← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
How Are Gen-Xers Reinventing Their Careers?
00:25:04
New York Times reporter Steven Kurutz talks about his recent article, “The Gen X Career Meltdown.”
Loading summary
Transcript42 lines
- [00:00]
Progressive Insurance Ad
All of it is supported by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name youe Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match Limited by state law not available in all states.
- [00:24]
Stephen Kurtz
Listener Supported WNYC Studios.
- [00:38]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Gen X is sometimes called the Forgotten Generation. Sandwiched between Boomers and millennials, there are simply fewer of us. We are between the analog and digital natives. We're used to the old way as of doing things, but have adapted to the new. This clip on Instagram from a user known as Mrs. Murphy sums it up.
- [01:02]
Mrs. Murphy
Child, when somebody thinks you are a young person in these streets, I appreciate it. But I am Cabbage Patch Kid, Rainbow Brite, Etch A Sketch Old I am Rotary dial transferred into a touch phone with that little spiral cord on it that used to lose its curl pattern after a while. Telephone Old I am. My parents had an answering machine. Oh I am. We had to use the white pages to find our friend's parents name to find their phone number. Old I am. My Little Pony Old I am. Your grandmother had plastic all over her couch.
- [01:36]
Alison Stewart
Old Gen Xers are decades into careers and finding that the workforce is rapidly shifting in a way that hasn't been felt before. My next guest is New York Times reporter Stephen Kurtz. He has written an article titled the Gen X Career Meltdown. In the story he reflects on how Gen Xers, especially those in creative fields, have been forced to face the changes in technology and industry wide upheavals and the fall of print media and the rise of social and on and on. Many of the people he spoke to have had to pivot away from stable day jobs to gig work or shift into new fields completely in their 50s. Stephen Kurtz, welcome.
- [02:16]
Stephen Kurtz
Thanks for having me.
- [02:17]
Alison Stewart
Are you a Gen Xer who had to reinvent yourself? We want to hear from you. Have you changes in technology made your job obsolete or forced you quickly to learn new skills? Have you stayed in your industry or have you had to leave? Where did you go? Call us or text us at 2124-3396-9221-2433 wnyc. You can call in and join the conversation or you can text us at that number. 212-43396. Your article focuses on Gen Xers and creative fields and media. You specify magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic, Divine graphic design, advertising Music, film and tv. Why did you want to look at that slice of Gen X workers?
- [03:05]
Stephen Kurtz
Well, I suppose because I know it. Yeah, I, I, I am Gen X. I started my career in magazines in the late 90s. And you know, what I noticed as I got, you know, in my 40s is that I either knew people who, you know, had gone through these struggles or, you know, had had acquaintances or in, you know, in my, in my case, you know, questioned it myself. I mean, I'm a features reporter at the New York Times, which is a wonderful job, but there are very few of those jobs left. And you know, every time another wave of technology, a wave of disruption happens, you know, you worry if you're going to be next, you're going to lose your job and what will you do, you know, in your 40s or 50s, how would you reinvent yourself? So, you know, I saw it all around me and I felt like there was this kind of quiet grief happening as people who had dedicated the bulk of their adult lives to learning a craft saw these industries get disrupted and saw it being very hard to make a living and had to figure out what to do in middle age.
- [04:27]
Caller
The texts are starting to come in. This says, I'm a 57 year old interior designer with 25 years of experience.
- [04:34]
Alison Stewart
I've been unemployed for a year.
- [04:36]
Caller
I see positions for people with less experience at shockingly low pay, but upper level jobs seem to be few and far between. I've seen director positions get downgraded to manager, I assume due to salary. If this trend doesn't shift, there'll be a huge gap in experienced designers working to make our environments more beautiful and more safe. Do you have a response to that?
- [05:00]
Stephen Kurtz
Well, yeah, I mean, you know, I did. Interior design was not one of the fields I thought about. But you know, what that text brings up are a few things. One is there's ageism, you know, and ageism happens in all, it can happen in all fields. But there's something about creative careers particularly that, you know, youth culture is prized and you know, it's difficult. You know, when you're in your 40s and 50s, you're competing with a 25 year old, a 30 year old. Employers are, you know, can pay them much less. And now there's this sort of analog digital divide which you talked about at the top, where, you know, if I'm an employer, why don't I hire a 25 year old who's grown up with social media? It's intuitive to them. And Even if the 50 year old you know, understands TikTok, you know, just as well. There's a perception that the 25 year old would, would get TikTok and social media and marketing, you know, and AI, you know, much better than an older worker. And so it's, it's very difficult to be out of work and to try to find a job. And also, you know, one other thing, a lot of creative careers are in big cities like New York and Los Angeles and the cost of living is skyrocketed. And so you have this moment where all these professions are being disrupted and you have people trying to make a living in very expensive places. And so that makes it, that adds a complication to, you know, reinventing yourself.
- [06:37]
Caller
I'm speaking to New York Times reporter Stephen Kurtz. He's written about an article called the Gen X Career Meltdown. We'd like to hear from you. Are you a Gen Xer who's had to reinvent yourself? Have changes in technology made your job obsolete or forced you to quickly learn new skills? Tell us us about how you're surviving in your industry. Our Phone number is 2124-3396-9221-2433 wnyc. You can text to us at that number or you can call in and join the conversation on air. You open your article with a philosophy that comes from Douglas Copeland. The philosophy is called lessness. What is lessness?
- [07:17]
Stephen Kurtz
Lessness is just, he, he sort of lays this out in his novel Generation X, which gave, gave our generation the, you know, its title, its moniker. And the idea of lessness is that people sort of resign themselves to diminishing material wealth. And in the early 90s, that might have been seen as well. There was a recession in the early 90s, you know, that's one thing, but it also might have been seen as maybe a chosen way. You know, there was this idea that Gen X were slackers and, you know, you, you might sort of go to Europe and hang out in cafes and work on a novel in your early 20s rather than joining a corporation or get a job as a barista or something. You know, going to work and trying to make money right out of school was not necessarily the thing to do for a certain segment of Gen X for kind of like, you know, cool creative people. Now, Lessness, I sort of pivot and I talk about how, you know, lessness defines your professional life and your career. If you're in one of these professions. I mean, let's just take an example, let's look at magazines, you know, the world That I know I came from magazines before I went to the Times, you know, the ad page, the ads went away, you know, when the Internet came along and social media. And so there are less ad pages, the budget shrunk, the staff shrunk, everything shrinks. You know, the copy editors and editors and staff writers. You know, I worked at a magazine where there were, you know, there's a whole layer of that, you know, career and all those people have been jettisoned. You, you know, the, the, in order to survive, the magazine publishers are trying to do more with less or trying to do the same amount with less. Even at Conde Nast, you know, which was seen as the pinnacle and the place where, you know, the expense accounts, you know, were unlimited and the town cars and the, and the martini lunches flowed, you know, has done a lot of belt tightening, layoffs, you know, and the word rate for a journalist in the 90s was maybe 50 cents to a dollar per word. Went back when I was freelancing in the late 90s, early 2000 reasons. It's the same today, 25 years ago. The cost of everything has gone up. And yet the, the cost of your work, when you compare it to, you know, the price of living has actually gone down. So, you know, this idea of lessness, you're, you're just sort of hanging on in a lot of these fields and, and, you know, trying to get by.
- [10:10]
Caller
Let's talk to Matthew, who's calling in from Harlem. Hey Matthew, thanks for taking the time to call, all of it.
- [10:16]
Matthew
Hello. Hi. So first of all, I have to now actually donate to wnyc because I made a promise to myself if I actually talked about Gen X instead of the other younger generations, that I would finally make a donation. So I'll be doing that. But what I wanted to say was our generation is the generation where employers stopped being loyal to employees with things like pensions and just that you continued working. You could expect to have, if you were good at your job, you could expect to have a job with that employer for years and years to come. People who worked for one or two companies their entire life. And we were the generation where right to work and that nonsense happened. And there was absolutely no expectation that the employer had any sort of loyalty to the employees.
- [11:08]
Caller
Matthew, thanks for calling and go to wnyc.org to donate.
- [11:13]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk to. I think it's Tania or Tanya from Harlem.
- [11:18]
Tanya
Yes, hi, this is Tanya. I love this topic. I'm so passionate about it. I read that article and just so you know, it's been sort of a buzz around my Gen X friends. We're all passing it to each other. Actually commented in the opinion section in the article that here's the thing that's so special about Gen X. And I actually worked in magazines in the video production side. So I started feeling a lot of this and the layoff and all of that. Actually one of Conde's competitors, which I won't mention, like back in the 2015, 2016. So it had already started and I think, you know, we were all sort of like, well, every year there's layoff every year. But in 2018, the bigger transition for me as a Gen Xer was all of a sudden I was the oldest person on my team and here I am in this digital media. Like I didn't grow up in digital media, you know. So all of a sudden I felt like my voice got a little bit smaller. But here's what I will say about our generation that I love. We are creative, we're innovators. We had time to imagine, time to problem solve and troubleshoot. So what I said in my comments in that article was we have to tap into our power and a lot of us are raising gen zers who are tech savvy. My son is into music and audio production. So like I watch what he's doing and I'm really trying to like sort of get ahead of this because we can spend so much time talking about how we're like left out. I refuse to be left out as a woman and a woman of color who grew up in media and in this industry. So I think we all, we know how to reinvent and a lot of that has to do with tapping into our community. And I'm starting to see friends create events, create zooms and get on. Especially in my Women in Reality TV Facebook group, people are trying to problem solve and that's what we do really well in this industry.
- [13:07]
Alison Stewart
Thanks for calling in. She's really interesting point, Stephen. I always say that Gen Xers like, we have good taste. We don't need people to like, I see people standing in line because they saw it on Instagram. Like I can figure that out for myself.
- [13:22]
Stephen Kurtz
Yeah, you know, I love this and it's, it's true. I mean there is a resilience and I didn't want the piece to be Woe is Gen X. You know, there's such a resilience to Gen X and the, and, and the subjects I talk to for the story, you know, they are in the process of Trying to figure it out. I mean, the piece sort of lays out the issue or the problem and then it says, it asks, what now? What do you do? You know, do you leave the high cost city and move to some place where real estate and cost of living is more affordable and continue to pursue your art? Do you take a safe corporate job that's maybe not as creative as you're accustomed to, but you know, it has health benefits in a 401k and you ride that out to retirement. Do you do something else? The caller just talked about sort of coming up with new skills and reinventing herself. And I think Gen Xers all along have done that. I didn't, from everybody I talked to. I didn't get a sense of the grumpy, kind of like, you know, back in my day sort of thing. I mean, the people I knew in print, when digital came along, they read the writing on the wall that print magazines were going to go away or be diminished. And a lot of them jumped to digital. But digital's had a disruption too, you know, and so it's like this sort of leapfrogging. And now if you're in digital or you're in video now you're worried about AI because you know what, you know, if you're a graphic designer or a videographer or something, can AI do what you did? Can AI edit, you know, rather than having the video editor? And so it's this constant kind of trying to stay one step ahead as you look, you know, in the, in the distance towards retirement. You know, can I, can I get there?
- [15:11]
Alison Stewart
I'm talking to Stephen Kurtz. He's a New York Times reporter. He wrote an article called the Gen X Career Meltdown. We'll have more with Stephen. We'll take more of your texts and your calls after a quick break. This is all of it. You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Stephen Kurtz. He's a New York Times reporter. He's written a piece called the Gen X Career Meltdown. And we want to hear from you. Are you a Gen Xer who's had to reinvent yourself? Have technology and changes made your job more difficult or more obsolete? Tell us your story. 2124-339692-21243. WNYC. Of the gen Xers you spoke to for this article, how many people were able to maintain their original careers and how many had to leave?
- [16:13]
Stephen Kurtz
Most have. I guess there are a few people who are still Doing what they have been doing. One of the people I talk to is a commercial and filmmaker. He makes TV commercials and he also does documentaries. And so, you know, the TV commercials was the job that allowed him to fund his passion projects, his documentaries. And he's still doing it, but he said it's very, very difficult, you know, and in his case what happened is advertising is increasing, going to social media and going, going to influencers. And so, you know, that TV commercial that you know, you might have spent three months or six months on is, you know, now a TikTok that you spend a couple days on. And at the same time Hollywood, because of changes there, a lot of the film directors that were making mid budget movies that Hollywood no longer makes are now competing for the ad jobs he's competing for. And so he's still holding on, but it's difficult. Others have done adjacent jobs. You know, I talked to somebody who was in magazines for a while, then worked in an online publication and then went to a tech company, a big tech company in editorial. So it's adjacent to what they did. I spoke to a woman who worked at Nickelodeon for 20 years, 25 years and loved that job. And she said, as she joked, she said I survived around 8 billion rounds of layoffs and she's right now living off severance and you know, looking for her next move. Another woman was a prop stylist for a lot of years for magazines and ads, you know, and you know, as I said, the magazine and ad business is difficult. And so she just went back and took a course to be a postpartum doula. So you know, it's, it's indiv. You know, it's individual, it's how, you know, do you have other skills, do you have other interests? Maybe this is the time to pursue that second career for other people. They have just given their life to a craft and gotten good at the craft and they, they, you know, want to somehow do that, you know, and it's just, it can be difficult.
- [18:39]
Caller
Let's talk to Joseph who's calling in from Brooklyn. Hey Joseph, thanks for making the time to call, all of it.
- [18:45]
Joseph
Hi, how you doing? I just wanted to say that I think that I'm a filmmaker in New York City out of Brooklyn and I've been working as a professional video editor for almost as long. And the landscape for us editors because of the democratization of technology and software has made it so accessible to so many people that our skills as storytellers at landscape has become so much more competitive. I want to say that for us Gen X creatives. I feel like the word on the street nowadays, and a lot of me and my colleagues have been saying this over and over again, is the word pivot. And we've been thinking a lot for years now about how we can pivot from what we currently do now to, to something else.
- [19:40]
Caller
What do you think about that, Stephen?
- [19:42]
Stephen Kurtz
Yeah, I, I think, I think the pivot, absolutely. You know, the woman I just mentioned at Nickelodeon, every new technology that came along in her job, she learned that technology and she was constantly, you know, trying to sort of stay current and the pivot. Yes, I heard that, I heard the word pivot a lot in reporting the story. And you know, for, for, it's going to be different for different, you know, for different people. You know, one of the, one of the things I want to kind of bring up is that the reason I focused on Gen X, I mean, every generation has its burdens and if you have a 40 year career, you're going to see change in your industry. That's just reality. But there's something specific I felt about Gen X and where they are in life is that, you know, for boomers, the more years of their career were spent in the good times and so they had higher salaries and were able to put money aside and buy a house or buy an apartment, save for retirement. They're now in their 60s and they can access their retirement accounts. If you're Gen Z or millennials, you kind of saw this coming, you know, or you didn't enter those fields in the first place and you're digitally native. You know, it's, you wouldn't find a lot of 20, 25 year olds getting into magazines, you know, but for Gen Xers, we're kind of caught in that middle and we're at an age where, you know, we have mortgages and saving for kids, college, maybe elder care. And also a lot of these creative jobs were wonderful and intellectually engaging and really cool. You know, you got to go to cool parties, you got to feel like you were shaping the culture. But they weren't necessarily high paid jobs. You know, my first magazine job, I think it was like $27,000, you know, and so, you know, you got paid in other ways. You got paid for creative capital. And so now a lot of that creative capital is gone. And also, you know, the money is gone too. And so that pivot is important. And it's like, where do you, where do you pivot? Do you stay in the arts? Do you stay in something creative or, or do you try to get out of it? Or. And also, do you have to think about, like, well, I don't want to pivot into a career that AI is going to take in three years, you know, so one person I talked to went back to school and is becoming a therapist. And, you know, I sort of joke in a piece that therapy isn't going to be disrupted by tech, the next technological wave, and may even help therapy because it put more people on a therapist couch, you know, but you have to think about when you're having that next pivot. Is that, is that career also, is that job also going to be threatened?
- [22:34]
Alison Stewart
Let's try to get Peter from Westchester in before the show ends. Hey, Peter, you're on.
- [22:40]
Peter
Hey, everyone. Great piece. I just wanted to say real quick, a cinematographer, I've been working in film since the early 90s, and I just wanted to point out a positive that our generation got with starting in the arts in that era was like you mentioned in your piece about how our world was similar to the 1950s in terms of analog television and vinyl records. And I think that was a real advantage, having a foot firmly in the analog film world before it became digital, just in terms of learning the craft and how difficult it was and best practices and a lot of that transitioned to digital. Digital cameras are based on film cameras. And I always felt like I had an advantage over younger coworkers because I had had to work firmly in an analog world first and kind of learn the craft that way.
- [23:26]
Alison Stewart
Good observation.
- [23:27]
Caller
And let's talk to Matt.
- [23:28]
Alison Stewart
Matt made a pivot. Matt, tell us real quick.
- [23:31]
Matt
Oh, hey. Appreciate you taking the call. Yeah, it was actually from a. I don't know. Well, I was doing nonprofit work in the first part of my career. Special events, bike rides, 5Ks, big production work for that. And was it into technology and start to embrace technology and now sell and help law firms integrate IT, cloud security, AI into their law firms. And yeah, 10 years ago, in my 30s and 40s, was, was, was producing events. Pivoting is like, we all know, guys, it's just a mindset. And I think Gen X holds that stronger than anyone else. We're proud of what we can accomplish just through our mindset. So I think I'm speaking to the choir when I say we know about. Heads down, chin up, get it done.
- [24:23]
Caller
Thanks, Matt.
- [24:24]
Alison Stewart
We've got about a minute left. Anything you want to leave our viewers, our listeners with Stephen?
- [24:31]
Stephen Kurtz
Well, yeah, I mean, just from the calls that have come in, I just want to reiterate like and again, I'm partial because I'm Gen X, but I just feel there's so much creative talent and, and resilience and you know, just with that creator was that caller was talking about of like coming up in the old school way where you really had to learn the craft and you know, there were a lot of layers and you had, you had to learn your particular industry and you paid your dues. All those kinds of skills, that deep knowledge base the Gen X has, you know, there's just so much knowledge and talent and it's just finding the employer who's willing to give the Gen Xer, you know, the chance to use it.
- [25:15]
Caller
Stephen Kurtz, you should read the piece the Gen X Career Meltdown.
- [25:19]
Alison Stewart
Stephen, thanks so much.
- [25:20]
Stephen Kurtz
Thank you.
- [25:22]
Caller
And that's all of it. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate listening, I appreciate you and.
- [25:27]
Alison Stewart
I'll meet you back here next time.
- [25:33]
Progressive Insurance Ad
NYC now delivers the most up to date local news from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening with three updates a day. Listeners get breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from across New York City by sponsoring programming like NYC now. You'll reach our community of dedicated listeners with premium messaging and an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship.wnyc.org to get in touch and find out more.