This Isn't Burnout

Why Your Creative Job Isn’t Fun Anymore

I recently met with a friend who is doing an intensive cooking course. We were sitting in a café near Brockley station, watching staff prep an outside barbecue. “Do you know why all the gloves, tissues, and plasters in professional kitchens are blue?” she asked me. I didn’t. “It’s a colour that doesn’t occur in food naturally. If a piece of this stuff gets into your dish, you’ll know. Food safety.”

And I thought: I wish capitalist bullshit came in blue. Because it looks like we’ve ingested too much of it and it’s making us sick.

If you need any evidence, look at these endless articles talking about rising depression levels in the creative industries. Everyone knows it’s happening, but we seem to be struggling to identify the cause. People talk of shrinking budgets, of AI-threat, of the work no longer being ‘fun.’ And it’s all true. But there’s clearly something else going on.

Any therapist would say that depression is often anger turned inward. But anger about what? We’re among the most privileged people on the planet. The average salary in advertising is three to four times the national median. What exactly are we so angry about?

I have a theory. It gets pretty bleak, and if you’re still convinced an ECD title or Cannes Lions Grand Prix will deliver lasting happiness, you might want to stop reading here. Those who have already tried that route and realised it doesn’t work, please do leave a comment.

Personally, I think we might be fucked on three different levels, simultaneously.

1. Our Creativity Is Being Used Against Us

Creativity is a fundamental human drive. The psychologist Rollo May called it a daimonic force — the need to impose our will onto chaos to feel whole. We are meaning-making animals, we need to be creative to stay emotionally healthy.

Creative industries systematically short-circuit this life-force and institutionalise it. They divide people into ‘creatives’ and ‘non-creatives.’ For the majority — the account managers, strategists, and producers — their creative impulse is dismissed as irrelevant in the name of corporate efficiency.

For designated ‘creatives,’ the offer seems more generous: a high salary to do what you love. But it’s a sinister deal. Your creative life-force, the most personal part of you, is exploited to sell commodities, often at horrific social and ecological cost. You are paid to betray the deepest parts of yourself. And, to add insult to injury, you’re often told to call that work ‘purposeful’ when everyone understands full well that the only real purpose is to make the shareholders richer.

Of course, we create justifications. We point to occasional campaigns that are meaningful, funny, or beautifully crafted. But the daily compromise wears you down. There’s only so long you can lie to yourself and others before it starts corroding the deepest parts of who you are. Depression is the most logical consequence of this bargain.

2. We Are Structurally Torn

People in creative industries occupy what the sociologist Erik Olin Wright calls a ‘contradictory class location’. On one hand, we sell our labour, are subject to dismissal, and don't own the companies we work for. On the other, we directly benefit from and enable exploitation. Our work’s single purpose is to protect and increase profits. Our high salaries are, in effect, our share of the surplus value appropriated from other workers — the Ghanaian cocoa farmer, the factory worker in Shenzhen, the delivery driver in Slough.

For decades, this contradiction was manageable. Pre-2008, the neoliberal fantasy of a rising tide lifting all boats seemed plausible. But now the meritocracy dream has collapsed. Sure, among millions of child workers there’s bound to be one who assembles an exceptional creative portfolio and girl-bosses her way to Cannes. And her example will be used to justify the structural forces and violent borders that keep the remaining 99.9% right where capitalism needs them to be: providing extremely cheap labour.

What does it mean to be paid a £200K salary for making shiny decks while knowing this money is downstream from real exploitation and suffering? How do you ignore it? The delusion has run its course, and now we’re left with the consequences.

The poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer, and we are the creative force that supplies sophisticated propaganda that props up this immense inequality and environmental destruction. We know it, and it’s damaging to our souls.

3. We Are Confronting Our Own Mortality

This brings us to the third, and perhaps deepest, level: the existential. Why have the previous two factors become so unbearable now?

In the past several years, we’ve experienced enormous loss: a global pandemic, wars, live-streamed genocide, and an accelerating climate collapse. Existential therapists call this a boundary experience. We’ve been forced into a mass confrontation with our own mortality. The comforting illusion of limitless time is gone.

In the absence of that illusion, we are left with freedom and its terrible partner, responsibility. We are forced to ask, “With my one, brief, precious life, why am I choosing this?” The thought that our lives are being wasted is crushing.

We’ve entered a multi-level crisis that has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the pain of a co-opted creative drive, layered on top of a contradictory class position, all of it fuelled by a confrontation with death.

This isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be transformative.

The trouble is, this collective crisis may not have an individual solution. A creative director in London won't realise her full creative potential until a child worker in Ghana is free to realise hers. We can try to find comforting workarounds, but they’ll never be enough.

We can no longer pretend the £30 red prawn risotto isn’t laced with rubbish; there are blue bits clearly visible in our food. Our collective loss of existential appetite is a healthy response to a profoundly unhealthy situation. So the choice, fundamentally, is either to keep eating the blue bits or to put down the fork and figure out together what comes next, while there’s still time.