’ critique of art house film classics. This stuff ceased to be economically viable before we ever entered the job market. It never should have gotten this far.
And boy am I glad that career of mine never panned out.
When I was at a small liberal arts college in the 90s and considering a career in academia, I remember hearing conflicting things about the job market. From the same elder Gen-Xer who was my advisor, I heard that tenure track jobs were no longer guaranteed with a PhD but also that there would be many open slots on the horizon due to hordes of soon-to-be retiring Boomers. I said, "F*#* it" and went the academic route (literature) only for college administrations to turns those tenure track lines into adjunct positions. And so be it, I entered adjunct hell with everybody elbowing each other as we climb up the greasy ladder. Now I say that I wouldn't be sad if they DOGEd much of academia out of existence because it's not really serving anyone anymore beyond the administrators. My stepfather is a retired union HVAC commercial installation guy, and he said he could get me in the trade back in the late 90s. I seriously considered it, and now I wish I had went that route.
I read an article some years back about a guy named Omar the plumber. He wanted to be a fire inspector and went to a 2-year college to get his qualification, but later found out the hiring was done from within the fire departments. He then went on youtube and found plumbers were in short supply. He's doing well. The "market forces" you mentioned will determine what and how much are people willing to pay one to do. Then there's the problem with lack of long-term stability in employment. My grandfather was an insurance salesman, and he had pins for 5, 10, 15, 25, all the way to 45 years with the company. I believe the lack of commitment between employer/employee is a major factor in mental health problems today.