The Exodus

A product marketing consultant with over a decade of experience is leaving to pursue art, illustration, and poetry. Another designer, burned out on growing her business, is pivoting to focus on fitness instead. These aren’t just isolated anecdotes — they’re part of an emerging pattern of experienced creative professionals not just changing jobs, but leaving the field entirely. When people who’ve invested years mastering a profession decide to walk away, it’s worth asking why.

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to create meaning within systems designed to extract value. Creative professionals know this exhaustion intimately. They live in the tension between human connection and mechanical metrics, between authentic communication and algorithmic optimization, between their own values and the relentless machinery of growth.

The challenge isn’t just about workload, though that’s certainly part of it. It’s about existing in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance. Many of these professionals entered marketing because they believed in the power of communication, in the art of storytelling, in the possibility of connecting people with things that might genuinely improve their lives. Instead, they find themselves serving an industry driven by investment patterns and technological determinism that often clash with their core values.

Then there’s the ever-shifting definition of success. What counts as a “result” in design and marketing has become increasingly abstract and elusive. Engagement metrics, conversion rates, attribution models — these measurements proliferate and mutate faster than anyone can meaningfully interpret them. The tools for measuring success change before we can even agree on what success means.

It’s a peculiarly modern predicament: working harder than ever while feeling the impact of that work dissolve into an increasingly fractured and cynical digital landscape.

We are told to be authentic while optimizing for algorithms, to be human while automating everything possible, to be creative while conforming to data-driven best practices. We are expected to master new platforms, tools, and paradigms at an exhausting pace, all while the cultural conversation increasingly dismisses our entire profession as manipulation at best, spam at worst, in either case – entirely automatable.

Given the combination of working more than ever but getting less than ever out of it while also trying to change everything about what you do as the entire world is screaming at you all day about how worthless what you do is, burnout should be no surprise to anyone with an active heartbeat.

The exodus to other fields might reveal something deeper: a desire to return to work that produces tangible, meaningful outcomes. When a designer or marketer becomes an artist, they choose to create something that exists in the world, that can be finished, seen, and touched. When they become a fitness instructor, they choose help people achieve concrete, physical results, perhaps even changing their lives in ways they never thought possible. These shifts suggest a hunger for work that can’t be algorithm-optimized into meaninglessness and not (yet) credibly done by a machine.

What’s particularly striking is that many of these departing marketers aren’t moving to adjacent fields or seeking different roles within the industry. This isn’t a finding-my-unique-ability conversation in the corporate sphere; they’re leaving. They’re not just tired of their jobs; they’re tired of participating in a system of uninterpreted abstraction that they are, nonetheless, beholden to.

Perhaps this trend is a warning sign that we need to fundamentally rethink how we connect people with value in a digital age. The exhaustion of marketers might be a canary in the coal mine, signaling that our current approaches to attention, engagement, and value creation are becoming unsustainable.

Hope

I retain hope that a way forward is possible — one that honors the ideas, labor, and earnest desire to work that most people have.

I’ve been fortunate to work with people who earnestly care about others, whose primary motivation is not to extract, but to build, who believe in all the things that design and marketing depend upon but for their intrinsic value and the intrinsic value of helping other people succeed. The hope I have is because if that exists at all among more than just a single person, then there must be a way forward together.

 

P.S. I received a good comment that I felt warranted a postscript here. The comment was that this piece:

implies people are voluntarily quitting full time jobs because of the dire state of the marketing industry…People lose their jobs, can’t find new ones, and try to figure out how to make a living doing something else. The nuance there seems pretty distinctive to me. What do you think?

I think that’s right. I’ve seen many people in the industry lose their jobs over the past couple of years and try for an admirably long time to land a new position. Eventually, some of them have decided to end their search and find something entirely new to do. I suppose in those cases, the question becomes how long should one be expected to persist in their profession when they’re not able to restore their employment.

I have also observed professionals go through various forms of de-employment (furloughs, part-time, pay cuts), endure them for a time, and then quit to do something else. That feels like a scenario in between the two the comment mentions.

And, I am aware of people who have quit outright.

In any case, I think it’s meaningful when someone closes a chapter on their career. Losing a job isn’t a feature solely of the last few years, but being unable to get another one may be. And I think that’s part of what I describe above.

However, I hope that no one reads this as a manifesto about why creative professionals should quit. I certainly don’t intend that at all. Instead, I think it’s important to consider the various challenges we all face, not as a reason to leave but as a reason to change. I’d prefer to change things right here, where I am, and I suspect that’s true of most people who might have been nodding along with this piece. My ultimate reason for hitting “publish” was to encourage anyone who might have thought they were alone in their feelings and observations that they are anything but.



Written by Christopher Butler on
January 24, 2025
 
Tagged
Essays