The Gen X Career Meltdown

https://archive.ph/8n2iX

Born in 79 so I'm either X or millenial - don't really care. I'm nostalgic about the times when tech was sought out and less pervasive. This recent article[1] really made me nostalic about the "goold ole days".

The "boring" days.

Anyways, I feel less sorry for myself and more empathy for younger generations.

Growing up has always been challenging, before school shootings, and online bullying..

Now you can't escape the call(s) without it implicitly being interpretted as ghosting.

/r

[1]https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/take-oncall-and-shove...

The rampant destruction of jobs, career paths, and education going on right now from the very top feels drastically worse

The post war boom needed people, was a time of great building. That had created past a peak, and we no longer were able to exploit foreign labor markets and resources with quite such abundance by Gen X's day.

But today? We had a fantastic economy. Life was expensive as hell, but at least there were economic prospects, things to do, careers that felt worth doing.

But now, we are chainsawing apart the economy. Political speech-control is forcing companies and universities to behave certain ways, to eliminaye jobs and career paths. Healthcare, sciences, and international diplomacy are being gutted, dismantled entirely. With foreign students to afraid to risk the arbitrary injustice of ICE and potentially being sent to a prison states super prison, universities will lose one of their reliable revenue streams. These are going to massively impact jobs.

This story is a good one to remember, about a change, but the horros happening now are utterly self inflicted, by people aggressively dismantling the New Deal and the post-wsr American Way of Life, eliminating enormous amounts of jobs & the career paths that started these jobs.

Gen X here. This author found the marginally productive people who can't read the room and adjust.

Us punk kids who photocopied their 'zines are doing just fine because we paid attention and moved on and then moved on again.

And the kids say: "skill issue, get gud"

Am I the only one that finds these generation-related articles really stupid? Gen <put letter here> meltdown. There are stupid people in every generation. There are smart people in every generation. If the writer was in the second group, they would stop generalizing and sensationalizing.

This article focuses a good bit of time on folks who work in marketing and journalism and specifically marketing agencies or print houses. Two things to really note there:

1. In Marketing you are usually either climbing the ladder and moving to management or you are out. No one can afford the experienced but expensive graphic designer, photographer, or writer. The skill-sets are too commoditized. And everyone is always looking for new fresh voices / design ideas. Agencies hire cheaper and younger talent that will put in hellish hours because they don’t know any better and don’t have family commitments. There is basically no one in marketing over 55 unless you are the owner or CMO. High burnout and not a kind career to families.

2. Marketing Agencies are a dime a dozen now and the business model is broken. You used to need a marketing agency to coordinate big media buys or to have access to the right people or equipment and the cost barrier and knowledge barrier to do it yourself was huge. So what you did was hire a really good marketing strategist and then they hired agencies to pitch campaign ideas and handle the production work, but the job moves too fast now to do that. The tools are ever cheaper and ever easier to use. Most companies have brought the bulk of the marketing work they do in house and maybe only work with an agency for a brand refresh or for a big nationally aired ad campaign.

Gen X is hitting the age where you are either executive in creative industries or you are out. Some of that is age discrimination, but some of it is just the reality that there is probably someone younger, cheaper, hungrier, and with fresh ideas looking to do the job.

As a member of Gen Z who grew up with cultural artefacts assembled by these people, I feel very much sympathy for their plight. I do not know why but this article gave me a memory of when I would read the funny pages and use my putty egg to take the pictures ink out and stamp them on paper. I remembered the witty computer articles that got me interested in the stuff at first, the thoughtfully made CDR games I played on my G4, the music and television they made that was so enjoyable. It seems with the loss of these people we're losing the tangibility of our culture, with it it's humanity, it's intentionality. Nowadays so many glyphs, stills and media are meant to just be eye-catching and appealing to some shared understanding, versus this identity that so many brands once had, that there was a feeling that someone was trying, granting you some comprehensive vision.

Gen X spent their youth rejecting their parents’ world—only to watch it vanish and get replaced by something even emptier.

Wild. I've heard of the end of e.g. journalism for years, since Craigslist... but as a software developer I thought I'd be immune to these kinds of shifts. Never thought the (career) reaper would come for me, haha.

I have some friends in Hollywood... they say there's nothing left, and not even a side-gig in Albuquerque left to pay the bills.

Been looking for a job, but in this downturn there's nothing available. After the economy recovers I have ageism and LLMs to look forward to. My own career mistakes as well—they were teaching fortran in school and I wanted to hack on Netscape for pay instead. ;-) Seemed like the right call at the time, but turned out dead wrong.

So, “previously a shoot would cost 5-figure […] now a kid can do it for $500”.

“Soon we will no longer need musicians, due to rise of AI”.

“If a director can do it with AI writing I want X, Y, Z”

A strange pattern. In all three cases, are we getting a 1:1 quality or we are so lost in age of cheap quality that those does not matter?

I for one would not buy anything or pay a subscription fee, where the photo or the music was AI generated. If the creative content I want does not have a humane touch, it is not worth to me.

Also, while we are bemoaning the loss of fields and jobs, behind the veil lurks the age of wrong incentives. In previous era, when my parents were pursuing a career, a record breaking profit meant more expansion, more investment, more debt and new pursuit of possibilities. Now we live in a moral bankrupt feudal age, where despite record profits, layoffs and merger+shutdown are performed like a crazy to maximize stock price and top level bonuses. It all is just regression of society’s feudal lords too deep in greed to care about the future.

No one thinks anymore, here is my product, it is so cool and ground breaking, we must layoff more employees to also chase that another fad which will likely fail in a year or two but I get good bonuses and move onto another place before the consequences come due but then more layoffs can be done to pay for my mistakes. But eventually if enough people are being laid off, who will buy my products? How will my target audience pay for this thing if they don’t have a job? The economy does not work if the gains are not cycled again back to society and common folks.

Also welcome to the age of media control and mass manufacturing consent(thanks to Noam Chomsky for the concept), when enough media words and campaign can be bought to tell the feudal overlords what to do and what is the new trend in societal destruction in order to maximize their billion bonus packages in short term and leave the consequences to the future.

/rant off

This is just talking about how technology has consolidated industries that were before not consolidated: journalism, photography, etc. This same issue affects Gen Y, Z, A. I guess GenX had a career in those things because they existed when GenX was at working age. Gen Y, Z, A never had the opportunity to be a journalist, photographer in the same way GenX did in their youth or the Boomers or Tweeters had.

FWIW, I'm GenX and we all saw this coming in the 90s. I'm lucky enough to happen to have interest in tech, so I'm still alive, career wise. It was ugly for non-tech people even in the mid 90s. Hopefully on-shoring will be a thing again soon. Globalization + Tech really kicked the shit out of the US workforce.

Good luck everyone.