soo everyone wants to be a creative??

Looking at the state of jobs from a creative point of view, with a wild conspiracy on the future of dating.

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A Timeline of Kate Middleton's Royal Absence
Kate Middleton “November Photo” Theory
“Plus all the Brexit stuff”
This was the story, the meme, the everything of the week, month, quarter, etc. This and this were the best posts to come of it!

Why the House voted to ban TikTok
Biden to bully Trump on TikTok and China
“girl what??”
“Capital Hill interns fighting for their lives”
The TikTok-could-be-banned thing is so unserious and is going to be bad either way. A bunch of old morons ruling on something they don’t understand! Here’s my favorite TikTok Congress post.

RNC Fires Staff After Trump Takeover
Talk about regime changes.

Florida teachers can discuss sexual orientation
Circling back on this and closing the loop: Florida teachers can say gay — just not as a part of instruction.

Engagement at work among in 'dramatic decline'
Can a chief happiness officer improve morale?
Is kindness a leadership superpower?
I feel like I keep seeing “stories like this” — and this is going to be an ongoing saga, perhaps even the state-of-work story of the decade. Unfortunately, these “bosses” miss a crucial point: workers have already moved on, after going so long unheard and unsupported. No amount of “fun stuff” will make up for giving up your life for two days off, all in the service of making the rich richer. 

$500,000 sand dune built to protect US homes disappears
Hmm seems like a pretty obvious symbol of what’s happening, no? Anyway, Americans again losing the Do Anything But Take Meaningful Action Against Climate Change challenge.

Gen Zers face blindness epidemic
This is borderline fake news but I’m keeping an eye on it, as this doctor on TikTok qualified it. Likely all a hoax though!

Airbnb Bans Indoor Security Cameras
Lyft & Uber will leave Minneapolis
Outdoor Voices to Close All Stores
These all feel related, like an era of a 2010s Millennial moment is fading. Add in the ongoing Ephemeral Tattoo controversies too.

2/3 of Adults Would Rather Watch Movies Streaming
I’m taking this as a win.

I keep hearing that jobs are up even if unemployment has risen, despite trends of people hating their jobs. I see this and feel this from friends who are unemployed and friends who are working jobs that they hate and feeling my own discontent with “working.” I look on LinkedIn, which feels unusually active with people not posting but commenting, tagging, and sharing information about jobs that they want. This creative gig! That creative gig! Thousands of people have applied. Unfortunately applications are closed. Does anyone know anyone at any place? Everyone is searching for that one good job to see through the bullshit of “all this.” But something’s missing here, because it feels less that people are “looking for work” and more that we’re entering a 2010s hangover that is amplifying a certain type of talented coastal worker who is quite loudly expressing discontent.

I do think there are a lot of people who don’t have work — but I also have a theory about what’s happening, which I know people are going to hate but it has to be said: the state of work is actually good — if you’re working a job you don’t care about, if you’re willing to do a job to do a job. This is also to say: non-creative work is doing fine.

When we talk about the trend of people hating their jobs, I think we’re talking about a very unique Gen Z and Millennial person who was crafted by the 2010s landscape, who believe that they could be X creative and get a good job. The context here — which is increasingly going away — is that you had a booming, expansive tech market who was subsidizing the dreams of creative careers that were otherwise siloed to marketing agencies, freelancers, and the like. This was the dawn of the creative director! In-house writers! Brand illustrators! Company photographers! Those jobs still exist, but they’re becoming harder to get, not to mention the work being reshaped by AI. Pair this with what feels to be a growing market of people who want these very limited jobs and you see the problem. No one wants a “real” job, to work as an accountant, in healthcare, in the government: everyone wants a fun gay job now.

This is largely colloquial observations, but I’ve been collecting examples to qualify this bottleneck of so-called creative talent: Mark Duplass recently gave an interview where she spoke about how the post-strike Hollywood jobs haven’t materialized, which workers are corroborating; we’re about to face an incoming deluge of has-been creators, who attempted to “hit it big” in the 2010s but failed to sustain themselves, as Taylor Caniff’s story revealed (see also: Gabbie Hannah’s pivot to YMCA dance instructor); on a smaller, more everyday level, look to the viral story of Kiera Jones, who moved to Houston from Florida to pursue a content creation dream — only to face homelessness; companies that create tools for creatives keep getting in trouble for using AI artwork instead of using work from human artists; a quote I keep coming back to, from Issa Rae in Time: “There aren’t a lot of smart executives anymore. And a lot of them have aged out and are holding on to their positions and refusing to let young blood get in.”; as of 2021, almost half of college graduates with degrees in the arts regret their major; there are many post-mortem stories about AI and other technology taking the jobs of copywriters and art / visual development, not to mention how this tech is locking in on content and creation at large.

Pair all this with teenagers and young people also clawing their way into this flailing creative landscape, as best exemplified by the almost fictional viral post about a teenager making viral videos using ChatGPT. That may seem fake but consider more than half of Gen Z want to be influencers and, again, consider the stories of Caniff, Hannah, and Jones, all modern fables of the pursuit of creativity in these times. But who is to fault them or any of us? As a wise recent post observed, do the kids have hope anymore? What are they working toward? What do they have to aspie to? The planet is dying and everyone is fighting: no wonder they just want fun, “easy” creative jobs, which appear to pay a lot for little work (which any working creative can tell you is a fantasy). I see this so often in the social media work I do, where I consistently field DMs from young people who are “UGC creators.” What is that? A burgeoning breed of poster who has a modest or nonexistent following who more or less convinces a brand to give them swag or pay simply for posting at scale. Think accounts like this, this, and this and this, this, and this, all of which is propelled by the promise of financial salvation via TikTok Shop infomercial antics.

What’s missing in all of this, from the aspiring content creator to the aspiring writer, is the history of working creatives: the moment we’re exiting, where you could work as a creative, was not the norm. Creative jobs are supposed to be precarious. Creative jobs are not real but a creative profession is real. Look to the careers of Vivian Maier, who worked as a nanny while doing photography, or Octavia Butler, who is noted for her odd jobs that freed her creative mind, or even Bill Hader, who spent his twenties working as an editor in reality television. Getting paid to “do the thing you love” as a creative is not reality: it’s an unreal promise that the tech industry gave us, to exploit us before discarding us — and we’re at the end of that lifecycle. I find it wild that creatives of all ages and skill sets aren’t seeing this and, if you’ve hired for any creative position in the past five years, you’ve seen this first hand: any creative job you post gets thousands of applicants who largely don’t have the skillset or talent but harbor a dream of “working as a creative.”

That’s the problem: just because you’re creative or have an inkling of talent or “like storytelling” doesn’t mean you should be bestowed a job doing said talent. Somehow Hollywood and blurred nepotistic origin stories have spun a yarn that anyone with creative aspirations can “make it”: it’s one of the last surviving American dreams, that talent being discovered is real (but parents of mediocres creative subsidising their success isn’t). Creative work is hard work because you are your boss, your manager, and distributor who often operates outside of a steady job. To be a creative requires resilience as you’re entering a marathon game that is part survival of the fittest and part deferred (or no) payments in exchange for doing what you love. Get a dumb day job to pay your bills — then do you outside of the job, until the day comes when the tide shifts, when the creative work pays off: such is the grand tradition of creative work. Don’t blame the clogged, saturated industries for not giving you creative work. You own your destiny.

Yes, people are hurting for jobs — but I also think we’re (ironically) not getting creative with our approach to work. The solution isn’t a “creative job” that makes the pain of it all sting less: the answer is undoing the system. I leave you with words from Chauncey Hare, a photographer who quit photography to become a therapist in the service of helping undo people’s relationship to work. This is pulled from the book Quitting Your Day Job via Hare’s book Work Abuse.

Even well-established and prospering photographers of talent, artists well beyond the first flush of youth, have tacitly accepted a double standard for their own work: their livelihoods are made according to the standards set by magazines and agencies; their serious work is done on the weekends or between assignments, in the hope of producing an exhibition, or small book, or perhaps only a personal file that someone, someday, will look at openly and slowly and with pleasure, without wondering how the picture might be made more “effective” by tighter cropping and the addition of a good caption.

Who’s Afraid of the Whitney Biennial 2024?
First Impressions From the Whitney Biennial
Biennial Heralds a New Kind of Body Art
The Whitney Biennial — Or any biennial, triennial, etc.! — are my favorite art shows because they log time and capture trends: extremely my shit. I was going to tie this into the above essay but ran out of time (It was a long one, sorry bbs.). Anyway, I’m struck by the repeating that, despite the urgency for art now, the show underwhelms and is quite riskless, if not boring: it doesn’t seem to rise to the occasion of these times. Even the final review says it’s “light on loud” despite the positive view. (Shout out to Demian DinéYazhi’ who snuck a message in support of Palestine into the show, without curators knowing.)

Support Tish Bailey
Niche but it fits into a trend of genre news regarding late 20th century and early 21st century (Black, female) vocalists whose voices were used on popular and heavily sampled tracks who got…no payment, despite their songs shaping culture. In this case, there’s a GoFundMe to help the vocalist behind “Freak Like Me.” I find these interesting and important as we barrel into a time where AI, tech, etc. is stealing the human — and these were humans doing the same thing years prior.

Unplug Your Laptop, or Plug in Forever
FYI: keeping your laptop always plugged in is actually bad for the battery. The more you know!

The Times’ New Word-Search Game Is Genius
How the NYT is building a modern tech stack
I meant to put this in the Report™ last week as

Ryan Broderick

mentioned it: a lot of talk about how the Times is a tech company now with the launch of new games — but I disagree. My theory is that the Times is just going to become Highlights for adults. We’re seconds away from them dropping a Hidden Pictures feature.

Colman Domingo Cowboy Boots to Oscars
Bradley Cooper Has the Most Special Red Carpet Date
"Kate McKinnon wears a custom Akris suit"
These stories don’t matter but they gat at my big Oscar takeaway: bell bottoms for men are back baby!! This is likely a late delayed Alessandro Michele runoff finally reaching the less adventurous, as ushered in by actually queer (and Bradley…) persons.

Lily Gladstone's School Boyfriend Gifted Something
”She wore it during and after the Oscars”
The Lily Gladstone Oscar campaign was one of the more endearing public storylines in recent memories. Hometown girl goes to Hollywood! We love to see it, hated to see her not-win.

LUNGE
Last week’s essay struck something, as I heard from a few people about wanting more grown up items. One person I heard from was someone doing something about it: Nicolas of LUNGE, which are very chic dog items. This also brought up a key point that I think is the (sad, capitalist) salve to kidification: spending more money or more time to source unique, quality things. To undo the buy-at-shoppy-shop culture, you have to invest something. The point is not ease.

"Shigeichi Negishi has died age 100."
This was a viral post about the death of the inventor of karaoke. Pour one out for an icon, who had a lot to do with democratizing music! 

"Burial - 'Archangel' edit from  @DJ_Seinfeld"
“of course he went to clubs”
"for making bad music"
“Shot, chaser”
Drama of the week: DJ Seinfeld did an obvious/boring Burial edit and got roasted for releasing…a notes app apology?? Please be serious, diva!

The Traitors
Let’s Cast Season 3
I just started watching The Traitors and the hype is REAL. What a show!! It’s like watching a board game: I’m obsessed, as I love playing games. I want to be on it and or do this with friends!! Which

Brendon Holder

said he was doing and…jealous.

I have a brain infection that I have to share, which started from chatting with

[SIC] Weekly

and has become more pronounced since that conversation: we are getting closer and closer to a movement where “straight” women and “gay” men start dating. Walk with me on a journey of understanding! We have a few stops to help you see what I see.

First stop: the dating apps and dating are broken. A major conversation in the past six months — which has been building since at least 2020 — is that the dating apps do not work and that the pursuit of a date in these times is a losing, fruitless battle. CNN, The Guardian, The Guardian again, The Guardian again, The Independent, Vox, New York Times, and USA Today have all put flags in the sand, which is underscored by a whopping 79% of college and graduate students not using the apps, according to an Axios study. (A caveat: college students likely historically don’t use dating apps because they’re not needed. Older adults? Different story.) Cut to the “Dating sucks!” and post-app stories from Vogue, Forbes, Dazed, Vice, NPR, and the New York Times (twice) this week. It’s like

Telling the Bees

said on TikTok: “we’ve dated before [dating apps], we’ll date after them.”

But what if the issue isn’t the apps or dating but the people? Thus the next stop: for non-queer persons, there is a widening gulf between genders, based on an inability for men and women to communicate. This is cultural and political but is best summed up by a recent TikTok trend of men getting hyped to share the amount of women they’re going to talk to at a party, only to reveal that they talked to no one. It’s a joke! And it’s a funny one! But it highlights the growing “global gender divide” as illustrated by stories from Financial Times, The Economist, Axios, Insider, and The Hill have been examining this from a largely political bend, which Vox and The Atlantic are qualifying with doubts — and many of these stories highlight the increasing bitterness men have against women as it relates to equality, advancement, and more. This all gets at the sirenic yet dramatic Washington Post editorial board piece from last November: “if attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage.” But don’t blame this on politics, on women drifting left and while the boo-hoo poor men suck Trump’s politics: the men are also creating their own problem. Stories of young men drifting right (which seems to happen every quarter) and other autonomous men stories, like men turning to stylists for fashion help instead of wives, say one thing while posts of men saying that “liking tomboys” makes you gay meeting with the rising tide that men just like made up women, which is how we have the “Sydney Sweeney’s big thangs cured wokeness!” convo. Rotted, all of it.

What’s a girl to do? This takes us to our next stop: people are getting queerer and queerer. This week, Gallup released findings that queer identification is up to 7.6%. That’s cool! It also highlights that one in five Gen Z adults identifies as LGBTQ+, which builds on similar findings in 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2019 (which backs into more findings from year before, about Millenials). This may sound ridiculous but there is more of an open-minded-ness of adults and young adults now that indicates binary dating might have an expiration date: why deal with these shitty men when you can opt for something different? This isn’t to say there’s going to be a rising tide of same sex women/femme relationships, but there is a larger “anything goes'' possibility that we cannot look away from.

And this leads us to our last stop, which is extreme and ridiculous but entirely possible given the path we’ve walked: we could very well see a moment where queer women and queer men date. There is a fantastic tension occurring right now that is timeless but “hot right now” in that “straight” women are lusting after gay men. This builds on the literally timeless culture of straight women and gay men bonds, which has become exacerbated by the likes of Pedro Pascal and more men that are longed for beyond friendship. I’ve been in many “Can we please?” relationships before with girl friends and, perhaps if I was younger and was more sexually fluid, I would have given such a relationship a shot. But for the younger me and similar young queers of today? This is entirely possible and I’m seeing indications of such a possibility thanks to a culture of jokes relating to loving borderline gay boys with a pretty face, the gay son and thot daughter joining forces, stories of girls dating queer boys, and future projections of life with your gay husband, not to mention media like Maestro (and even Central Cee’s “Doja”) along with the rise in babygirl culture. I’m also reminded of the very viral 2023 TikTok storyline of Jacob Hoff and Samantha Wynn Greenstone, who were a point of fascination because they are a gay-straight couple who are getting married. While seemingly a performance or deep friendship, the Hoff/Wynn model might catch on: who is to say that this couldn’t work? Who is to say that a healthy, romantic, heterosexually asexual long-term relationship might not last? Why does dating have to include sex, monogamy, or procreation to be successful? If we’re questioning our genders and sexualities, we’re also going to question relationship structures — and that could mean friendships turning into long term commitments and a new era of sexual fluidity that remains queer despite “being straight.”

And thus ends the journey of my brain infection. Will any of this happen? I have no idea but, in this economy, it seem possible that a straight woman and gay man could get together and have a more healthy, happy, and loving relationship than with a mouth-breathing Joe Rogan wannabe who will hold it against someone that they’re successful and not a trad wife. Who wants to deal with such a retrograde dude? Go with a more modern man: date a gay boy. Be free, be queer, be happy!

"A classic"
“Can you chug”
This Tweet on sharing TikToks before TikTok dies is a great time to look through. Enjoy these two, the first one I had never seen and the second one an all time classic.

“When you're such a has-been”
“Where’s Messi?”
“it’s ok peepaw”
"ryan’s filler…"
“which could mean anything”
Best Oscar posts. Real wild how this conversation nosedived after a day? Says a lot!

“real human teeth”
“I just saw god”
“shoutout to them”
I think we’re approaching a Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons supremacy storyline. My only critique, which feel free to come for me: Jesse’s gauntness is starting to make them look like siblings.

“No Chick-Fil-A sauce?”
This post went wild viral this week, which I am only sharing to put on record something that paid subscribers have been following me say for a few weeks: the Chick-Fil-A sauce girl will be the new Brittany Broski, if she plays her cards right.

“a meme from online”
This reminds me that I had a dream about Elon Musk this week, an epic where we were dating and he was a nightmare but I somehow reformed him and got him to host a concert sponsored by Playskool. Anyway, Kathy Bates has to play him in a movie.

"Revealed on March 13"
Don’t ask me why I’ve been watching blind item TikToks but you have to watch this one about Taylor Swift and the, uhh, criminal she is related to. This has been an ongoing discussion!

“POVERTY”
“NEXT SINGLE IS”
“what kind of fucking edit”
“Brainrot city”
These all capture a sort of young-people-braindead-mania that I am obsessed with. The last one very accurately acts as a primer on Gen A/A-Zoomer slang.

“Weird video”
Speaking of brain rot, the parents are brainrotted too.

“Are y’all in my room?”
This is funny, but it might also illustrate that the baby blue bedroom is the ivy wall of 2024.

“tried to take a cute yoga timelapse”
Thing I laughed at the most this week.

“my man lowkey a freak”
And he’s coming on Easter too. Love that lord of not-mine!

“He doesn’t want to be on top”
This is just as good as sending your husband to fork jail.

“Chanteur et rapper”
Me trying to speak french.

And, finally, me opening my eyes at 7AM everyday.

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