I was recently in New York City with my 17-year-old as part of a “Congrats on slogging through high school and graduating!” road trip. We were in areas of Manhattan I wasn’t as familiar with, searching out high-end resale shops that carried the brands he loved. (Think Supreme, or as I call it, Supreme Waste of Money.)
Anyway, somewhere between Soho and Chinatown, I found myself staring at the Google map on my phone, unable to connect what I saw on the screen with my physical surroundings.
There was too much noise around me. Some spatial reasoning neuron wasn’t firing. Which direction, exactly, were we supposed to walk?
It led to a lot of backtracking. And eventually, I realized I should just let my digital native kid navigate.
But It’s My Career, Too
So many days, I sit here in my home office feeling that same way. Which way do I go? It’s as if I’m staring at a map of my career that says, “You are here,” but my surroundings, much like a report authored by AI, are full of gibberish.
I know I’m not alone.
I’m talking to you, fellow GenX creatives! To all of us writers, editors, designers, photographers, videographers, illustrators, and other creatives in our 50s, who have made a solid living from our creative output and should be at the peak of our earning . . . except for this maelstrom of industry disruption and economic panic making our livelihoods feel fundamentally unstable.
We’ve lived through industry disruption before. The early 2000s tech bubble burst. The 2008 banking crisis. Covid and the early 2020s. So we know how to navigate. We know how to adapt what we do, based on who has the money to hire us.
But now, there’s a double whammy.
First, we’re not exactly young anymore. We’re not old and washed up, either. But let’s face, we’re a little tired.
And second, generative AI has just made everything weird. It’s harder and harder to tell what’s “real,” and it all feels like a shit show. The AI tools are both helpful and terrifying. They make some tasks easier, while also making it harder to prove our worth.
If you’re like me, you’re now struggling to envision the next 10 – 15 years of your career.
I used to think I’d write forever. I still have a plan to be writing fiction well into my 60s and beyond. But the content writing and strategy that’s been my bread and butter and fed my family? Will it even exist?
I’m already down 15% for the year compared to 2025, and down 25% compared to 2024. I’m not superb at math, but some numbers are easy to understand.
I’m trying to approach this problem with curiosity (How interesting it all is!) and optimism (I am a person who always figures it out!).
But then, at 2 a.m. when I’m staring at the ceiling, I think, Oh fuck, do I have to rebuild again?
Maybe It’s Actually Re-Remembering
As my agent and I are trying to sell a novel, I’ve started a new one.
It begins in the mid-1990s in an English department graduate program, and is based on some of my own experience. (I received an MA in English from Miami University of Ohio in 1998.) The character I’m writing is very different than me and the plot is far from my life, but it has been fun to dig out my grad school box and remember that time in my life.
I see the Judi I was. Which has made me think about all the Judis I’ve been. At every stage, a bunch of shit felt insurmountable.
And then I surmounted it.
Or at least I survived it. But survival is enough. Survival is great.
In New York, my kid kept looking at me with exasperation, saying, “The map is trying to help you, Mom!”
But is it? I thought.
Maybe I don’t need a map to help me. Maybe I can help myself.
So, a few days after I made that rebuilding sketch in my dot journal (if you know me, you know I’m currently obsessed with chronicling the shiny dust of life in my dot journal!), I filled out the next page.
I made myself remember what will help me. What is on my side.
It’s really helpful to catalog what you’re good at withstanding. And the qualities that have helped you get where you are.
Also this, friends: What can you re-remember about yourself? It’s easy to forget your best stuff when the gibberish is flying at you.
Listen, the industry is going to do whatever the hell it wants. We’ve journeyed from latchkey-kids to John Hughes, fishnet to grunge, typewriter to computer, rise of the creative class to real estate bust. It’s one more journey.
We’re sandwiched in like flattened panini, but we can do it, ya’ll. We have to do it. To bring our best stuff to this weird new economy.
I know it’s not how we pictured it in the 80s, with our phones attached to the wall and long cords we tried to stretch to our bedroom. Sure, we thought cars might someday fly, but we didn’t think fakery would. It’s frustrating as all fuck, but we are where we are.
I can’t hand the map to my kid on this one, but I can hand it to the Judi who figured out how to do it before. She’s good for one more round.