The Stories We Tell, and the Ones We’re Losing
I grew up in the 80s and early 90s when America still had something close to a shared culture. I remember seeing Back to the Future Part in a packed theater and watching Field of Dreams with my dad, who pretended he didn’t tear up at the end (he totally did). Die Hard marathons, Saturday mornings with The A-Team, and the first time I saw Prince perform, those moments still sit somewhere deep in the memory banks.
For a kid like, pop culture was a kind of roadmap. It was loud, colorful, and full of swagger. Everyone was tuned to the same channels. When Thriller or Purple Rain dropped, you didn’t need an algorithm to tell you. You felt it in the air.
Fast-forward to today, and it’s a different world. Kids aren’t watching Spielberg classics or quoting Ghostbusters. They’re watching creators on YouTube with usernames I can’t remember, people shooting videos from their bedrooms and somehow reaching millions. It’s a new kind of storytelling ecosystem, decentralized and deeply personal. But something’s been lost in the shift too.
Last week I read a sobering piece in the Wall Street Journal about how Hollywood’s creative middle class has collapsed. Not the A-list celebrities — the people who actually made the machine run: the gaffers, camera ops, editors, set builders, costume designers. The folks who used to fill every diner on Ventura Boulevard after a long shoot. In just a couple of years, the number of workers in L.A.’s entertainment industry fell from 142,000 to around 100,000.
One makeup artist took a 66% pay cut to become a phlebotomist. A baker who ran two cookie shops serving film sets had to close both. “Survive until ’25” became the local motto, but ’25 isn’t saving anyone.
It’s not just strikes or AI, though that’s definitely the next tidal wave. It’s a perfect storm: runaway costs, new filming hubs in cheaper states, the streaming bubble bursting, and audiences staying home. Fewer shows are being greenlit. Production days are down nearly 60%. The world’s storytelling capital is bleeding out.
It reminds me a little of New York in the early 2000s, when the magazine world I loved began to hollow out. Those were the people who made the city sparkle, the ones who always had a story, a deadline, and a theory about where culture was headed next.
Now it’s L.A.’s turn. The dream factory is going dark.
Look, I know sympathy for Hollywood doesn’t come easy. But this isn’t about red carpets. It’s about an entire creative class — people who built careers, raised families, paid mortgages, and took pride in their craft, suddenly finding the ground gone beneath their feet.
And here’s the thing: it’s not just them. The same forces are coming for all of us. AI is already writing songs, producing videos, and designing ad campaigns. Even MrBeast, the biggest YouTuber on Earth, posted recently, “When AI videos are just as good as normal ones, how will it impact the millions of creators making content for a living?”
That’s the question we should all be asking, because at some point, it’s going to hit our own corner of the world too.
When the ways we make a living start disappearing, what do we hold on to?
Maybe the answer is the same as it’s always been, each other.
— Daniel
.