This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Marc Pascarelli, based in Miami, about his career pivot from white-collar media jobs to the marine mechanic trade. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
Over three decades, my hands-on media career slowly shrank down to a single, glowing screen.
It didn’t start out that way. I got a master’s from NYU‘s Interactive Telecommunications Program in the late ’90s. This was back when email was brand new and editing was an elite craft you learned by peering over someone’s shoulder in a dark room.
Looking back, my early career feels like a fun movie montage.
I did it all in media
My first job in the 90s was duplicating tapes for executives at Miramax. I moved on to AMC, cutting promos for Elvis movie marathons. I took film production gigs and found that I liked the physicality — being on location, behind the camera, loading film.
In the mid-2000s, I opened my own postproduction shop in downtown Manhattan. Having a physical headquarters was awesome, but I got ahead of my skis financially. After the 2008 crash, I couldn’t keep pouring money into rent on my freelance income.
Around 2010, my dad got sick, so I closed my New York shop and moved to South Florida. The next decade became a blur of corporate media pivots: a stint in digital cinema, running field production and editing for a Univision-Disney startup, and eventually getting swallowed by the daily cable news machine. By the time the pandemic hit, the network had restructured entirely, and all I did was re-edit the Spanish network’s stories in English. The creative work I loved was gone.
The editing suite started to feel like a trap. I was stuck in a windowless room, endlessly recutting the Spanish network’s political mudslinging into English. When they finally axed the English division post-COVID, my lack of fluent Spanish sealed my fate. I walked away with a buyout check in an unforgiving local media market.
I felt like I was too old in my mid-50s
By my early 50s, I was working remotely in 3D animation for major cable networks and creating digital graphics for documentaries. On paper, it was the dream remote gig. In reality: 10 hours a day staring at a screen in my home office, waiting on a 25-year-old coordinator in New York to approve a single frame. You’d get an email, followed by a Slack message asking if you saw the email, followed by a text asking if you got the Slack message. I’d be like “Yup, sure did. Googly eye emoji.”
I’m not a “woe is me” type, but the circumstances were building a case I couldn’t ignore. Tech neck. An aching back. Job postings offering less money for more responsibilities. And South Florida’s media market is bilingual — without fluent Spanish, the doors close fast. At some point, you look in the mirror and ask: Who’s dying to hire a 55-year-old video editor? Am I just going to rot in this chair?
So I started looking around my own neighborhood. Boatyards line US-1 all up and down South Florida. I researched yacht repairman salaries, and they weren’t bad. I’ve always been mechanically minded; on film sets, I loved hauling gear as much as cutting footage. And I didn’t want to spend my 50s whining about dwindling freelance rates.
The old-school move is: you get a degree. That’s what I really needed — another diploma under the bed. So I enrolled in the Marine Service Technologies program at McFatter Technical College.
I went to trade school
Trade school at 55 is a masterclass in shedding your ego. About 90% of my classmates were 18 to 24 years old. I showed up with a graying beard and a ball cap, next to teenagers whose dads had boats in the canal behind their houses. When they wore a cap and gown at graduation, it was their first. It was my third.
Early on, kids joked, “What’d you play with as a kid, a wooden hoop and a stick?” But I rigged up an iPad with a professional shotgun mic — the same setup I’d used shooting field news — to catch every detail of lectures about marine engines. They started calling me “Microphone Man.” By midterms, the same kids mocking the setup were asking, “Yo, Microphone Man, you uploading the study guide today?” I shared it with everyone, the professor included.
I also got a gig after class working the counter at West Marine — the Home Depot of boating supplies — learning the insider lingo one impatient boat owner at a time.
I have less screen time and more sun now
Near the end of the yearlong program, my instructor introduced me to a graduate running a business out of the Miami Beach Marina. The company sells, services, and teaches lessons on luxury yacht toys — among them eFoils, electric hydrofoil boards that don’t so much ride the water as hover above it. Basically, flying surfboards.
I wasn’t the young, flashy hire. But the owner actually valued my decades of professional reliability, my experience teaching snowboarding, and the technical know-how I’d picked up in college. Today, my job mixes hands-on mechanical work — servicing eFoil motors, replacing gaskets, greasing components — with taking clients out on Biscayne Bay for lessons.
Financially, I took a hit. I burned through savings for the year in school, though Florida’s vocational aid covered most of the tuition. I make about $25 an hour at the marina, which is unsettlingly close to what I was making as a freelance editor.
But desk work has a hidden cost: when you work from home in media, you’re never truly off the clock. Now my commute is a mile-long, sun-kissed scooter ride. And when my shift ends, my day is actually over. I’m outside on the water, moving my body, surrounded by people having a good time. I still take the occasional freelance editing gig on my days off, but my life doesn’t revolve around an inbox anymore.
Starting over in your 50s is daunting, but doing nothing is worse. Media skills don’t transfer easily to other corporate ladders, and nobody hands out second chances. You have to build them yourself. Making this pivot showed me that change is possible at any age. And I’d rather go down swinging in the Florida sun than fade away behind a monitor.
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