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 ways of doing things but have adapted to the new. This clip on Instagram from a user known as Mrs. Murphy sums it up.

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 relephone old. I am my parents had a answering machine old. I am we had to use the white pages to find our friend's parents' name to find they phone number old. I am my little pony old. I am your grandmother had plastic all over her couch old.

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 Steven Kurutz. 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. Steven Kurutz, welcome.

Steven Kurutz: Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Are you a Gen Xer who had to reinvent yourself? We want to hear from you. Have 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 212-433-9692, 212-2433-WNYC. You can call in and join the conversation, or you can text us at that number. 212-433-9692. Your article focuses on Gen Xers in creative fields and media. You specify magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, and TV. Why did you want to look at that slice of Gen X workers?

Steven Kurutz: I suppose because I know it. I am Gen X. I started my career in magazines in the late '90s, and what I noticed as I got in my 40s is that I either knew people who had gone through these struggles or had had acquaintances or, in my case, questioned it myself. I'm a features reporter at the New York Times, which is a wonderful job, but there are very few of those jobs left. Every time another wave of technology, a wave of disruption happens, you worry if you're going to be next, you're going to lose your job and what will you do in your 40s or 50s, how would you reinvent yourself? 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.

Alison Stewart: The texts are starting to come in. This says, "I'm a 57-year-old interior designer with 25 years of experience. I've been unemployed for a year. 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?

Steven Kurutz: Well, yes. Interior design was not one of the fields I thought about, but what that text brings up are a few things. One is there's ageism, and ageism can happen in all fields. There's something about creative careers particularly that youth culture is prized, and it's difficult when you're in your 40s and 50s, and you're competing with a 25 year old, a 30 year old. Employers can pay them much less, and now there's this analog digital divide which you talked about at the top where 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.

Even if the 50-year-old understands TikTok just as well, there's a perception that the 25-year-old would get TikTok and social media and marketing and AI much better than an older worker. It's very difficult to be out of work and to try to find a job. Also, one other thing. A lot of creative careers are in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, and the cost of living has 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. That adds a complication to reinventing yourself.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking to New York Times reporter Steven Kurutz. 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 about how you're surviving in your industry. Our Phone number is 212-433-9692 212-433-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 Coupland. The philosophy is called lessness. What is lessness?

Steven Kurutz: Lessness is-- He lays this out in his novel Generation X, which gave our generation its title, its moniker. The idea of lessness is that people resign themselves to diminishing material wealth. In the early '90s, that might have been seen as-- Well, there was a recession in the early '90s, that's one thing, but it also might have been seen as maybe a chosen way. There was this idea that Gen X were slackers. You might 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.

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 cool, creative people. Now, lessness, I pivot, and I talk about how lessness defines your professional life and your career if you're in one of these professions. Let's just take an example. Let's look at magazines the world that I know. I came from magazines before I went to the Times. The ad page. The ads went away when the Internet came along and social media and so there are less ad pages. The budget shrunk, the staff shrunk, everything shrinks.

The copy editors and editors and staff writers. I worked at a magazine where there's a whole layer of that career and all those people have been jettisoned. 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 Condé Nast, which was seen as the pinnacle and a place where the expense accounts were unlimited and the town cars and the martini lunches flowed has done a lot of belt tightening, layoffs 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 2000s. It's the same today, 25 years ago. The cost of everything has gone up, and yet the cost of your work, when you compare it to the price of living, has actually gone down. This idea of lessness, you're just sort of hanging on in a lot of these fields and trying to get by.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Matthew, who's calling in from Harlem. Hey, Matthew, thanks for taking the time to call All Of It.

Matthew: Hello. Hi. 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. 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. 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. There was absolutely no expectation that the employer had any sort of loyalty to the employees.

Alison Stewart: Matthew, thanks for calling and go to wnyc.org to donate. [laughs] Let's talk to-- I think it's Tania or Tanya from Harlem.

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. I 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, back in the 2015, 2016, so it had already started, and I think we were all like, "Well, every year there's layoff, every year."

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 where I didn't grow up in digital media. All of a sudden, I felt like my voice got a little bit smaller. 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. 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.

I watch what he's doing, and I'm really trying to get ahead of this because we can spend so much time talking about how we're 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. I think we know how to reinvent, and a lot of that has to do with tapping into our community. 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.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for calling in. She has a really interesting point, Steven. I always say that Gen Xers, we have good taste. We don't need people to-- I see people standing in line because they saw it on Instagram. I can figure that out for myself.

Steven Kurutz: Yes, I love this, and it's true. There is a resilience, and I didn't want the piece to be Woe is Gen X. There's such a resilience to Gen X, and the subjects I talk to for the story, they are in the process of trying to figure it out. The piece lays out the issue or the problem, and then it says, it asks, "What now? What do you do? 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 it has health benefits and a 401(k), and you ride that out to retirement? Do you do something else?"

The caller just talked about coming up with new skills and reinventing herself. I think Gen Xers all along have done that. From everybody I talked to, I didn't get a sense of the grumpy back in my day sort of thing. 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. Digital's had a disruption too, and so it's this sort of leapfrogging, and now if you're in digital or you're in video, now you're worried about AI.

If you're a graphic designer or a videographer or something, can AI do what you did? Can AI edit rather than having the video editor? It's this constant trying to stay one step ahead as you look in the distance towards retirement. Can I get there?

Alison Stewart: I'm talking to Steven Kurutz. 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.

[music]

You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Steven Kurutz. He's a New York Times reporter. He's written a piece called the Gen X Career Meltdown. 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. 212-433-969 221-433-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?

Steven Kurutz: 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. The TV commercials was the job that allowed him to fund his passion projects, his documentaries. He's still doing it, but he said it's very, very difficult. In his case, what happened is advertising is increasing, going to social media and going to influencers, and so that TV commercial that you might have spent three months or six months on is now a TikTok that you spend a couple days on.

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. He's still holding on, but it's difficult. Others have done adjacent jobs. 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. 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.

As she joked, she said I survived around 8 billion rounds of layoffs, and she's right now living off severance and looking for her next move. Another woman was a prop stylist for a lot of years for magazines and ads, and 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. It's individual, it's 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 want to somehow do that, and it can be difficult.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Joseph, who's calling in from Brooklyn. Hey, Joseph, thanks for making the time to call All Of It.

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. 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 has--That 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.

We've been thinking for years now about how we can pivot from what we currently do now to something else.

Alison Stewart: What do you think about that, Steven?

Steven Kurutz: I think the pivot, absolutely. The woman I just mentioned at Nickelodeon, every new technology that came along in her job, she learned that technology and she was constantly trying to stay current and the pivot, yes, I heard the word pivot a lot in reporting the story. It's going to be different for different people. One of the things I want to bring up is that the reason I focused on Gen X, 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.

There's something specific I felt about Gen X and where they are in life is that 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 saw this coming, or you didn't enter those fields in the first place, and you're digitally native.

You wouldn't find a lot of 25-year-olds getting into magazines, but for Gen Xers, we're caught in that middle and we're at an age where we have mortgages and saving for kids' college, maybe elder care. Also, a lot of these creative jobs were wonderful and intellectually engaging and really cool. 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. My first magazine job, I think, was like $27,000, and so you got paid in other ways. You got paid for creative capital. Now, a lot of that creative capital is gone. Also, the money is gone, too. That pivot is important.

It's like, "Where do you pivot? Do you stay in the arts? Do you stay in something creative? Or do you try to get out of it?" 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." One person I talked to went back to school and is becoming a therapist. I joke in the piece that therapy isn't going to be disrupted by the next technological wave and may even help therapy because it put more people on a therapist couch.

Alison Stewart: It's true.

Steven Kurutz: You have to think about when you're having that next pivot. Is that job also going to be threatened?

Alison Stewart: Let's try to get Peter from Westchester in before the show ends. Hey, Peter, you're on.

Peter: Hey, everyone. Great piece. I just wanted to say real quick, I'm 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. 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. I always felt like I had an advantage over younger coworkers because I had had to work firmly in an analog world first and learn the craft that way.

Alison Stewart: Good observation. Let's talk to Matt. Matt made a pivot. Matt, tell us real quick.

Matt: Oh, hey. Appreciate you taking the call. It was actually from a-- I don't know. I was doing nonprofit work in the first part of my career. Special events, bike rides, 5Ks, big production work for that and was forced to pivot into technology and start to embrace technology and help law firms integrate IT cloud security, AI into their law firms? Yet 10 years ago, in my 30s and 40s, was was producing events. Pivoting is, like we all know, guys, it's just a mindset. I think Gen X holds that stronger than anyone else. We're proud of what we can accomplish just through our mindset. I think I'm speaking to the choir when I say we know about heads down, chin up, get it done.

Alison Stewart: Thanks, Matt. We've got about a minute left. Anything you want to leave our viewers, our listeners with, Steven?

Steven Kurutz: I mean, just from the calls that have come in, I just want to reiterate and again, I'm partial because I'm Gen X, but I just feel there's so much creative talent and resilience and just what was that caller was talking about of coming up in the old school way where you really had to learn the craft and here were a lot of layers and 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, there's just so much knowledge and talent, and it's just finding the employer who's willing to give the Gen Xer the chance to use it.

Alison Stewart: A shot. Steven Kurutz. You should read the piece The Gen X Career Meltdown. Steven, thanks so much.

Steven Kurutz: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: That's All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate listening. I appreciate you, and I'll meet you back here next time.