Not Fine, Thanks for Asking: Gen X, Creative Work, and the Quiet Collapse

There’s a line that’s been bouncing around my head since Friday, when The New York Times dropped their article:

“Just when they should be at their peak, experienced workers in creative fields find that their skills are all but obsolete.”

The headline? The Gen X Career Meltdown.

Cute.

Accurate.

Devastating.

It’s a piece that hits with the force of a slow-motion car crash — and if you’re Gen X and have ever worked in media, design, advertising, film, photography, music, publishing, or whatever we used to call “creative work”… it probably felt like reading your own obit.

For me, it wasn’t hypothetical. I recently lost my job at Condé Nast. I’ve been building digital experiences since 1997 — back when websites were coded like mixtapes and dial-up made everything sound haunted. I was there for the rise of the web, the birth of streaming, the social media gold rush, the content era. I worked on products that reached millions.

And then one day, like a lot of folks in my generation, I found myself… no longer at the table.

No big drama. No grand betrayal. Just the quiet erosion of value. The kind of slow fade that happens when the work you’ve done for decades doesn’t carry the same weight it used to — not with industry trends leaning toward offshoring talent, downsizing teams to skeleton crews, and flirting heavily with AI as the new creative department.

It’s not personal, we’re told.

It’s just efficiency.

The Efficiency Myth

That word — efficiency — is doing a lot of damage these days. Especially now that there’s a federal agency named after it.

In case you missed it, there’s now something called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. No joke. It was created by executive order in January 2025, handed over to Elon Musk, and tasked with “modernizing” federal agencies by slashing jobs, outsourcing work, and replacing experience with code wherever possible.

Sound familiar?

DOGE has already begun cutting into the ranks of long-serving federal workers — many of them Gen X — and pushing out veterans and career professionals in the name of streamlining. Because apparently, institutional memory and real-world skill are too expensive now.

We’re watching the same thing happen at the federal level that’s already happened across every creative and knowledge industry we once called home.

The Fade-Out

I mean, this is the same generation that got into these fields when they meant something. We weren’t chasing money — we were chasing impact. Music journalism, ad creative, photography, magazine publishing — these were vocations. Cultures. Scenes. You were in it because you loved it. Because it mattered.

And now, as the NYT article outlines, we’re looking around and realizing the industries we helped shape are ghost towns. We stuck around for the long haul, paid our dues, kept our heads down, learned the new tools, adapted — and somehow still wound up being the first ones cut.

What the article gets right — and what a lot of younger folks may not fully grasp — is that Gen X wasn’t promised much. We weren’t raised on “follow your dreams.” We were latchkey kids who learned early how to self-soothe and make do. But we still believed that if we kept showing up, we’d matter. Maybe not in big, loud, showy ways. But enough to stay in the room.

Now? We’re being quietly asked to leave. Nicely. With a cupcake.

And a severance package that stops before the panic does.

What makes it worse is that it’s not even burnout.

It’s grief.

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The Quiet Collapse

What makes this stage of things so hard isn’t just the financial hit.

It’s the slow-motion disappearance of everything we were trained to be — and the realization that no one’s coming to explain it, fix it, or even acknowledge it.

In The Autumn Inventory, I wrote about “sorting the legacy from the clutter,” trying to decide what to hold onto when the world keeps telling you to let go. That wasn’t just about physical stuff — it was about identity. Purpose. Value.

And this?

This is what it looks like when your career becomes part of that inventory. When the things that once defined you — the job title, the project list, the network, the relevance — start to feel like boxes in the attic you’re not sure you can carry down anymore.

In Still Fixing the Damn Printer, I joked about being the one who keeps everything running while getting none of the credit. But that’s the thing: we were the bridge. We carried the old system forward while learning the new one on the fly — patched the damn printer while onboarding ourselves to Slack.

Now we’re told we’re too slow, too expensive, too analog. And meanwhile, the industries we helped build — the ones that ran on passion and patience — are being stripped for parts. It’s not just us losing jobs. It’s us losing our language. The systems, rituals, and creative spaces we came up in have been paved over by platforms optimized for noise.

It’s not rage that defines this moment. It’s something quieter.

We’re not demanding the spotlight back. We just want to not be erased.

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So yeah.

Not fine.

Not broken, either.

Just standing here, middle-aged, media-trained, emotionally stunted, and trying to figure out the next move before the severance runs out.

I don’t have a tidy ending for this.

But I do have this blog. And if you’re still reading, maybe you’re in the same boat — drifting, but not sunk.

Still making stuff. Still telling stories.

Still showing up.

Because Gen X always did know how to survive a collapse.

We just didn’t expect it to be our own.

And retirement?

That’s starting to look less like Florida and more like learning how to say, “Welcome to Walmart” with a straight face.

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