I’m writing this in Hawaii as I sit in a rented apartment having spent nine days here. In the olden days of yore, I might have had a two week vacation. Pfft! Not anymore. These days, I feel more obligated to get back to work sooner. Vacations are taken at shorter periods. I don’t think I’m in any way special. This has become the norm. (And for those of you thinking, “You got a vacation???” That’s how strange the world has become…)
But I read a NY Times article this morning about the Gen-X’ers who’ve had to live through very uncertain times. It’s here:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/28/style/gen-x-creative-work.html
And this statement rings very, very true:
I am at the very end of the boomer generation, and, frankly, NEVER felt like one. I identify far more as an X-er. Their reality has been mine, especially in anything creative.
If I talked to musicians 10 years (or more) older than I, they would regale with stories of live performances and fun times. I got to do some of that in the 1990s. But the main gig I wanted to do (become a professor of music in oboe) dried up WHILE I WAS IN SCHOOL. The ground was essentially shifting the entire way through. There were fewer and fewer opportunities, more competition, cities and small towns I couldn’t move to… The entire university and college systems were remaking their models away from educational institutions and toward profit models. So becoming an oboe professor was not realistic. It wasn’t impossible. But it wasn’t exactly viable either — not with a spouse who didn’t want to move wherever “there” was.
He’s not to blame. I wouldn’t want to move wherever “there” was either. For any position, though, there were at least 300 applicants for an associate position that paid crap and didn’t come with any sort of benefits. It didn’t call itself a “gig” job at that point, but that’s what it was.
Orchestra jobs were also in high demand for the musicians who wanted one. If you were a string player, your odds were better. As an oboist (and/or English Hornist), there are only 2 to 3 of us in any given orchestra (not 20 or 30). Through the 1980s and into the 1990s a lot of orchestras struggled and folded. Funding dried up. Audiences (who were largely elderly) were literally dying. Support dimmed. Any seat that opened for an orchestra job was met with hundreds of applicants.
This is not a pity party. It’s an “I can relate” party. But I shifted in the 1990s and went off to do something more lucrative. I am pointing out that these shifts in our economy didn’t start in the 2000s. They were in motion years before that.
And they continue to be in motion. There’s an old adage: “The only thing you can count on is change.” The X-generation has been living through that watching all these creative endeavors getting eaten up by technology for a public that doesn’t know the difference.
Sure, the owners and higher ups make more by eliminating the workforce in favor of the technology. But the tech is only as good as the input it gets. The tech needs the human input (at least at this point) to continue thriving. Eventually, the human input might not matter anymore. This is true. I’m more troubled by the widespread acceptance of the exploitative models than anything. Since when did the mighty dollar become so important? Answer: Decades ago in everything from education to career choices. (If we want to go back in history, we can probably go all the way back to the Bronze Age, but that’s a different article.)
The Boomers are mostly to blame for this shift, I gotta admit. They became overly concerned with their profits and didn’t care much about shared cultural activities.
And now, we’re living the results.
The only way to get the creative jobs back is to CARE. Care that it’s a live, real musician. Care that it’s an actual photographer. Care that there’s a physical, thinking writer behind the article, book or manual. Care and buy from actual, bonafide people.
The only way to combat this behavior is to support the human element. Buy responsibly. Do what you can.
🙏