I'm All Done Being Delusional

For forty years I made a living as a creative professional. It's been over for a while. Only I just realized that today.

Everything came crashing down this morning.

If there’s one thing that defines my professional history, it’s an inability to see things are they are … and how they’re going to be.

For nearly forty years, I’ve made a sort-of OK living as a “creative professional.” I entered the newspapering business back in the days when daily papers were fat with ad inserts and newsrooms were flush with money from classified and display advertising. Expense budgets were bloated; well-staffed bureaus were all the rage, and everybody read the news because everybody trusted the news.A person with talent and drive could make a linear ascent up the news added to bigger papers and better-paying jobs, and I promise you that in the late 1980s of The Bonfire of the Vanities, nobody thought the good times would end.

But of course they did, beginning when the mid-1990s advent of Craigslist killed newspaper classified advertising almost literally overnight. By the turn of the millennium, wage freezes were common and wave after wave of layoffs were starting to sweep newsrooms. And let’s not even get started on the shortsightedness of our “smartest person in the room” news execs who initially saw news websites as a cute little adjunct to the print product and saw no point to charging for them, let alone maximizing their virtues as limitless space. (I’ll admit I didn’t see it at first either, if only because I trusted the “geniuses” in the big offices to read the future for me.)

I hung on by the fingernails of my fingernails for another decade, suffering through death-of-a-thousand-cuts wage cuts, loss of pay for overtime, holidays and night differentials, and sundry other indignities until the ax fell in January 2011.

That was the end of my newspaper careers but I was optimistic. Because just as one wave petered out, another rose in great endless swells: the advent of electronic book publishing, via the Kindle. I had time to see the end of print-first newspapering, and I used that time to see what else I could do with my old-school skills in a new-school publishing universe.

That worked out great … for a while. I went to writers’ conferences, made lots of friends, helped a lot of novelists with their traditionally rejected trunk manuscripts, and made a self-sustaining living from it. Albeit with some creative concessions, like having a home. (For years, I made it work through housesitting and houseguesting, until the COVID pandemic pretty much killed that.)

What followed were years of self-delusion. I wrote off the increase in fallow periods in my editing business as anomalies to be suffered through because I was convinced that a return to the boom times was just around the corner (and sometimes, in a dizzying but short-lived way, they were). A.I. still felt like a distant threat and books, especially in “hard” genres like romance and thrillers, still seemed a durable way of delivering entertainment (and even enlightenment). And my name still seemed to be passed around in writer networks just often enough to make those flush periods forget the increasing (and increasingly long) fallow times.

Things began to nosedive a couple of years ago. During a winter-long fallow stretch, I behgn seeking out “job-jobs,” and actually found one via LinkedIn as a copy editor for a book publishing house. But that lasted less than a year, in part because I was Mr. Old School in a new-school environment, and had a tough time adapting to the necessary technical tools for the job in a way that most of half-as-old co-workers seemed to take in stride.

Back to the editing practice. These last few years there have been good times (March through October 2024 was amazing) and bad times (November through February 2025 was brutal). But not only was that boom-and-bust cycle getting more exhausting — and getting harder on my health — but everything started to seem harder. For every great zero-drama client, there were more who haggled with me over price, devaluing my work even as they sought it out, and many was the time I had to swallow my pride and stifle my resentment and take what I could get.

I was not enjoying the good times as much I used to, and I didn’t have any faith that the good times would continue. I soon found myself expending just about as much time and energy on hustling up clients as I did working for them, working my networks, chasing vague rumors of phantom opportunity, and trying not to make my begging sound like begging. I found, too, that I was hitting my head on the compensation ceiling; I used to charge for my services in accordance with the market rate as defined by the annual rate survey from the Editorial Freelancers Association. But, lately, more potential clients were not accepting those as reasonable compensation for established editing professionals, or at least this editing professional. And if I didn’t bend enough in their direction, they’d find someone who could. And more and more often, I’d have to borrow money from my wife to meet baseline expenses (she’s great about it, and I love he dearly for it, but I want us to have an equal partnership and it kills me when I can’t quite hold up my end of it).

I admit I attributed this more to bad luck, confined to me, and not something that was happening to creative professionals everywhere. Like I said, I’m the last to see the full scope of what’s happening in front of me. Let alone where it’s going. I admit, too, that this “I’m the victim of bad luck, over and over and over and over” mindset took me to some pretty dark places. Especially when one of my best friends, who had gotten stuck in a similar professional and psychological cul-de-sac took his own life in March 2024. One of the last things he told me was” “I feel like I’m running out of road.” I wasn’t willing to accept that then, for him, and I refused to accept it for me. But if I’m being honest? I kinda see how he got there.And that thought has jittered in my brain ever since.

That brings us to this morning.

That’s when I read this piece in The New York Times. It was about me … and a whole lot of people like me.

Talk with people in their late 40s and 50s who once imagined they would be able to achieve great heights — or at least a solid career while flexing their creative muscles — and you are likely to hear about the photographer whose work dried up, the designer who can’t get hired or the magazine journalist who isn’t doing much of anything.

Yep. That’s me.

And the hits just kept on coming.

Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It’s as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted.

Hoo boy.

How about some more?

Aside from lost income, there is the emotional toll — feelings of grief and loss — experienced by those whose careers are short-circuited. Some may say that the Gen X-ers in publishing, music, advertising and entertainment were lucky to have such jobs at all, that they stayed too long at the party. But it’s hard to leave a vocation that provided fulfillment and a sense of identity. And it isn’t easy to reinvent yourself in your 50s, especially in industries that put a premium on youth culture.

“I know people who said, ‘Screw this, I’m going to become a postal worker,’” said Ms. McKinley, the ad industry veteran. “There are still a lot of people who are freelancing, but it’s dried up quite a bit in recent years. It’s painful.”

Oh. Yeah.

Illusions? Over. Scales on my eyes. Fallen. Self-pity? Poof.

I read that, over and over. Then I opened a new tab. And started applying to become a postal worker.

I’ll still edit on the side, when I can. I’ll still poke away at my novel drafts. I may even pitch a freelance article here and there. But the idea that I can make a living solely from editing and writing? That’s history. I can either whine about it, or I can face reality … and find a fresh stretch of road on which to continue this life’s journey. I choose the latter.

(He says, hoping his Substack presence proves to have … presence.)