Growing Up at the Dawn of Cyberspace For those of us born around 1980, William Gibson’s Neuromancer might be the most prophetic novel we never read as teenagers. Published in 1984, it predicted the digital world we would inherit: a reality where human consciousness extends into cyberspace, where corporations control the digital commons, and where being “jacked in” to a global information network is the default state of existence. But it was The Matrix, arriving in 1999 when I was nineteen, that captured something even more fundamental about our generation’s experience. Beyond its surface narrative of machines and simulated reality, beyond its Hot Topic aesthetic, the film tapped into a profound truth about coming of age in the digital era: the experience of ontological shock. Every generation experiences the disorientation of discovering the world isn’t what they thought it was. But for the last X’ers, this natural coming-of-age shock coincided with a collective technological awakening. Just as we were questioning the nature of reality and our place in it as young adults, the stable physical world of our childhood was being transformed by digital technology. The institutions, social structures, and ways of being that seemed permanent turned out to be as mutable as computer code. Neo’s journey in The Matrix — discovering his reality is a simulation and learning to see “the code” behind it — paralleled our own experience of watching the physical world become increasingly overlaid and mediated by digital systems. The film’s themes of paranoia and revelation resonated because we were living through our own red pill experience, watching as more and more of human experience moved into the digital realm that Gibson had imagined fifteen years before. The timing was uncanny. The Matrix arrived amid a perfect storm of millennial anxiety: Y2K fears about computers failing catastrophically, a disputed presidential election that would be decided by the Supreme Court, and then the shocking events of 9/11. For those of us just entering adulthood in the United States, these concurrent disruptions to technological, political, and social stability congealed into a generational dysphoria. The film’s paranoid questioning of reality felt less like science fiction and more like a documentary of our collective psychological state. This double shock — personal and technological — has shaped how I, and I suspect many of us, think about and design technology today. When you’ve experienced reality becoming suddenly permeable, you assume disruption, glitches, and the shock of others. You develop empathy for anyone confronting new technological paradigms. You understand the importance of transparency, of helping people see the systems they’re operating within rather than hiding them. Perhaps this is why our generation often approaches technology with a mix of fluency and skepticism. We’re comfortable in digital spaces, but we remember what came before. We know firsthand how quickly reality can transform, how easily new layers of mediation can become invisible, how important it is to maintain awareness of the code behind our increasingly digital existence. The paranoia of The Matrix wasn’t just science fiction — it was a preview of what it means to live in a world where the boundaries between physical and digital reality grow increasingly blurry. For those of us who came of age alongside the internet, that ontological shock never fully faded. Maybe it shouldn’t — I hold on to mine as an asset to my work and thinking.

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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.

Māsa is a restaurant in Riga with natural wine and local products from Latvian farmers. The clients are a couple...