The cost of reinvention

And why Gen X keeps showing up anyway

We did everything we were supposed to do.

We worked hard. Got the degrees. Stayed late. Pivoted when we had to. Reinvented ourselves midlife, mid-crisis, mid-market collapse—more times than we can count.

And still, we’re being told: you don’t fit.

This New York Times piece—“The Exhausted, Unappreciated, and Strangely Inspiring Career Arcs of Gen X Creatives”—names something a lot of us have been living: the erasure of experience in a market obsessed with polish, novelty, and “culture fit.”

It’s not just about artists. It’s about all of us with nonlinear stories—people whose résumés don’t follow the approved arc. People who stepped off the ladder to care for someone. People who got laid off and started over. People who beat cancer, left toxic jobs, built consulting businesses out of necessity. People who lost a decade to survival and still found their way back to center.

We’ve done the work. We’ve led teams, shipped projects, held things together when no one else could. We’ve rebuilt our confidence after being gutted by systems that measure worth in title inflation and tenure, not impact.

And now we’re told we’re too experienced. Or too rusty. Or not quite right for the role.

Not because we can’t do the job—but because our stories don’t fit the mold.

That’s the thing no one wants to say out loud: reinvention is marketed as a virtue, but penalized in practice.

We’ve learned new industries, survived layoffs, kept our careers alive through caregiving, illness, divorce. We’ve rebranded ourselves on LinkedIn, rewritten our résumés 37 times, and found a way to talk about all of it in language that won’t scare recruiters.

But every time we show up, we’re asked to prove we still belong.

The truth is: we never stopped belonging.
The system just stopped seeing us.

We’re not burned out because we’re fragile. We’re burned out because we’ve spent years carrying the emotional labor of proving we still have value. We’ve been endlessly flexible, endlessly resourceful, endlessly reinvented—and still, it’s not enough to get past the algorithm, the recruiter screen, the unspoken bias toward a tidy career arc.

There’s no bonus for surviving.
No credit for getting back up.
No recognition for how much it costs to keep showing up.

But we do. Because we know what we bring.

Wisdom. Context. Strategic depth. The ability to walk into chaos and lead with clarity. The kind of insight you can’t fake with trend fluency or a well-filtered personal brand.

We’re not on the sidelines. We’re in it. We always have been.

So if you’re out here feeling like a high-functioning Gen Xer who somehow became “too much” for the system to process—you're not alone.

Welcome to the Island of Misfit Gen-Xers.
(Yes, the one from Rudolph. But with better playlists, stronger coffee, and no interest in being fixed.)

We’re not obsolete. We’re not stuck.
We’re still evolving.
And we’re not done.