Gen X was obsessed with anti-sellout culture, but maybe capitalism won after all

Life is really expensive, so does selling out even mean anything these days? On career pivots, career meltdowns, and content monetization.

Apr 02, 2025

I’m convinced that in the second half of life, you often find yourself having to relearn things all over again. It’s a bit of a rude awakening because life is a beautiful, if puzzling, story when the unexpected comes in waves. It’s not fully yours to control, so you learn how to surf in order to temper the disruptions. Or, you can just see where it takes you.

After a series of consecutive sucker punches the last seven or so months, something good has finally happened in our household. Not exactly life-changing, but a huge lifestyle shift in which I am now living with a spouse who works from home 2-3 days a week. If you’re a long-time blog reader or a former bakery customer, then you know how big a change this is.

After thirty years of waking up before sunrise to start work in the early morning hours at restaurants, commercial kitchens, and urban greenhouses, Mark now logs into an office job (same company, different role) at 9 A.M. He’s so unaccustomed to starting his day this late that he sometimes bakes bread or preps dinner because he doesn’t know what else to do with his time. Having worked blue collar careers his entire adult life, he’s now joined those of us who sit at desks and stare into computer screens eight hours a day, some days from the corporate office and other days in one of the kid’s unoccupied bedrooms that is now co-opted as his WFH workspace.

“It’s kind of like I’m not working at all,” he confesses sheepishly after closing the laptop at 5 P.M.

How else would someone who’s worked on his feet, lifting 50 pound bags of flour or produce in manual labor jobs for nine hours a day react?

“Office jobs are like 65% actual work and 35% bullshitting with your coworkers and making coffee runs,” I tell him. He nods because he understands. He’s on the other side now.

Baking in a commercial kitchen — A past life as a business owner and baker

It’s only been six weeks and the novelty has yet to wear off, but it’s thrown everything in our household off kilter. Even the cat is confused by this change in schedule and thinks that every day is a weekend now.

And here is where I make my own confession because I don’t know how I feel yet about having to share the apartment during the weekdays with another human. It’s not like I don’t know how to make that work. We made it work for a year and a half when the kids were doing high school remotely (also, it’s bonkers that this actually happened), but when your lives are intimately intertwined inside a city apartment, it’s an adjustment for everyone.

The Gen X career meltdown

You may have read this article published last week in the NYT by now: “The Gen X Career Meltdown” is about aging workers in creative fields who find themselves pushed out of their careers and made irrelevant. I touched on this a few months ago in this post, “Can we talk about this horrendous job market?” Reader comments are chiming in to add that it’s not just creative fields that are feeling the downward spiral, but other industries too. The article is a little too on the nose and I personally know too many people who are in the same underemployed situation as I am. Others are hanging on for dear life till the robots come for their jobs. Most of us are just trying to survive as we slowly crawl towards retirement.

Think about this: are you where you imagined you would be when you thought about your future life ten years ago? It may not even resemble anything like it was. One of the markers of wisdom is knowing when to quit. The other is learning to let go. They’re closely related, but not the same. One is a little more reactive, the other acted upon with more intention. When I think about how my design career evolved and then winded down over the last few years, it transpired through a combination of quitting and letting go.

“The cruel irony is, the thing I perceived as the sellout move is in free-fall,”1 surmises a TV and movie director interviewed for The NYT article.

Not to bring up stereotypical, generational drivel into the conversation, but Gen X really was the anti-sell out generation. It was so core to our countercultural ethos that it was embedded deeply in our collective mindset. Being called a yuppie was an insult (now there’s a word you don’t hear anymore) and there was nothing worse than being accused of selling out and betraying your artistic integrity. We were anti-corporate because the capitalistic machine exploited art and music, co-opting underground movements for profit and marketing the commodification of subcultures for mainstream consumption. We rebelled against it all.

Looking back, it seems insufferably earnest because you know how it goes. Gen X grew up, got jobs, earned good money, and even became the innovators of some of the tech platforms that would eventually lead us to influencer culture. Monetization has been normalized for some time now. It didn’t happen overnight, but you don’t really hear about selling out anymore because it isn’t really a thing. In the 90s, it was possible to work a part time job while pursing your art and still make your rent, but that anti-corporate lifestyle became untenable because life just got exponentially more expensive. Corporate sponsorships, once the death knell to your indie cred isn’t considered shameful, but smart and savvy. Personal branding and the creator economy isn’t going anywhere, and now with mass layoffs and ageist irrelevance, some of us might be going back to that DYI ethos.

Mark and I always chuckle when we read idyllic posts from well-meaning, but clueless people who daydream about quitting their jobs and opening a coffee shop or a bakery. And it’s always people in tech or finance who are burnt out and looking for less stressful ways to make a living.

Sorry to break it to you, but this ain’t it. When I’m in a particularly salty mood I get annoyed at how romanticizing small business life undermines the hard work and physical labor it takes to run a food business. We were stressed a lot. The numbers at the end of every month made us question whether or not it was worth all the long hours, but chefs don’t go into food to make money.2 They go into it for the love of their craft and I always found the disparity in our incomes so ridiculous. It just never seemed fair that I could earn as much as 6x an hour than my spouse, just sitting on my couch moving a bunch of pixels around.

But now, with my own freelance work drying up, our lives have switched. One of us needs to be a cog in the machine for health insurance and now it’s his turn, working a full time desk job for the first time. Like other Gen Xers, our income keeps taking a hit, so whatever we have to do to pay the bills is fair game. I wouldn’t say that I’m having a career meltdown (yet), but I’ve definitely changed my tune on monetization, even saying yes to things I wouldn’t have entertained before.

cat on a desk — Back when it was just me and Nori, my sole WFH companion.

As a non-monetized blogger, I left a lot of money on the table

Two years ago, when I decided to turn on paid subscriptions, I asked my kids what they thought of the idea. Not really sure why I was asking for their opinion, but getting paid for any kind of content seemed radical at the time, considering I was so stubborn against it in my past blogging life.

They looked at me quizzically and practically rolled their eyes.

“Why wouldn’t you?” They answered with a shrug.
“There’s nothing wrong with making money off your work.”

It really was the most perfectly Gen Z response they could give.

But there were a few of us during the 2000s era of blogging who agonized over our stubbornness against putting ads on our sites. We had endless debates over it, internally and with each other. I don’t even remember what the hangup was aside from staying true to some idealized moral code of being authentic and not compromising our values. I left a lot of money on the table, but I didn’t feel right about monetizing anything that had to do with my family, which is probably why I threw that question out to my kids that day.

Maybe I still carried a deep-seated discomfort about being associated with “mommy bloggers” just because I sometimes wrote about motherhood. Admittedly, I had a stupid chip on my shoulder because blogging wasn’t my job—I never did it for the money. I was completely creeped out by brands who would send me fully fleshed scripts, complete with the names of my children, outlining how to weave product placements into blog posts. So, I had my reasons.

Blogging jumped the shark when I got a call one day from a Bravo TV network producer who was pitching a new reality show about mom bloggers and wanted to know if I was interested in possibly being part of the cast. This was in the early 2010s.

“My life really isn’t that exciting,” I insisted on the phone. “I don’t like drama.”

“That’s not an issue! We’d create situations,” he explained. “For example, maybe you’re planning a birthday party for one of the kids. We’d create some drama by having a venue cancel at the last minute or some other unexpected incident that throws the plans into chaos.”

Um, what? I was utterly fascinated so I continued the conversation.

“Yeaaaah. I’m not really comfortable with made-up scenarios because my readers would see right through that. I just write about real life. I don’t even monetize my blog.”

“Oh.” (long pause) “That’s interesting. That’s an archetype we hadn’t considered. Well, if you’re not interested can you recommend another blogger just like you who we can contact?”

Thank god that pilot never got green lighted—I thought it was a terrible idea for a show. I admit I was tempted for a minute by the per-episode payout, but I would have considered myself the biggest sell out of all if I said yes.

A round up of links

To read:

It Is Very Good That You Are Here (Orion Magazine)
A visual poem by Madeline Jubilee Saito.
Severance: a closer look into the mid-century, brutalist, and retro-futuristic universe of lumon design (Designboom)
I haven’t watched Severance yet, but I loved this breakdown on how the set and its meticulously curated furniture pieces create the sterile corporate aesthetics and retro-futuristic dystopia of the series.
What happens to health research when ‘women’ is a banned word? – Trump's federal funding cuts are shutting down studies on Alzheimer’s care, uterine fibroids and pregnancy risks — all because they focus on gender. (19th News)
Really bad news for us when women’s health issues are already under-researched.
Why so many young women are opting out of first dates (Dazed Digital)
This is something I’ve definitely noticed!
Different ideal, same pressure: Gen Z’s fixation on ‘perfect’ skin echoes millennials’ obsession on being thin (El País)
From thinspo to Sephora kids to skincare culture, the beauty obsessions of pre-teen girls.
Unzipped at 30: The Story Behind the Cult 90s Fashion Documentary (Another Mag)
I was living in Portland when this documentary of Isaac Mizrahi’s 1994 Fall collection was released, and I was obsessed with this film. It was one of three NYC-centered movies that made me intensely homesick (Party Girl with Parker Posey and the drag documentary, Wigstock, being the other two). I can’t tell you how many times I watched Unzipped as a video rental when it was released on VHS (lol). The celebrity cameos and 90s supermodels gave the documentary its gossipy effervescence, but it was Mizrahi’s humor, charm, and personality that carried that film.

To make and drink:

A hat tip to my friend, Tanya, for giving me the wisdom of these two herbs, nettle and tulsi. I’ve steeped it together as an iced tea and drink it almost daily. Nettle, among other benefits, is anti-inflammatory and can help ease menopause symptoms. Tulsi (or holy basil) helps with stress and metabolic conditions such as glucose levels and cholesterol. Maybe it’s all in my head, but I swear it does help me stay calm(er).

Starting over, at the very bottom

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