How Gen X became the biggest work losers

Stephen Armstrong, The Independent

True story. Back in 1999, I was writing a story for a glossy magazine published abroad. It was prescient — something you might read about in The Economist today — but you wouldn’t get the photo shoot that went with it. On the trip was a photographer, his assistant, the lighting guy, someone to play music, some guy for vibes, and a model. In the middle of the day with the sun so high in the sky you could blind yourself looking at the water. They were shooting the model deep-sea fishing, so we needed three boats: one for the model, one for the photographer, and one for his extra lights

Obviously, that was ridiculous, but it was the Nineties — nobody worried about the cost of anything, and it was small beer compared to the money being spent by our American counterparts. One friend who moved to New York in the Nineties was paid $5 per word for 5,000-word articles. Earlier this year, Vanity Fair writer Bryan Burrough — author of Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco — revealed he’d been paid around $166,000 per feature. “For 25 years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, typically 10,000 words,” he wrote. “For this, my peak salary was $498,141.”

Ever wonder how Carrie could afford that Manhattan apartment in Sex and the City? She was a Gen X magazine journalist. She isn’t now. In the sequel, And Just Like That..., she’s the less-famous co-host of a podcast. Miranda, once a lawyer, is studying for a master’s and drinking too much. Charlotte is living vicariously through her daughter. Samantha is awol. And that all tracks with what I see among my friends now.

For a brief moment, Gen X ruled the creative economy, but it was a mirage, and now it feels like we’re losing the plot completely. Take my night out with my mate Ed — an editor of a trade magazine — the other evening: a cheap parting outside, bus home, no dinner. The time of living it large at the Met Bar and getting cabs everywhere is a distant memory. This is now a typical Gen X night out.

Together, we ran through what our friends were up to. Andy’s job as a graphic designer has disappeared. Phil, once a highly paid photographer, hasn’t been hired for months, is thinking about getting into Bitcoin, and trying not to panic about how much his divorce is costing him. Alice has had six jobs in the past four years. She went from editor to content editor to digital manager to product designer at a laptop company, to something at a car place, to (I think) recruitment. Truthfully, I’m not sure she knows what her job is. A lot of people we know are now “coaches”.

“Each year I stay employed, it’s like I get promoted,” Ed says, after we’d pause to peer into this sliding pit of doom. “I’m paying a guy a fortune to fix my roof. AI isn’t going to fix my roof, but it’s going to take my job.” It’s no surprise that Generation X — aged between 45 and 59 – are the least satisfied age group at work, with 16 per cent believing they do not have a “good” job, according to hiring platform Indeed. Not only are their “talents” often no longer needed in a world where AI is fast replacing copywriters, photographers, and designers, but those still in place often experience age discrimination (around 80 per cent, according to a 2022 AARP survey).

Born in an analogue age, Gen-Xers are watching digital natives leapfrogging them into content creation jobs they don’t understand and are ill-equipped to do, while entire sectors are disappearing overnight. Analysis by the IMF suggests that around 60 per cent of jobs in advanced economies like the UK and US are at risk of being replaced by AI.

This shift is not only having a profound effect on our identity, but also causing a financial meltdown. Gen X were born to the post-war generation, and many of our parents were relatively young when they had us. We then slouched into adulthood with an ironic disregard for convention, meaning we had children later. So now we’re supporting both our university-age kids and our ageing parents in their “care home era” — and doing it on salaries that are rapidly shrinking.

All those jobs in the booming creative economy we flocked to? Today, the NUJ reports that senior journalists at major magazine and newspaper groups are earning £22k. Graphic designers average £28k. Photographers? £24,350. Media photographers top out at £30k, while wedding photographers can reach £40k. And for someone in their mid-fifties today, it’s still a long time before they can access their pension at 67 — if they even have one. Research last month from Get Pension Ready found that Gen X are the least likely to be on track for a comfortable retirement. While 40 per cent of overall respondents reported being on target with their savings goals (including 50 per cent of Gen Z, 47 per cent of Millennials, and 37 per cent of Boomers), nearly two-thirds (65 per cent) of Gen X said they no longer have access to defined benefit pension schemes.

It might sound like “boo hoo hoo” to Gen X whingers. We got to live through the Nineties — there were parties everywhere, no toxic social media... We started work in a world that hadn’t changed much since we were born.

We played records. We watched TV. If we wanted to talk to someone, we phoned a building and hoped they were in it. My children find this hilarious. When things changed, we were either enthusiastically naive or extremely poorly informed. Some of us actually said the internet was a fad. We had no idea we were in the process of being made obsolete. “We suffered from a constant turnover of tech that seemed brilliant, then disappeared,” recalls Richard Benson, former editor of The Face and Arena. “CD-Roms — amazing! Psion Organisers — good! Palm Pilots — cool! There was a weird promise that the economy was going to be rebuilt on the creative industries. We thought, that’s going to be us. We didn’t foresee it would be Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. We didn’t realise one day something would come along that could replace us.”

Gen X — bless us — also thought selling out wasn’t cool. If you’d offered us the chance to become Mark Zuckerberg, we’d probably have said no. As the latest Face exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery shows, this was an era when launching a magazine was like launching a punk band — they had philosophies, a voice, and there were so damn many of them.

Now we have what, in 2024, media analysts at Enders Analysis call “the final phase of industrial-scale print volumes”. The creative jobs we once flocked to are disappearing with them. Those big jobs in the media — publishing, TV and advertising — don’t exist in the way they once did. In America, Gen X has become the first generation to earn less than their parents.