We're In the Middle of The Great Flattening

Creating can be hard, but it shouldn't feel impossible.

I know this guy we’ll call Jack. He moved out to Los Angeles during the 2010s after ten years of working in the NYC hospitality industry. Around that time, all kinds of people I knew who could begrudgingly be put under the label of “creative types” made the same move throughout the decade, supposedly because there was a whole new gold rush happening out there at the time.

Just like any run, however, not everybody gets lucky, and eventually the nuggets stop showing up no matter how much you kept panning. I don’t remember the exact moment when I started noticing it, but I’d say it wasn’t long after the first Covid vaccines became available when I started seeing the first little trickles of people moving back east from L.A. I guessed that it was nature taking its course, and that every generation has its coast hoppers who go where the money and jobs are in their given industry, but I was wrong. The post-vaccination exodus I was seeing was part of the creative boom that had taken place over the last 10-15 years going bust, a bubble bursting that is still taking place in excruciatingly slow motion.

I hate the term “creative,” and I know there are some people out there who’d rather me label Jack as somebody who works in the hospitality industry, but those people have probably never worked a bartending or restaurant job before and don’t understand how creative you have to be in order to have any success and that many of us get jobs making drinks or taking orders because we want to supplement our creative endeavors. When I met Jack, he’d graduated from SVA and was a graphic designer moonlighting as a bartender but was also taking small acting roles because he liked the extra cash and thought it was fun. Eventually, the part-time gig slinging cocktails became permanent, but Jack was enterprising and decided to go into business for himself as a consultant who could mockup ideas and concepts with the skills he’d learned in school. That was about 2013, and at the time, striking out on his own looked like the best thing to do and the right time to do it for Jack. He also wanted to keep trying to land acting roles, so he packed up and headed out to California.

Around the 2010s, a lot of people I knew started things up. They launched clothing brands, set up non-profits, opened restaurants, shops, indie publishing imprints, and other ventures based on their vision and whatever money they had or could get. It feels silly saying the scrappy 20-tens, but just like there was a gold rush for media and entertainment jobs around that time, it’s easy to overlook how many people in other areas felt impelled to do their own thing. Some wanted to get rich, others just wanted to have a business; neither of those possibilities feel even remotely possible now. Some have been able to weather the storm, while Jack tells me he’s “trying to figure out [his] next moves.”

Chalk it up to my own naivety, but I had always figured that people in the service industry would at least be able to keep going in L.A. I know their industry is suffering from (take your pick) tariffs, lack of tourists, people not wanting to spend, rising food costs, higher rent, or whatever else make it incredibly hard to keep a place open, but I didn’t think it was move back to NYC bad. I figured that at least there are jobs right now, even if it’s just the sort of thing that would just hold Jack over until his business picked back up.

“Nope,” Jack tells me before a pause. Both places are expensive, the difference is that “it’s just easier to hustle them in New York than it is in L.A.” Either way, he admits there’s also a bit of pride involved: “I’d rather end up bartending brunch shifts in Brooklyn than having to serve anybody in L.A. I feel like an old man there.” Later, he adds, “I’ve given up on the acting thing,” because he doesn’t feel inspired anymore.

We’re in the middle of a creative flattening and it isn’t just a coastal thing or something that’s relegated to one industry or medium. I’ve talked to people in Austin, Chicago, New Orleans, and other places across the country who all describe the same feelings that there just won’t be work for them in their field. Obviously, the great unknown of how much A.I. can really replace humans is a huge worry, but I’ve also heard people concerned that their involvement in union activities could make it impossible to even get interviews, and the constant threat of private equity looking to take over companies and run them into the ground seems to be something folks in almost industry I can think of have to at least consider in this era of consolidation.

For me, it’s easiest to see things from the perspective of somebody who has worked as a writer and in New York City media for over 15 years. I’ve been around long enough that people were talking about the “good old days” when I started, but it’s gone from bad to apocalyptic over that time. If you have or had a job at a media company since around the time when the Internet started to really inch up towards television as the American public’s main news source—let’s say 2010 because this Pew report showed that young people were going to push that number even higher towards the Internet before TikTok entered into the conversation—you’ve likely seen not just one, but several companies you or your colleagues worked at fold. Layoffs are a constant threat, and the idea that there are benevolent billionaires out there who want to turn things around because it’s for the good of the public is a fantasy.

Working in media has been a shitshow for as long as I can recall, so it was commonplace to see friends and colleagues to give up and move on to greener, and more lucrative, pastures. Some went on to become creative directors, others went full into marketing or publicity, while a more than a few made the move to California, lured there by promise of a writing job for a show or after selling the rights to something they’d written. Personally, that move was never going to happen for me; I love L.A., but I need seasons and places to walk. That didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty of jealousy since I was still scraping by writing articles that I got paid maybe a hundred bucks a pop for. I was a “creative,” but churning out “content” wasn’t what I’d had in mind for a writer. The people who were going out west seemed to have more freedom and an actual, viable career path. Then things changed.

I know there wasn’t one The Moment, but I do see the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike as the point when a lot of us still out here in the content mines started understanding that the grass wasn’t as green on the other side as we’d thought. Before the strike, I think a lot of writers who lived in New York or wanted to work on TV or film saw L.A. as a nice change, a dream, or, at the very least, a backup plan. When it became clear that the “Now hiring” signs had been pulled from the Netflix and Hulu windows, and that it had never been that easy to go from here to there was when I noticed a lot of people started to really panic.

Lauren Bans wrote an article for New York last month about how she’s watched things go from sunny to bleak in Los Angeles since moving there in 2014, including 2025’s horrific wildfires, Hollywood’s continued downsizing, and ICE roaming the streets. There are numbers to back up how the California dream is vanishing for so many, but there’s something else:

More telling than the stats is the mood around Los Angeles. (Sorry to be so L.A., but feelings matter.) To say we’re having a down moment is putting it mildly. “The vibes in L.A. got very We’re all so sad, we’re all so broke. It just made me feel hopeless,” says Niccole, a writer-actor friend who moved back to New York this past November after ten years in L.A.

My latest friend to abandon Los Angeles — let’s call him Dave because he kinda looks like Dave Franco and will be flattered by this comparison — told me he was shocked by the response he got from Angelenos as he made his good-bye rounds. “Not one person gasped or asked ‘Why?!’ when I told them I was moving,” he says. “Everyone was like, ‘Good for you.’ Or even whispered conspiratorially, ‘I wish I could do that.’”

I started thinking about how the NYC situation often feels like a funhouse mirror version of that what Bans wrote: people here are sad and broke, everybody seems stuck, yet the place feels not just full, but overstuffed. I’m constantly walking around and mumbling Who are these fucking people because in over 20 years, I’ve never seen so many people who don’t look like they live here or even want to seem as if they might. It’s always been a transient city, but lately it has felt like a playground for the mediocre; just the most boring corporate “activation” shit going on everywhere you look, and every business owner I talk to is just getting by no matter how much press or social media love they get. Plus, it’s more expensive than ever. People can’t find affordable places to live, and over 85,000 people stayed in shelters “on a typical night” last year, while tall buildings keep going up and 50,000 empty “ghost apartments” sit unlisted and unused. A thing I think NYC, L.A., and a handful of other cities share, and that it’s going to take a long time to undo, is how much power leaders gave to corporations. That bubble was bound to burst, leaving miles of empty storefronts in urban areas across the country. It’s extremely difficult to make it in these places as an artist. I know the old trope was to add “Unless you come from money or have connections,” and that still is a big help, but not big enough if the jobs or opportunities just aren’t around.

The city bubble is one thing—NYC and L.A. have been ruled “dead” and come back from the grave a few times—but the creative bubble bursting is going to have long-term repercussions for the individuals whose careers are being impacted, as well as the culture as a whole. Things have become so flattened, corporate, and expensive, that there often doesn’t even feel like there’s room to dream, let alone figure out how to make money doing what you love. Just looking at the news once is stifling enough, so I can understand why people like Jack and others have told me they don’t feel inspired to even try to create.

I’ve known Jack for almost 15 years, and I feel like he’ll be fine. Other people I know who have been held up or laid off will as well. Humans have always found a way, and I don’t think we’re totally a braindead mass of idiots who want to consume slop and go to bed—not yet, at least. There will always be the people who come out OK on the other side—but also those who don’t. The latter is what I worry about, specifically when I start thinking about the Big City Dreams people have when they move to cities like NYC or L.A.

When I think about Bans’ New York article about the emptying out of L.A., my mind goes back to a century ago, the late-1920s, back when the motion picture industry was “disrupted” by films with sound, also known as “talkies.” In the years that followed the popularity of The Jazz Singer in 1927, countless writers also made the move from cold New York City to sunny Los Angeles. Some thrived, while others didn’t. Either way, by about the 1940s, the studios didn’t see as much reason to pay journalists and novelists big money, so the work began to dry up for many of them. While many of the writers carried their bad habits with them from the east coast out west, I always think about how watching the dream of having a decent life doing what they loved was the eventual ruin of some of my favorite writers. Dashiell Hammett died at 66 in 1961, but I wonder if he had never gone to Hollywood if he’d have faced as much scrutiny for his political beliefs from J. Edgar Hoover and HUAC—it’s said his 1951 imprisonment and blacklisting for refusing to rat out other members of the Civil Rights Congress, combined with all the drinking and smoking, left him broken. Dorothy Parker was still out in Hollywood and doing so poorly by the 1950s that she was on unemployment, and by now everybody knows how things turned out for F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novelist was the poster boy for bad behavior for most of his life, but Hollywood at least offered him some hope after he pissed away so much of his talent, life, and marriage. When that hope dried up, and after a year of sobriety, he died of a heart attack in Sheilah Graham’s apartment just south of Sunset Blvd. at the age of 44. Just two years earlier, in 1938, he wrote producer Joseph Mankiewicz a letter after Fitzgerald’s work on the script for the film Three Comrades had been drastically changed:

To say I’m disillusioned is putting it mildly. For nineteen years, with two years out for sickness, I’ve written best-selling entertainment, and my dialogue is supposedly right up at the top. . . . I am utterly miserable at seeing months of work and thought negated in one hasty week. I hope you’re big enough to take this letter as it’s meant—a desperate plea to restore the dialogue to its former quality. . . . Oh, Joe, can’t producers ever be wrong? I’m a good writer—honest.

Doing what you love is tough. There will be heartbreak and disappointment even in the good times. But if you’re a person who thinks and feels, these days are especially heavy and sometimes it can feel tough to muster even an ounce of inspiration. It’s bleak out there, and I don’t have any answers as to how we can fix things, but I do see one silver lining, and that’s the human need to make stuff. I often comfort myself and friends of mine who will bring up their own fears about never finding work again or machines replacing artists by reminding them that there have been periods in the past where people thought the downfall of humanity as they knew it was nigh, and they responded just by continuing to create. The Romantic period of the late-18^th century is my favorite example that I tend to go back to, how artists and thinkers feared the machines of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment thinkers need to rationalize everything would destroy creativity, deprive people of inspiration, and suck all the wonder out of the world, so they just created art and poetry that is easy to see was a reaction to the steam engines and public intellectuals who shaped the world around them. Those people created because it was what they needed to do. It’s easy to sometimes forget that the reason most of us started writing or painting or playing music in the first place was because we wanted to. Turning your passion into a career, no matter what it is, will always have the boring, mundane, and downright challenging moments, and right now is one big rough moment for so many of us that might last a long time. If that’s the case, then the only thing to do is keep going, continue creating, do it whenever you can, but do it because you want to, because the world is crap without creations. I usually hesitate to say something is a revolutionary act, but in these cruel, uninspired days, the simple act of making and enjoying yourself, is a small, necessary revolution.