The Causey Consulting Podcast
The Causey Consulting Podcast
The Starving Artist Cliche & the NYT Gen X Article
Do artists have to starve before they "make it?" Are all creative jobs drying up? Is Gen X having a "career meltdown?" Or is everyone having a career meltdown?
Key topics:
✅ The world itself has changed so much since the 90s. How could the job market NOT change in that same span of time?
✅ Are you doing the same thing because you're stuck in a rut? Do you even enjoy what you're doing? Or is it like a familiar safety blanket?
✅ Are you living a cliche because you have bought into the stereotypes and limiting beliefs of others?
✅ Do you have a game plan if your corporate job disappears?
✅ The human resources department is finna ta be the robot department.
✅ If you are not your source, you are not free. Period.
Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPyLvi2gvxE
https://medium.com/minds-without-borders/make-more-money-by-not-caring-f1c93b84c138
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Transcription by
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Gen X career meltdown, starving artist mythology, creative fields, AI takeover, HR industry, career change, limiting beliefs, job loss, career flexibility, entrepreneurship, career preparation, industry trends, job market, career resilience, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com and now here's your host, Sara Causey.
Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I want to explore the starving artist. Cliche, the mythology around the starving artist, the creative who must suffer for his or her craft. And I also want to probe the New York Times article the Gen X career meltdown, which came out at the end of March and caused quite a sensation around social media. For one thing, I was surprised to find it, because Gen X is so often forgotten, but it's even more touching and poignant to me, because I am now living full time as a writer, an artist, a poet, a creator. So to see this article, which is titled the Gen X career meltdown, and then the byline reads just when they should be at their peak, experienced workers in creative fields find that their skills are all but obsolete. Q ominous Halloween, Vincent Price kind of music here, gloom and doom. Get ready. Saddle up for it. So let's explore these questions.
Just a brief interruption to your regularly scheduled programming to ask if you've purchased your copy of Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld. It's perfect for anyone interested in history, the Cold War or intriguing biographies. You can find it on Amazon today. Now on with the show!
About three weeks ago, I released a video on YouTube, and it wasn't even in response to this. It was just some kind of serendipitous thing, something that I pulled out of the collective unconscious or the Spiritus Mundi, I guess, because I was not even aware of this article yet, but I recorded a video I just sat outside on the farm, no makeup on my hair, tucked up in my hat, contemplating this question, do creatives really have to suffer? Do you have to live a life of abject misery? Maybe you get, quote, unquote, discovered in your lifetime? Maybe you don't. Maybe your paintings take off. Maybe they don't, maybe your sculptures sell. Maybe they don't, maybe your stories and your novels are picked up by a publisher. Maybe they're not. Do you have to live in the back of a laundromat and eat peanut butter and dryer lint sandwiches just to get by? Because those are the cliches, and it's like they've become such pervasive cliches that everyone buys into them, really without question. It's like the idea of people going out to Hollywood and getting a job as a valet Parker and a waiter, a waitress, a barista, etc. So it's like, I do this at night to try to make ends meet so that during the day I can go to auditions or vice versa. And it's like we all just sort of accept that that's the way that it's done. And I love in Erica wernick's book meant for this, how she challenges that, like, why would you set yourself up for failure if you're working a job at a time when you need to be going to auditions, then how are you going to audition? Like just long pause there, because it's a great question, but then these same people will sit up and complain, I can't get to any auditions. I'm not booking any gigs. Nothing is going right for me, but I have to work this job, but I'm out here to be famous, but I'm not doing it. And they set themselves up for a vicious cycle that it's like being trapped on a hamster wheel from hell. Like, how are you ever going to get off that hamster wheel if you don't look at things differently? And I would say the same thing is true even more broadly when we just look at the starving artist, the poet who's miserable, the painter who never gains notoriety in his or her lifetime, etc. It's like all of that just strikes me as being limiting beliefs. Now, yes, they're reinforced by society over and over and over again. But that doesn't mean that they're true. I went down the rabbit hole the other day. I was watching this video on YouTube because I had had seen an article. I think it was like on msm.com where it came from. I don't remember, but it was like this scientist says he has ever. Evidence that we're living in a simulation. And I was like, well, well, well, do tell that's the kind of crazy, metaphysical time bending stuff that I really enjoy reading. And I also went down the rabbit hole with this other YouTube video where another commentator was saying the same thing, this is a simulation. This is like your own movie, your own reality. And so if you're going to be able to create your own reality and do your own thing, why would you not want to create exactly what you want? Why would you want to create abject misery? And for me, really taking this brave, bold move of getting the hell out of staffing and HR work, which, you know, it's like, I say it's a brave, bold move, because I'm going against the grain. But at the same time, it's so clear to me that the writing is on the wall in that industry. And I'm sorry if this offends you. I'm sorry if this is something that you're going to be very upset by. But I just feel like that entire category is going to be largely taken over by AI and robots. The Human Resources department will probably be changed to some other name, because it's not going to largely be human anymore. And I'm already seeing this. I'm already seeing HR departments where it's 80% AI, 20% human, sort of like the fast food restaurants that are being piloted around the country, where there's one human in the store at any given time, and everything else is automated. So it's like there's one human to babysit the establishment, to call the police in case anything goes wrong, or to troubleshoot the robots if there's a technical problem, but they're not relying primarily on human workers anymore, and I really believe that that's what's going to happen in the long run, not tomorrow, not next month, not next year, but in the long run, I really believe that that's what we're going to going to see in HR and recruiting work. So to me, it's like, my god, I don't want to be the last rat off the Titanic. I don't want to sit in a deck chair on the Titanic and split hairs at the same time. It is scary, even if you know that you were on a boat that was sinking and it's time for you to get in a canoe or to get on a life raft and paddle like hell in the opposite direction, it's still scary to leave it behind and then to go into something that's more creative, that's more loosey goosey. That's scary too, because it is loosey goosey. You are, in so many ways, forging your own path. There's not a map and there's not a rule book anymore. I've told the story of being like 39 and getting into a high level position where I was managing a branch that had, like, a million dollar a month revenue to it. Having a corner office, not because that's what I wanted, but that's what was there. I didn't demand a corner office, to be clear, I thought the whole thing was a little bit over the top and ostentatious, but I went in there and I did it, man. I sat, sat back in the chair, propped my feet up on the desk, looked out the window at the other office buildings around and I'm like, This is what I was trained and coached that I was supposed to want, and now that I'm here, it's a Pyrrhic victory. It feels very hollow, and I'm not happy. And I started freelancing not too long thereafter. But the thing is, whenever you own and operate your own business, or you are a full time freelancer, it's not an automatic gateway to freedom. And I have also been pushing back against this on social media, and I recently was featured in an author profile interview, and that was one of the things that came up in that interview, was owning and operating your own business, or being a professional freelancer. It is not an automatic gateway to freedom, and I wish these YouTubers and commentators would quit telling people that I have owned and operated a business. I know what it's like. I've been a professional freelancer. Nobody can gaslight me. You still have a hell of a lot of responsibility. Now you may have more flexibility with the day to day mechanics of your schedule. So you may be able to start your day at eight or nine in the morning instead of getting up at four or five. Or you may be able to say, I want to rearrange things so that I can have Wednesday off and go to the doctor or go get a massage or go to a matinee movie or take the kids somewhere, but then I'll have to make up for that work on Saturday or Sunday. You may have more flexibility to do that than you would have working outside the home for somebody else. But make no mistake about it, you are not. Completely free, and if somebody is trying to sell you that bill of goods, I would just humbly ask that you question that determine for yourself if what they're saying makes sense. Because a lot of those same people that are, oh, business, being a business owner, being an entrepreneur, being a full time freelancer, starting your own thing, it's a gateway to freedom. A lot of those people are also trying to sell you something. I'm not trying to sell you a damn thing. I don't have any program. I don't have some here's your five steps to freedom. I'm not peddling anything. I'm just telling you. I would humbly ask that you question anybody that's saying entrepreneurship is a gateway to freedom. And then I also want you to buy my course for 9999 it's like, Hmm, it's a little bit convenient, isn't it? Anyway, so we have this starving artist mythology that creatives have to suffer, that you have to live in abject poverty for a long time and pay those dues and be utterly miserable. And then maybe, just maybe, if you're really lucky, and you cross all your fingers and toes, then you might get a lucky break later in life. So we have that to one side, but then on the other side here, in a closely related article, we have the Gen X career meltdown, and it's all about these Gen X creatives, and I'm, I'm part of that group now, I guess who started out on these creative careers, maybe they got started in the 90s or thereabouts, and now they're finding that the career paths that they pursued 20 to 30 years ago have dried up. And I'm sort of like, can we be surprised by that? Look at how much the world has changed in 20 to 30 years. It's mind boggling. And it seems like the changes are coming faster and faster. I'm thinking now of the Yates poem The Second Coming, where he talks about the gyre. It's like this. This cyclone is just whipping up faster and faster and faster. It's incredible. I also think about the writing that I do for Dag hammershold and his legacy. He was born in 1905 he was killed in 1961 just in that time span. Now we look back on it now 2025 1905 seems ancient to us, hell. For that matter, some of you listening are gonna say 1961 seems ancient, but look at the amount of change that he saw just within his lifetime, to go from the way the world was in 1905 where everything was much more siloed and there wasn't so much technology, then you have television and the birth of mass Media. You have World War One and World War Two, you have nuclear weaponry. It's just astounding, even in his lifetime, the changes that he saw. Now I'm thinking about me as a Gen Xer. I think about the changes that I've seen within my lifetime. I remember when the elementary school got a computer lab, Ooh, that was a big deal. We were all excited. And the computers were huge. I mean, absolutely ginormous, very heavy. They had the old school floppy disks that were like the size of a saucer and had virtually no data on them. I remember playing a math game, again, super primitive by today's standards, where it was like, you'd have to do addition and subtraction and multiplication and division, and it would like, pop up one problem at a time, and you would just hit a number key and then enter and they would tell you if you got it correct or not. But that was like, Ooh, this is cutting edge. This is a big deal in the elementary school to have computers in here. They're like, the size of Cadillac cars. But then I, you know, I start thinking about by the time I got into high school, I thought that I was the cat's pajamas because I had an electric powered word processor with a monitor I wasn't using, like a PC for assignments until I was in college. Now, would have been in the 90s. So, yeah, I'm thinking about this, and I'm like, if you entered a career in the 1990s and you think that that career is going to be completely and totally unchanged by the year 2025, ah, you might be nucking futs. I hate to be so cold about it, but it just seems like, how could you not see that the world is changing? How could you not have more foresight? But I think sometimes what happens, and I'm thinking now of a friend of mine that was in print journalism, and he said, I knew that we were in trouble. I knew that everything was going digital. I knew that soon, and very soon, we were not going to be selling actual paper copies of the newspaper anymore, but I didn't want to believe it. I wanted to believe that I would be spared somehow, that maybe even if 90% of the workforce there was laid off, I somehow wouldn't be I would be spared. I would be the exception to the rule. And then by the time that he was laid off, he was on the job market at the same time as a lot of other unemployed journalists who were all looking and it took him quite some time to find something else to do. He went through his entire severance, his entire savings, and it was a very tough time. One of the statistics that they mention in this New York Times article is by 2030 ad agencies in the United States will lose 32,000 jobs, or 7.5% of the industry's workforce to technology, according to the research firm Forrester. Now look, people will see that, and they'll say, Well, seven and a half percent is really nothing. That's a little bit of a nothing burger, so maybe I'll be in the percent that's not affected, and I won't have to make any changes. And, you know, maybe that's true. But I want to try to thread the loop here a little bit thread the eye of the needle. I think we need to be careful about ignoring the writing on the wall and also careful about getting into limiting beliefs. Now I know that that seems contradictory. I know that that sounds counterintuitive, because you're like, well, Sara, you're saying like, you'll have people that are hard heads, that refuse to believe that they might be in the seven and a half percent of jobs that go away. But then at the same time, you're saying, Don't get into limiting beliefs. Don't be a negative Nancy. How are we supposed to navigate this? I I think a lot of it, and this is just my opinion, and I could be wrong. I always say I don't give you advice, and I don't tell you what to do. I just sit here and I opine for your entertainment only. I personally think what a lot of it boils down to is knowledge of the self, knowing what you are meant to do? Are you at a job because it's familiar? Has it become a slog? Is it like Groundhog Day? Well, I get up and I do this, and I don't want to make any changes. I know that I probably should make a change, but I'm risk averse, or I'm change a verse I'm thinking now of feel the fear and do it anyway. By Susan Jeffers and how she talks about over the course of time, a person's comfort zone does not just automatically get bigger and bigger. It feels like our like our waistline, has the tendency to do that as we get older, but the comfort zone Doesn't your comfort zone will actually shrink. Unless you are actively pushing the boundaries out and doing things that challenge you and challenging whatever limiting beliefs that you may have around set events, your comfort zone will get smaller and smaller, and the next thing you know, you're painted into a corner, and your life is like the size of a postage stamp. I have seen that happen to so many people, friends and family alike, that retired, and then it was like their world became so tiny, so tiny, and they would get into these weird routines that I guess somehow made sense to them, but didn't make sense objectively to anybody else. And I'll give you an example of what I mean. A friend of mine had an uncle who was eccentric and bizarre. There's not even enough time for me to get into how eccentric and bizarre this man was, but he fell into the pattern of keeping very weird hours. He would get up at two o'clock in the morning. And he would brag about that. And he would say, the problem with society nowadays is that people are lazy. They just want to lay in the bed and do nothing. And he would even brag, I get up earlier than people in the military. Those guys in the military, they're getting up around four in the morning. Well, not me. I get up at two. I'm up earlier than soldiers. So he'd get up and he'd pilfer around, and he'd do things till about 10am then he would lay down in his recliner and sack out and be out for most of the day. Then he would get up in the evening, do a few. More things, go to bed, get up at 2am and the whole cycle would start over again. So he was sleeping at odd and off beat times, but in his mind, he was a superior person because he was getting up at 2am and it's like this doesn't even make any sense, like going out and prowling at all because this was, this was pre pandemic, you have to remember. So we'd get up and go prowl like all night Walgreens and all night Walmarts and 24 hour grocery stores and things. And it's like, I don't really know that that is anything to brag about, getting up at two in the morning and then wandering through a Walmart at 3am along with drunks and people that have been up all night. I'm not really sure that that's something that a person should be bragging about, but to him, his lifestyle made total and complete sense. People get stuck in ruts, and I will again, use myself as an example here. So it doesn't just sound like I'm picking on other people. I had not been happy doing recruiting and staffing and HR work for quite some time. It was really not anything that I ever wanted to get into. It was something that I just fell into by accident, and it turned out that I was good at it. And as time went on, I got better and better, and it really it reached a point where I could do the job blindfolded, with my hands tied. And I think sometimes, you know, I can't speak for everybody that's in this article, to be clear, but I think sometimes that's what happens in other jobs as well. It's not just industry specific or person specific to me. I think sometimes people get into these ruts and they don't want to change the routine they fear change. So it's like, well, I don't want to contemplate what I would do if AI took my job. I'd rather just keep going every day. I'm gonna keep my routine. I'm gonna get up at the same time and drive to this office or sit at this laptop and I mean, I guess if I get laid off, I guess if the company closes, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it, and then when that day inevitably comes, they want to cry and whine to everybody about, well, I can't believe that this happened. And it's like, Well, you had some warning. You had to know it was coming. I'm just sort of like gesturing here like, mean, you saw it was coming, and you chose not to do anything. So that is, in its own way, a choice you may feel like, well, I'm I'm choosing to ignore reality, but really you're choosing to paint yourself into a corner. There's likewise, an article that I found interesting on medium written by Michelle T, who, T, ho, T, who, I don't know how to say it, and I hopefully I'm not butchering it, but I probably am, and it's the title of it is, make more money by not caring. The byline is, if you dare to care, you risk poverty. And she talks in this article about journalists working in newspapers, and she discusses how the advertising reps seem to make a lot more money. They had lunches and dinners out, they drove nice cars, but then the journalists would be driving beat up cars and eating peanut butter sandwiches at their desk. And if they had to take a pay cut, it would say they would say to themselves, well, how can I find a cheaper apartment? Maybe I can just live in an efficiency apartment in a back alley somewhere and eat generic peanut butter because I just want to keep working on the news. I'm so passionate about what I do. And so she makes this juxtaposition between the sales people who are like, if I get a better offer, somewhere else, I'm gone. It's all about the money to me, versus this nobility idea, I want to tell the news, I want to report the news, and even if that means that I need to live in the back of a laundromat eating peanut butter and dryer lint sandwiches. I will do that because I am so committed to the news. And I'm like, well, here we go again with the nobility and poverty, the scarcity mindset and the nobility and poverty. And I'm like, I just for me. I reject it. I just reject all of this, all of it. I think that if you are in an industry, and you look around and it is clear to you that the industry is dying, maybe not immediately, but you're starting to see the initial signs that if I got laid off, I don't know that I'd be able to find anything else in this industry, I think this may be the end of the road. I'm just not sure why you wouldn't look for other options. But Sara, what if I'm really passionate about this? What if I am willing to eat peanut butter and dryer lit sandwiches in order to do this job? I. So then in that case, I would say, you better damn well figure out how to take care of yourself. Now, whatever that looks like to you, God is your source, the universe, your higher self, whatever it is, you need to understand that that job is not your source. That job is not the be all, end all, because that job could be taken away like that. Your boss could come in in a pissy mood and fire you. The shareholders could say, 10% of people need to go because we want the stock to go up. And you could be caught up in that 10% they don't care. They don't give a shit. Corporate America does not care about you. Let's be extremely clear about that. The economy doesn't care about you. All of these things are amoral. They don't care about you and your family. You have to care about you and your family. So if you're working in an industry or a field and you're saying, I want to stay here, I don't want to leave I don't want to go do something else, maybe I don't stay at the same company necessarily, Sara, but I want to stay doing this same basic kind of work. The onus is on you to figure out how to make that happen. And we can get more metaphysical than that, if you want to and say, my job. No pun intended, is to figure out what I want. And it's like how David bear on his podcast, breaks it down very simply, desire plus non resistance equals desired outcome. Figure out that desire don't put up resistance to it, and then let the universe, or God or Jesus, whatever it is that you believe in, let that higher power figure out how my point is, you have a lot of people that are not even doing that. They don't even know what they want. They've not set an intention, they've not set a desire. They just want to stay in a turtle shell and work the same job over and over and over again, thinking there's no possible way that this could ever end. It might happen to the guy in the next cubicle. It might happen to the lady down the street, but it would never happen to me. And I'm like, Don't be so sure. I did not want to stay in staffing, for example, and say, Well, I'm just so good at doing this that there's no possible way a trained robot could ever replace me. We all love to think that, but let's be real here, that day could come. I wanted to be nimble. I wanted to make a move. I didn't want to just sit back and wait for the inevitable and go broke, and I really don't want any of my listeners to do that either. Is there a Gen X career meltdown? I don't know. I'm tempted to say that there's a career meltdown, full stop, regardless of generation, because the job market is as bad as I've ever seen it. Will it turn around at some point? Probably, but I don't know how long into the future that's going to be. And we have to think about what the jobs of the future will even look like anyway. What will be available to human workers, as opposed to AI and robots? That's also a question that I don't have the answer to, but I suspect that, you know, if we look back on this episode in a decade, it's going to be so different even from what it is now, and you have to be prepared for those changes. That's why I talk about prepping in some of these episodes, and I think everybody should be an emergency prepper. At the very least. You need to be aware. Have good situational awareness. Know what's going on around you, not be paranoid by it. Don't be Chicken Little, but just be aware, so that whenever you start to see these fluctuations and you realize I might not be safe at any point in time. The rug could be pulled out from underneath me. You have a game plan. You know what you would do next. You can set that desire and go to work on something different. Now, to close this up, I would also say that in that video that I was watching on YouTube. This man said, people will look at events in different ways, and that has a lot of bearing on what actually happens to them in the long run. And he used job loss as an example. Let's say that two people are laid off on the same day. One person says, How am I going to pay my bills? I'm going to go broke. This is a tragedy. The other person says, I must not have needed that job anyway. I will figure out something else to do. I will set an intention to be guided. Maybe I win the lottery, maybe I make a smart investment, maybe I find an even better job, maybe I start my own business, whatever I decide to do. So it will wind up being better than the job I just lost. Both of those people are setting self fulfilling prophecies, whether they fully know and understand it at the time or not. They are because the subconscious mind and the imagination starts going to work on whatever they've said. So the person who says, I'm gonna go broke. This is a tragedy. Experience is going broke and having a tragedy the person who says I'm gonna create something different, create something different. So notice what I've said here. It's not that the job loss doesn't happen, it's that the stories that get told about the job loss are different. And I would argue, to take a step back a little further and say, don't wait for the job loss to happen. Be prepared. Know what the market is doing. Know your industry backwards and forwards. Understand the trends, and Don't bury your head in the sand like an ostrich. Be prepared to move if you need to, you don't want to be in a sad article about, well, I love this job, but I can't find anything else, and now my life is misery. I would much rather read about you in a happy article about how awesome your life is. Stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode.
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