The Gen X career crisis is having a moment — a viral one.
When The New York Times (NYT) ran a story last month about the wave of mid-career creative professionals hitting obsolescence, it quickly shot to the top of the site’s most-read list. Readers flooded social media with replies, citing the sharp irony of reaching your peak just as your industry flatlines.
In the weeks since, a stock market crash has come along to make things worse. Triggered by sweeping tariffs and investor unease, the downturn has sharply eroded retirement savings and reignited recession fears — hitting hardest just as Gen Xers were supposed to be settling into their peak earning years.
Since the start of April, losses have accelerated, leaving the S&P 500 down more than 11% year to date. The Nasdaq has plunged 17%. Apple (AAPL) stock — once a retirement-plan darling — has plunged more than 21%, dragging IRAs and 401(k)s down with it. And for mid-career workers who have relied on stock-based compensation to build wealth or bridge career shifts, the selloff has been doubly punishing.
This isn’t Generation X’s first system collapse. It might just be the most literal. And for many, it feels like a final insult.
Born between 1965 and 1980, Gen X came of age with punk rock and Reaganomics, learned to code in BASIC, and entered the workforce only to be met by a near-continuous series of economic disruptions: the 1990–91 recession, the dot-com bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID crash. Now in their mid-40s to late-50s, they’re navigating careers — and retirement prospects — shaped by technologies and economic shocks they never saw coming.
These years were supposed to be about payoff for those in white-collar fields and for workers in skilled trades alike. By their 50s, many Gen Xers expected to be earning their highest salaries, gaining seniority, maybe even paying off a mortgage. Instead, they’re scrambling to stay relevant in jobs that have been automated, outsourced, or reclassified into gig work. The promise of hard-won security has been replaced by physical strain, shrinking benefits, and rising anxiety about what happens if the market keeps falling.
For Rebecca Moon Ruark, a 50-year-old marketing professional and mother of two outside Annapolis, Maryland, the moment feels eerily familiar — and much harder to rebound from.
Ruark has spent the past 15 years building a career in higher education communications, particularly in direct mail. It was a niche she loved, and one that once paid well. But lately, the work has been drying up.
“With the rise in popularity and usability of machine learning, AI, and popular language models like ChatGPT, I’m receiving fewer direct mail jobs,” she said. “I’ve noticed a definite downturn over the last six months.”
She recalled one moment when her human edge still won out: A client pitted her copy against ChatGPT’s. Her version performed better. “I didn’t give it much thought then,” she said. “Now, I know better.”
In higher-ed writing, pay has stagnated for more than 15 years, she said, but the more consistent contract work she has secured still requires a human touch. Still, Ruark is increasingly uneasy about the future. She recently started contributing more to her “hemorrhaging” retirement account on the advice of a market-savvy friend, but said she hasn’t checked its balance in over a month.
“This crash or recession or whatever we’re calling it hits different because I’ll be 50 this year, and I don’t want to work forever,” she says. “In 2009 I left my full-time job and found plenty of freelance gigs. I had the energy to hustle. I won’t always. That’s how this economic downturn feels a little more foreboding.”
Though several years younger than Ruark, Doree Shafrir also spent her entire career chasing work through an ever-shifting media landscape — and now finds that the chase is getting harder. After the 2008 crash, she left a full-time job and quickly landed freelance work. “That is not the world now,” she said.
A longtime journalist and podcaster, Shafrir is part of what she calls “Generation Catalano” — born just after Gen X — and she has weathered every boom-and-bust cycle in media since the early 2000s. Her résumé reads like a time capsule of digital publishing’s rise and fall: Gawker, The New York Observer, BuzzFeed (BZFD) in its heyday. She thrived in the freelance economy that followed the last crash, eventually launching a successful podcast and writing a memoir. She pivoted again with the rise of Substack, writing a motherhood-focused newsletter. But the ground keeps shifting. Podcast ad revenue has shrunk. Direct-to-consumer brands have pulled back. Substack feels like a supplement, not a solution.
“Plenty of very talented people are not working,” Shafrir said — and this time, there may not be an obvious next move. “The tariffs have people really spooked. It feels like a death spiral.”
The difference this time, she said, is the scale — and the fatigue. “This moment does feel different — AI is really scary,” Shafrir said. “It’s not like people didn’t struggle in the past, but the number of people I know who are underemployed or out of work entirely? That feels new.”
For some, the challenge isn’t just adapting — it’s enduring. A San Francisco–based video producer and editor in her 40s, who asked to remain anonymous due to employment concerns, said this latest stretch of unemployment has been her most brutal yet.
After years of stable corporate work, she made a strategic pivot in her early 40s, hoping to shift into full-time editing as a chronic illness made physically demanding on-site shoots harder to manage. The transition came with a pay cut, but she saw it as a necessary recalibration — until the pandemic hit.
After losing one job to in-office mandates she couldn’t physically meet, she’s been job hunting ever since: 99 applications, 25 formal rejections, one interview — likely only because she knew someone on the team. “Most of the jobs I see for video creatives pay very low, especially the remote ones,” she said. “And now that more companies are requiring people to come in, there are fewer jobs I can even apply to.”
She’s not new to career reinvention. She once edited a full-length documentary — her dream coming out of film school — and later built a solid corporate resume that helped her buy a house. But today, she’s confronting a harder truth: “Admitting to myself that all I’m looking for is a job now, not a career, has been hard to accept.”
“It feels very different from the previous times I’ve been unemployed,” she added. “There’s this extra double dose of uncertainty: being female, a person of color, chronically ill, unemployed for this long, and with the state of the TV/film industry? This feels like the hardest round yet.”
For Julie Liddell Whitehead, a 54-year-old writer and mental health advocate in Mississippi, the crisis goes beyond job loss. It’s about erosion — of purpose, of professionalism, and of the human voice itself. After maintaining a blog for over a decade about living with bipolar disorder, she discovered her writing had been scraped to help train ChatGPT. “It’s theft,” she said plainly.
Once a college instructor, she left teaching after watching plagiarism give way to AI-assisted workarounds. When asked recently to give career advice to a high school writer, she declined.
“The scary thing is watching the devaluation of human ability,” she said. “A lot of us have spent a lot of time practicing our craft — writing or coding or accountancy or engineering — and we’re possibly looking at the end of all of those career paths.”
Michael Bourne, a 59-year-old novelist and teacher who moved to Canada from the U.S. in 2012, sees this moment from both inside and outside. He came of age in the newspaper industry, working his way up through local dailies before realizing, in the early 1990s, that something fundamental had changed.
“Technology killed it — and nobody saw it,” he said. Now, from his home in Vancouver, he watches the U.S. economic fallout with a sense of déjà vu. “There’s real affection for American culture here,” he said, “but people are frightened and saddened by what’s happening.”
“This could easily send Canada into a recession, too,” he added. “It’s miserable. Really bad.”
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