Read time: 11 minutes 33 seconds
Note: This piece is 0% AI written. AI was, however, used to research and fact-check.

Staying in a wailing body is excruciating

Now, I need somebody to know / Somebody to heal / Somebody to have / Just to know how it feels / It’s easy to say but it’s never the same / I guess I kinda liked the way you helped me escape — Lewis Capaldi, “Someone You Loved” (2019)

My parents are fighting. Again.

The aroma of homemade Korean food wafts. Piping hot white rice, simmering kimchi stew with a touch of dashida (beef-based monosodium glutamate), and seven different bahnchan (side dishes). But they sit on the table, cold and forlorn.

Their blowups are always during dinner. It’s a testament to the addictive quality of Korean food that I still eat with them. I beeline to my room upon my mom’s urging. My room shares a wall with the kitchen, so it’s no escape at all.

I realized my spoon was still in my hand, thin and cheap. As my dad’s accusations got uglier and more cutting I found myself slowly bending it. It felt good to channel my fury into something, to have the power to at least change this. Maybe this is why the boys at school fight so much.

Lying in my twin bed, I look about to distract myself. 90s K-pop CDs — that I’m too embarrassed to talk about at school — are stacked near my Discman. Jonathan Taylor Thomas grins at me, crouched, chin in hand, from my $7 Walgreens poster. A collage made up of my friends’ studio pictures sits on my dresser.

I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here and live with them, like the grownups on Friends.

This happens so often that even from inside my room, I can see what is happening. He’s had three Jim Beam on the rocks and is man-screaming. As searing as the sound is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the content it carries.

He tells my mom she’s a worthless slob. And worse.

Always a man of action, he leaps over to the fridge. The throwing begins. Down goes a dried-up block of Costco cheddar cheese, dozens of packets of McDonald’s ketchup and Taco Bell Mild hot sauce, a near-empty jar of Classen’s dill pickles with the green lid. Those Americana commingle with a glass tub of kimchi, a container of doenjang (soybean paste) with spots of fuzzy mold, and bright red, garlicky ohjingeojeot (salted, fermented raw squid side dish).

I’d later realize that stone-faced does not mean unwounded.

I stare hard at my faded 101 Dalmations comforter, as if it’s an illuminated manuscript holding ancient wisdom on how to stop him. The puppies smile back at me blankly.

Gas poured, match struck, let it drop. My body is ablaze, to a degree no child should have to endure.

The booms have died down. He’s finally worn himself out.

Shaking, raw hands, cut with cheap metal. Did you know you can feel terror, fury, relief, and love all at once?

Ten minutes pass, and what remains is silence mixed with softly sizzling grief.

Staying in a wailing body is excruciating. I reach for my latest library book, The Baby-Sitters Club: Mary Anne Saves the Day, to go where I always want to be. Anywhere but here.

Exquisite Work happens when you’re in your body

The majority of artists started telling stories because we didn’t have the easiest childhood. — Chloe Zhao, Oscar-winning director of Nomadland and Hamnet, New York Times’ The Interview

One of my favorite Buddhist parables goes like this:

A man is traveling and comes to a wide, dangerous river. On his side there is fear and danger; on the other safety and peace. Sans bridge or ferry, he gathers grass, branches, and leaves for a makeshift raft. He manages to cross the river safely.

Once there, he appreciates how helpful the raft has been, and considers keeping it. Maybe carrying it on his back as he continues on.

The Buddha then asks: what’s wiser — carry the raft, or to leave it behind now that it has served its purpose? You know the answer: he should leave it by the shore and move on.

The Buddha says his teachings (the Dharma) are like that raft. The lessons are meant to help you “cross over” from suffering to liberation. Don’t cling to them once their purpose has been fulfilled.

Part of what makes you so creative is your imagination. Imagination is a skill; if you lived in your head a lot as a kid, it’s beautifully honed. You got good at leaving your body and physical reality for a safe place in your mind. It felt good up there.

However, imagination can also be used to survive. It got some of us through the hard stuff, protected us. But if you’re reading this, you’re likely safe now. The people and things that hurt you then don’t anymore. But are you still carrying a bunch of rafts on your back?

Exquisite Work happens when you’re in your body when you’re present and embodied.

In contrast, knowledge and being knowledgeable are at a major flashpoint. LLMs obviously know more than us, game over. They can also instantly spit out many of the pieces / assets / artifacts that we creatives have trained hard to create.

(for more on this, check out last month’s piece below)

But there’s good news: we have a totally unfair advantage over AI in many areas. One arena is our human senses. The classic 5: sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste. Importantly, you can’t fully tap into them when dissociated.

Hamnet slowly but surely slotted into my top 5 films ever. It reduced the theater into hopeless sobs with its ravaging yet eerie flavor of sadness. I felt as if I’d fallen down a deep well, containing the grief of every parent who has ever lost a child.

It is an Exquisite Work on every level: direction, cinematography, screenplay, acting, set, locations, concept, costumes… every goddamn thing.

After watching a few Chloe Zhao interviews, you get the distinct sense that she is hardly an earthling — only half of her resides on this planet. The other half is slow dancing with the divine.

Per her quote above, she had a rough childhood and thus frequently escaped into her mind and the unseen worlds. To become the director that she is, she had to learn to buckle down, stay in her body.1

“Be here now.” — Ram Dass (and infinite others before him)

On a movie set, the director is God. This one ever so gently forced everyone to be embodied. She and Jessie Buckley — who won the 2026 Best Actress Oscar for her role of Agnes — early on started exchanging dream journal entries. They dove down into velvet-black subconscious and reemerged to share their loot. Many of these visions slithered their way into the acting and art direction of Hamnet.

Zhao also asked the whole cast and crew to participate in her on-set dance parties. Why? To shake off any lingering emotional charge after intense scenes. Here is the viral video of everyone undulating to Rihanna’s “We Found Love” (2011). The final scene, almost indescribable in its power, demanded a real banger.

Hamnet is superb because every actor is aware of and inhabiting their body, as well as tapping into their collectively heightened senses.

It’s a deeply feminine film with verve — as in the feminine energy of yin. That doesn’t mean it’s gendered or just for women. Men have plenty of yin, women have much yang.

I know 3 men who were moved by it:

1. My husband

2. His best friend

3. Wesley Morris, host of the New York Times’ “Cannonball” video column. Morris declared that he spent most of the film skeptical and actively disliking it. Then, during the final (epic) scene, he broke down in sobs. Whilst recounting this to his culture desk colleague, Morris starts tearing up again. He cried, “God, fuck this movie! Ugh, FUCK this movie!!”

Hamnet, like all Exquisite Work, makes you feel.

It asks kindly at first, dripping in beauty and light.

Then, it flies in your face with gentle brute force. That force is — as Jessie Buckley articulated during her acceptance speech at the Oscars — the “beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.”

In the final minutes and with that motherly love, it presents you with a raft so you can paddle over to safe harbor. She hopes you won’t forget her.

Be here now

My dad has a new office. There’s a cute little mint microwave resting atop a mini fridge and freezer. The office came with a couple of large curved desks, tables, and truly horrible fluorescent lighting.

A couple weeks ago, he called me in an urgent manner all too familiar. My nervous system pole-vaulted up, activating an ancient feeling that makes me want to run away and never come back.

He needed invoice templates to use with future clients. So, I made him one. Took three hours out of my week to do it, made it to spec. Turns out the form won’t open on his computer, which runs Windows… 10? How is that even possible? Didn’t I use Windows 7 as a small child?

Suddenly, his voice rises fast. I hear myself tell him that the docs do in fact work, I checked. “No! They don’t!” he insisted with his signature cruel tone.

“Okay, okay, I’ll do it over,” I blurted out placatingly.

“Okay appa says thank you,” he hurriedly said, before hanging up the phone. Why the fuck does he say it in the third person? Why can’t he just say HE is sorry, acknowledge HE shouldn’t yell, and thank me for my time?

I then remember my body and take some deep breaths. Though this advice is totally infuriating, it works.

I feel my feet heavy on the floor, the weight of my hips, legs, thighs, knees, shins, pressing down into it. The floor that then presses into planet Earth.

With an eye on my breath, I tried to imagine how frustrating it must be for him, to be incapable of making essential documents that lead to contracts, that then lead to getting paid.

He humbled himself and asked his daughter for help, but they just don’t work. Why is nothing ever easy? Why can’t he catch a break?

At the green age of 23, Dad immigrated to the U.S. from Seoul. At the airport, his father looked him dead in the eye. “You’re going to America. Build a big, successful business. Work for yourself.”

Grandpa died in 2020, before my dad could complete the assignment. So here he is at retirement age, staring down the barrel at his third and final shot at making his dad proud. He’s still trying, pushing himself, striving for excellence. So I too will keep trying.

So what else is there to do but crush it at escapism? Fly far, far away to fun places via friends, books, music, TV, and movies (and later, unrequited love).

Yet time does heal all wounds. My dad has become a teddy bear in his old age. He’s actually apologized to me twice (!) in the past 10 years — unthinkable for an embattled Boomer Asian immigrant man. He doesn’t throw things anymore (I pray). Still yells, though. Life is not a children’s book.

Since talk therapy is not an option for him, here are some ways he tamed his demons and practiced embodiment:

• Diving for abalone and sea urchins in Mendocino

• Spearfishing on kayaks he found on Craigslist

• Caring for cacti and succulents with his green thumb

• Going to car auctions and scoping out good 3rd Generation Toyota 4Runners

I’ve never been more proud and inspired by my dad. This former painting contractor now general contractor exhibits deep appreciation and care of craft.

He’s still working to keep his promise to his father.

He’s still trying to make up for everything he did to us.

Maybe, all this time, Dad’s been trying to teach me something: to do great things in this world, you have to be here.

Many thanks to Rik van den Berge, , and for helping me see what I couldn’t.

Read time: 36 minutes

This review distills February 2023 - March 2026 media coverage of how AI has been and will be affecting your paycheck, workplace expectations, and career trajectory.

It’s long and will get clipped in your inbox. Click the link up top to read comfortably in your browser.

If you want to hear my research process (and how much of this was AI-written), that’s wise. Please read this footnote.1

Since everything with AI feels fucking insane, I dusted off my Ph.D. dropout skills and wrote us a fat book report.

I don’t need to tell you how to read. Except you’re probably stressed out and time-poor. So:

You can scroll all the way down to What’s happening in my field? (e.g. creative direction, design, film, copywriting, architecture, music).

For what you need to know to act, read these sections:

• What’s the big picture?

• What’s the takeaway?

• Shit, what do I do?

Alternatively, you can lilypad-hop through it by reading all bolded parts. It will give you a more detailed picture.

Many of you are on it. But for those that aren’t, I won’t mince words: get on it. As you’ll see in a second, the reportage is staggering.

The AI era is urgently, historically significant to creatives. The impact is akin to what the invention of photography (initially) did to painting. Only turn it way up.

Second only to climate, AI is the most consequential topic of our lifetimes.

“You’re staring at the sun / You’re standing in the sea / Your mouth is open wide / You’re trying hard to breathe / The water’s at your neck / There’s lightning in your teeth / Your body’s over me”2

Just as TV on the Radio told us in the early aughts, in this article we’ll be staring at the sun.

After fixing my gaze on it all, two things happened:

1. I now know it’s even worse than I’d imagined.

2. I feel more empowered than ever to respond.

Of course, there’s no denying the usefulness of AI. It helped me write this monster. I kept squinting and muttering, “omg I love you” due to the sheer amount of time it saved me, while doing something important for my people.

On the dark side, its economic impact on creatives packs a gut-punch in some cases. And OpenAI, Anthropic, and others will keep releasing new features at a quick clip.

“If you stay ready, you ain’t gotta get ready.”
— the late Grammy-nominated rapper Nipsey Hussle

So off with your sunglasses, let’s stare straight at the thing.

🗺️ What’s the big picture?

Interestingly, a Yale Budget Lab study found that AI “has not yet significantly [emphasis mine] impacted the overall job market” at the macro level [emphasis mine].

The creative sector is an exception — displacement is direct and documented for us, particularly for freelancers and entry-level roles.

In design, one structural pattern underlies them all: companies are contracting team sizes rather than doing mass firings. When someone leaves, the role isn’t backfilled — managers assume AI can cover it.

Harvard Business Review (January 2026) reported that the job losses and slowed hiring are happening — even though companies are still waiting for generative AI to fully deliver on its promises.

Worker Sentiment and Public Opinion

Pew Research Center surveys from 2025 found that 52% of U.S. workers feel worried about the future impact of AI in the workplace, while only 6% say it will lead to more opportunities for them.

Across the general public, 64% expect AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years, while only 5% expect more jobs.

AI experts are significantly more optimistic, with 73% seeing AI as having a positive impact on how people do their jobs. While only 23% of the general public shares that view.

AI Restructures Creative Work Faster Than Predicted

The consulting firm CVL Economics projected in 2024 that AI would disrupt over 200,000 jobs in the U.S. entertainment sector alone by 2026.

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, AI was cited in the announcements of more than 50,000 layoffs in 2025 across industries.

The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs report projects 9 million jobs to be “displaced” by AI over the next five years — though it also forecasts ~11 million new roles created.

In the UK: By early 2026, the Brave New World? report — drawing on evidence from over 10,000 UK creators across illustration, writing, music, photography, and performance — found:

• One in three creative jobs already lost to GenAI

• 32% of illustrators reported lost commissions or cancelled projects

• 86% of authors said GenAI had already reduced earnings

• 72% of authors said job opportunities had been cut

• 57% of authors said their career was no longer sustainable

• 99% of creators said their work had been scraped without consent

🎣 What’s the takeaway?

“I feel it all, I feel it all / The wings are wide, the wings are wide / Wild card in sight, wild card in sight / Ooh I’ll be the one who’ll break my heart / I’ll be the one to hold the gun / I know more than I knew before.”3

“Miss Kat, Miss Kat!” he grabbed then yelled into my thigh.

“Okay, okay, I’ll let you play with the iPad but we have to clean you up first,” I insisted, trying to keep my balance.

Ravin was a second grader in my after-school class I taught years ago. His round face had stormclouds, with some sweet rays of sunshine. He was smaller than the other boys. They didn’t include him in their soccer games.

Mostly because he smelled really bad. A whiff of his hair and charcoal gray hoodie would make me gag and I had to turn away so he couldn’t see. Ravin lived in a van with his grandparents, who were in their 40s. They looked 60. The whole family reeked. When you live in a van, you can’t shower when you want.

Hating it, but with half the fight he used to give me, Ravin let me give his torso and legs a paper towel bath. Even though we were in the faculty bathroom, shame, gratitude, and fury took turns flashing across his face, like lasers at an EDM show. But he knew when he was clean, they bullied him less.

Ravin wasn’t the only one I lost sleep over. There was Jordaya, who got abused at home and had raging ADHD. Chelsea, hopelessly behind and painfully shy, had alcoholic parents who always picked her up late. Tomas, whose parents worked three jobs each, so they didn’t notice when he outgrew his shoes or needed a haircut or lost his entire backpack.

Every day I fought the urge to buy them what they lacked. The stress and heartbreak was a growing helium balloon, living amongst my insides.

Most of the takeaways below show how employers are hoping that AI can replace some or many creative workers.

How might you approach this?

Don’t bypass and erode what you do have over AI: humanity, emotions, empathy, insight, etc. It’s about time we realized our feelings aren’t a problem, they’re a signal. Yes, feel it all so you can then come up with something good:

A Deeper Structural Shift

Beyond raw job numbers, researchers and creators point to a qualitative degradation of creative work.

Brookings scholars noted that in Hollywood, the fear is not just job loss but transformation of remaining roles — writers becoming editors of AI-generated drafts rather than original creators, in what one writer called “the Uber-fication of Hollywood”.

A UOC research study estimated that generative AI could automate up to 26% of tasks in arts, design, entertainment, media, and sports, predicting that “less time will be spent on technical execution, and more time on strategic thinking and conception”.

UNCTAD contributor and University of Chicago professor Ben Zhao argued,

AI-Driven Layoffs

Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that 54,883 U.S. layoffs in 2025 were explicitly driven by AI, part of a total 1.2 million job cuts that year — the highest since the pandemic.

Major companies that cited AI when cutting headcount: Accenture cut ~11,000 roles citing AI automation potential, Salesforce eliminated ~4,000 customer service positions, and Duolingo reduced contractor reliance for tasks AI can complete.

The pattern extends beyond tech. The broader entertainment sector is experiencing what The Ankler called “Hollywood’s AI-Era Jobs Collapse” — radiating outward from studios into marketing firms, PR shops, freelance editors, and the entire supplier ecosystem.

“AI-Washing” vs. Real Displacement

A nuanced but important distinction: not all AI-cited layoffs are straightforwardly caused by AI. A February 2026 New York Times investigation noted the phenomenon of “AI-washing” — companies using AI as cover for layoffs that are also driven by over-hiring corrections, VC tightening, and restructuring.

Freelance Market Collapse

Freelancers have been hit earliest and hardest. A study by Imperial College London and DIW Berlin analyzing over 3 million freelance job posts found a 21% decrease in weekly postings for automation-prone jobs after ChatGPT’s release. Writing-related jobs experienced the steepest decline at 30%, followed by software/web development (20%) and graphic design/3D modeling (17%). A separate study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior found that freelance jobs easily handled by AI — like “About Us” pages and real estate copy — dropped by over 50%.

Brookings Institution research confirmed these trends at a broader scale: freelancers in AI-vulnerable occupations experienced a 2% decline in contracts and a 5% drop in earnings following new AI software releases in 2022.

Job Market Contraction

The data on creative job loss is stark and accelerating. Some examples:

• In a landmark study by CVL Economics, three-quarters of those surveyed said GenAI had already supported the elimination, reduction, or consolidation of jobs in their division.

• The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report flagged graphic design as the 11th fastest-declining job — a dramatic reversal from two years earlier, when it was classified as a “moderately growing” occupation.

• Meanwhile, Hollywood writers saw their available gigs fall 42% from 2023 to 2024.

Workplace Expectations & Upskilling Pressure

The expectation to be AI-fluent has accelerated dramatically. Key skills now demanded include prompt engineering, AI-powered design tools, automation workflows, and AI ethics literacy.

Key data points:

• 36% of employees say AI expertise is now essential for their role — up from 23% in 2024 — and 38% of employers agree, a 10-point year-over-year jump

• 73% of workers say creative and visual skills are expected at work or school, with 84% noting these expectations have risen in the last three years, per an Adobe survey

• Only 49% of employees feel fully equipped for their roles (down from 59% in 2024); Gen Z confidence dropped a stunning 20 points to just 39%

• A training gap is real: only 44% of employers claim to offer formal AI upskilling programs, but only 33% of employees confirm having access to AI upskilling training

• PwC’s 2025 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey found that among daily AI users, 75% felt they had the learning resources they needed — versus just 59% of infrequent users, showing that AI access is widening skill inequality.

Entry-Level Creative Jobs: A Pipeline Crisis

Perhaps the most underreported story is what AI is doing to career pipelines. AI tends to eliminate the “grunt work” — production tasks, first drafts, iterative design — that has historically been how junior creatives develop skills and build toward senior roles. The Atlantic flagged this in a December 2025 piece: when AI does the grunt work, it removes the training ground that turns assistants into directors, junior designers into art directors, and staff writers into editors.

🫣 Shit. What do I do?

Stay tuned.

I’m working on deep-dive, actionable essays. There’s a lot of upside to this as well.

Try to keep up.

I know it’s not easy, AI is in many ways a fast, Hulk-like mutant. Who is likely to come out okay? Here’s my bet:

Share

Overhaul your portfolio.

The single most important shift: portfolios now must demonstrate AI fluency and strategic judgment, not just visual craft. A Verified Insider analysis of the 2025–2026 design hiring market — written with input from former Apple design leadership — found that companies now want to see how candidates use AI to prototype, validate ideas, speed up exploration, and analyze data. The advice is explicit: include at least one case study in your portfolio that incorporates AI as part of the design process.

But showing AI tools isn’t the point — showing thinking is.

Know what to put in your portfolio.

Individual contributors should lead with 3–5 focused, high-impact case studies. Start each one with a concrete business result before the process walk-through. Make it interactive — add Figma links, Loom walkthroughs, clickable prototypes.

Design leaders should spotlight team achievements, strategic influence, mentorship, and how they shaped direction across product and business. Metrics, testimonials, and specific examples of managing change reinforce the leadership story.

Everyone should tailor the portfolio per company. The era of one generic portfolio link has been over for a while now — 71% of employers say portfolio quality strongly influences their final decision.

Get AI fluent. Learn to sell yourself.

The framing that’s working for candidates now is not “I use AI tools” but “Here’s how AI changed my process and allowed me to deliver higher-impact work.” A practical example: “I used AI to generate 40 layout variations in 10 minutes, which let me spend the time I saved going deeper into user research and strategic trade-offs — and here’s the outcome”.

Be prepared to discuss (designers especially):

• What you chose not to automate and why (this signals judgment)

• Where AI failed and how you corrected it (signals critical thinking)

• How AI changed your time allocation — less production, more strategic problem-solving

• AI ethics considerations you have navigated — especially relevant for branding and UX roles dealing with user trust

Update your resume with AI skills.

For clients updating résumés, AI skills should appear in three places: skills section (tools like Figma AI, Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, Cursor, RunwayML), experience bullets (show quantified impact — “reduced prototyping time by 40% using AI-assisted workflows”), and professional development (courses or certifications in prompt engineering or AI design)

📍What’s happening in my field?

Design

UI/UX and Product Design (Digital)

This is probably the most data-rich story of any design field. The numbers are severe:

• UX designer job postings dropped 71% from their 2022 peak; UX researcher postings fell 73%

• In 2023 alone, UX job postings dropped to roughly 70% of their 2021 levels, per Indeed data cited by Nielsen Norman Group

• The 2024 UXPA salary survey of 408 UX professionals showed 35% of organizations added staff, 35% lost staff — net growth of zero, the worst since 2009

• A 2025 User Interviews survey found 49% of UX professionals feel negative about the field’s future (up 26 percentage points from 2024), and 67% feel negative about career opportunities

• 21% reported their companies laid off UX staff in 2025

• Only 4.2% of open roles target junior or entry-level designers across five countries studied — reports of 1,000+ applications for single entry-level positions are common

Nielsen Norman Group’s landmark “UX Reckoning” piece describes the field as being on a “corporate chopping block,” with business leaders still treating research and design as “nice-to-have” — and AI giving them cover to cut. NNG’s blunt prescription: designers who survive will be those with critical thinking, taste, and the ability to connect UX outcomes to business goals — not those who rely on templates and toolkits.

That said, the WEF Future of Jobs 2025 report offers a counterpoint:

Workplace expectations: AI fluency is now table stakes. Figma AI, Adobe Firefly, and AI-assisted research synthesis tools like Dovetail are expected skills.

The framing shift in job listings is from “designer who uses AI” to “AI-native product designer” — someone who can work across PM, engineering, and data simultaneously.

Graphic Design and Branding

Graphic design is in the most acute contraction of any design field. The WEF flagged it as the 11th fastest-declining job globally — a category that two years prior was considered moderately growing. The mechanism is blunt: AI image generators trained on unlicensed work can produce “good enough” brand assets at a fraction of the cost of hiring a human.

Freelancers bore the first wave. The Imperial College/DIW Berlin study found graphic design and 3D modeling freelance postings down 17% following ChatGPT’s release, part of a broader 21% drop in automation-exposed freelance work.

Execution-level work — social media templates, basic ad layouts, product mockups — has been largely automated away at the client level.

What’s surviving: Brand strategy, visual identity systems requiring cultural and psychological depth, and art direction that requires judgment.

For branding specifically: McKinsey and senior agency leaders describe the retained human value as the stuff AI can’t replicate — brand voice, cultural sensitivity, the ability to read a client relationship, and the strategic decision of what not to make.

Creative Direction, Art Direction, and Design Leadership

These roles are not disappearing — they are expanding in scope while shrinking in headcount.

Fortune (December 2025) reported that companies like Accenture, Salesforce, and Autodesk describe creative workers becoming “directors” who delegate to AI agents rather than executing work themselves. One senior Accenture executive described this as requiring companies to restructure their corporate hierarchy entirely.

MorganHR’s workforce evolution research describes today’s Art Director as a “cross-functional creative strategist” — expected to guide omnichannel brand storytelling, collaborate across UX/marketing/data teams, and use consumer insights to shape campaigns. By 2028–2030, the projection is Art Directors orchestrating AI-human creative systems and leading experience design rooted in behavioral science.

The dark side: 20 artists today may become 1 AI “director” tomorrow — productivity gains are being extracted as headcount reductions, not shared as efficiency dividends.

The ladder from junior designer to art director to creative director is breaking, because the entry-level execution roles that trained junior talent are being eliminated first.

The “Producer to Director” Shift

This is the defining metaphor of the moment. At Fortune’s 2025 Brainstorm AI conference, Salesforce VP Nancy Xu described it: workers are moving “from producers to more directors.”

For creative directors specifically, the role is becoming orchestration of AI-human creative systems. MorganHR’s workforce evolution research maps out a 5-year trajectory:

• 2025–now: Creative strategy, branding, team leadership, proficiency in Adobe Suite, Figma, motion tools

• 2026–2027: Fluency in prompting AI tools like Adobe Firefly, data interpretation from analytics platforms, collaboration with ML engineers and UX researchers

• 2028–2029: Experience design rooted in behavioral science, immersive storytelling (VR/AR/spatial), emotion-led campaign development

• 2030: Orchestrating AI-human creative systems, brand innovation strategy, performance-based design leadership

Agency Restructuring Is Real and Accelerating

The most visible structural signal: WPP, the world’s largest advertising group, announced in February 2026 that it’s bringing Ogilvy, VML, AKQA, Grey, Burson, and Landor under a single “WPP Creative” umbrella — explicitly to eliminate structural friction and optimize its AI resources. This isn’t a cosmetic rebrand. Reuters reported it as part of a plan to save £500 million, driven by AI disruption reshaping traditional agency business models.

A Sunup study of 225 senior U.S. marketing and advertising leaders found:

• 100% of agencies surveyed already use AI, with nearly 60% saying it’s deeply embedded

• AI is performing at the level of mid-career professionals across copywriting, design, research, and project management

• Nearly half have already reduced or paused entry-level recruitment

• Over half of large and mid-sized firms expect significant headcount cuts within three years

• Traditional job titles are being replaced by hybrids: creative technologists, AI innovation leads, and brand technologists

• The “prompt engineer” title is already fading — firms now value intelligent use of AI over knowing how to talk to it

The bottom line for creative leaders: agencies are repositioning around consultation, strategy, and governance, not production volume. Success is measured by how seamlessly human expertise and machine precision interact, not by team size.

What Creative Leaders Must Do Differently

McKinsey’s January 2026 research on “Building Leaders in the Age of AI” describes the core shift as moving from “command” to “context.” Leaders won’t always be the smartest in the room — AI may outperform them on execution. Their job becomes creating the context in which teams navigate AI-informed process changes, role changes, and disruptions.

Concretely, creative leadership in the AI era requires:

• Training teams in prompt engineering and AI tool workflows while establishing creative quality standards for AI output

• Developing governance systems — ensuring every AI-generated asset reinforces brand positioning rather than diluting it

• Managing the psychological challenges of role transformation — positioning AI as creative amplification, not replacement

• Building hybrid workflows that combine human creativity with AI speed

• Maintaining accountability for direction, tone, and ethics — machines handle repetition, humans carry responsibility

• Cross-functional fluency: bridging UX, marketing, data, and engineering rather than operating in a design silo

Reworked’s analysis of management in 2026 makes the point sharply: what matters isn’t knowing how AI technology works, but “fostering curiosity, encouraging people to ask better questions, and supporting teams in making sense of new tools”.

The Broken Ladder Problem for Leaders to Solve

Accenture’s Ami Palan warned at the Fortune conference that if AI agents handle entry-level execution work, “companies may need to hire fewer people, and some learning opportunities may disappear for younger workers”. The traditional path from junior designer → mid-level → senior → art director → creative director depended on junior execution work that AI is now absorbing.

Salary and Compensation Trends

PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer — based on nearly a billion job ads from six continents — found that workers with AI skills command a 56% wage premium over similar roles without AI skills, double the 25% premium from the prior year. This is the single most important compensation data point for your clients.

Lightcast’s analysis of 1.3 billion job postings echoes this: postings that include AI skills offer 28% higher salaries — nearly $18,000 more per year — than those without. And AI-requiring roles continue to grow at 7.5% even as overall job postings fell 11.3%.

Negotiation Leverage for AI-Fluent Designers

The Verified Insider’s design hiring playbook advises designers to negotiate like founders: think beyond base salary to stock options, learning budgets (critical for staying current on AI tools), remote/hybrid setup, and growth paths. Many hiring managers are willing to pay more for candidates with AI-assisted workflow experience or design leadership in complex domains — this gives AI-fluent designers genuine negotiation leverage.

The PwC data also shows that employer demand for formal degrees is declining, especially for AI-exposed roles — falling 7–9 percentage points from 2019 to 2024. This means skills-based demonstrations (portfolio, case studies, AI project examples) are gaining ground over credentials.

The Bifurcation

Compensation is bifurcating dramatically.

Designers who are AI-native, strategic, and cross-functional are commanding more than ever.

Designers who are execution-only are facing a market where the floor of what AI can do keeps rising, compressing their value.

The Salesforce VP’s framing captures it: “The near-term impact of AI will largely be that we’re going to take the bottom 50 percentile performers and bring them into the top 50 percentile. If you’re in the top 10 percentile, the impact of AI is actually much less”.

For creative leaders, the question isn’t just “How do I use AI?” It’s “How do I become the person whose judgment, taste, and strategic thinking directs what AI produces?” That’s where the premium — in both salary and career durability — lives now.

Fashion Design

Fashion also presents a bifurcated picture. McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2026 describes AI shifting from “competitive edge to business necessity,” with companies reshaping workforces so that existing roles become more AI-centric and shift toward higher-value creative and analytical tasks. McKinsey’s earlier generative AI in fashion report estimated the technology could add $150–$275 billion to fashion and luxury operating profits within three to five years.

But the workforce impact is already visible. The industry recorded 18,517+ job losses in 2025 amid broader structural distress, with 80% of fashion executives surveyed expecting no improvement. One fringe but frequently cited projection claims AI will eliminate 70% of fashion design jobs by 2028, particularly in pattern-making, trend forecasting, and technical specification — tasks that AI tools can now complete in minutes instead of hours.

The roles most at risk are technical and production-facing: pattern graders, junior trend analysts, lookbook and catalog photographers, and entry-level visual merchandisers. Creative directors and senior designers who set cultural direction and manage client and retail relationships are better insulated — for now.

Workplace expectations: AI trend-forecasting tools (analyzing millions of social media images daily), generative design tools for rapid ideation, and AI-driven demand prediction are increasingly standard at major houses and fast-fashion brands alike.

Web Design

Web design’s execution layer has been heavily disrupted. Tools like Wix ADI, Framer AI, and Webflow’s AI features have commoditized template-based site creation. Freelance web design and development postings fell roughly 20% in the Imperial College study, and basic web design work (small business sites, landing pages, portfolio builds) has been among the hardest-hit categories on platforms like Upwork.

What remains in demand: conversion-focused design with strong UX reasoning, complex design systems, accessibility-compliant builds, and senior-level work that bridges design and engineering. Web design as a standalone profession is consolidating into UI/UX and product design roles — or disappearing into AI-assisted no-code tools for clients who would never have hired a human designer anyway.

Industrial Design and Product Design (Physical)

Industrial and physical product design has been less immediately disrupted than screen-based disciplines, largely because physical constraints, manufacturing tolerances, and supply chain realities require domain expertise that AI can’t yet replicate end-to-end. AI tools like Autodesk’s generative design software accelerate iteration dramatically — producing hundreds of structural variants in minutes — but a human designer still selects, refines, and stress-tests them.

Autodesk’s 2025 AI Jobs Report found that AI fluency mentions in US job listings surged 56.1% in 2025 (building on 114.8% growth in 2023 and 120.6% in 2024) across design-and-make industries including product design and manufacturing. The message is clear: AI tools are required, not optional. But the report also found that design skills have surpassed coding and cloud skills as the most in-demand competency in AI-specific job listings — human-centered thinking is more valued, not less, in AI-native design roles.

The junior pipeline problem exists here too. Firms are hiring fewer entry-level product designers, preferring experienced talent who can direct AI tools autonomously.

Interior Design

Interior design is among the most insulated of the design fields in this analysis, for a specific reason: the work is fundamentally relational.

The core value proposition — translating a client’s lifestyle, emotional preferences, and spatial behavior into built environments — requires human judgment and relationship that AI can augment but not replicate.

AI tools (space planning software, material visualization, AR walkthroughs) are accelerating the early-phase workflow dramatically, collapsing weeks of initial concepting into hours.

But the profession is evolving: 62% of UK architects (a closely adjacent field) are already using AI tools, with 84% describing AI as augmenting rather than replacing their work.

The disruption risk is concentrated in commoditized residential work — the kind of one-room, budget-constrained projects that AI-powered tools like Modsy or Houzz now handle directly, bypassing human designers entirely. High-end residential, commercial, and hospitality design remain substantially human-dependent.

Experiential Design

Experiential and spatial design (retail environments, branded activations, events, installations) sits at the intersection of architecture, theater, and brand strategy — and is evolving rather than contracting.

AI is being used for rapid prototyping, 3D environment visualization, and interactive tech integration. But the high-touch, site-specific, and relational nature of experiential work makes it harder to automate than screen-based disciplines.

The field is also growing in some dimensions: as AI makes digital content cheaper, brands are investing more in physical, embodied experiences that can’t be replicated online. That said, the production and execution roles within experiential — model-makers, junior spatial designers, set dressers — are being cut in favor of leaner teams using AI visualization tools.

Visual Art and Illustration

This may be the hardest-hit creative sector right now. Because generative AI tools (Midjourney, DALL-E, Adobe Firefly) were trained on artists’ work without consent, they can now produce client-ready visuals at a fraction of what a human artist, illustrator, or designer charges.

Goldman Sachs estimates that AI can automate 26% of the tasks performed by professional artists and designers — including background removal, recoloring, icon generation, and style templating. Visual artists, illustrators, and graphic designers report losing clients and having wages pushed down as employers substitute AI for human work.

Creator-focused surveys paint an even grimmer picture. A 2024 UK Society of Authors survey of nearly 800 respondents found that 26% of illustrators had already lost work directly due to generative AI. Over a third of illustrators (37%) reported decreased income.

Film, TV, Animation & Gaming

A January 2024 report (CVL Economics, widely cited inThe Atlantic and industry press) found that 203,800 entertainment payroll jobs are affected by AI — and since that figure excludes freelancers and gig workers, the real number is almost certainly higher.

80% of firms that have primarily gig workers are early AI adopters. Entertainment executives themselves are candid about displacement plans: roughly one-third predict job losses for sound editors and 3D modelers within three years, and ~55% expect sound designers to face the greatest displacement. The September 2025 unveiling of “Tilly Norwood,” a realistic AI-generated actress, sparked fresh alarm in Hollywood.

Music

The music industry faces layoffs at labels and publishing companies partly driven by AI music generation. Roughly 33% of entertainment business leaders surveyed expect songwriters, composers, and studio engineers to face displacement in the near term, and about 40% put music editors and audio technicians in the vulnerable category.

Global: UNESCO’s 2026 Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity report, based on data from 120+ countries, projects that music creators could lose up to 24% of their revenue by 2028, while audiovisual creators could lose 21%. A CISAC-commissioned global economic study calculated the cumulative loss at €22 billion over five years (€10 billion in music, €12 billion in audiovisual), representing a direct transfer of economic value from human creators to AI companies

AI-generated music is projected to be roughly 20% of traditional streaming platform revenues by 2028, and approximately 60% of music library revenues — areas that directly cannibalize human composers’ income. A PRS survey found 74% of its members were concerned about AI-generated music competing with human-made compositions.

In a particularly low moment, the CEO of an AI music generation company claimed publicly in early 2025 that “most musicians don’t genuinely enjoy creating music” and predicted musicians would soon become unnecessary.

What a raging douche.

Writing, Editing, Translation, Journalism & Publishing

This is where the data is most brutal and most personal.

Here’s the field-by-field breakdown.

Copywriting

Copywriting has been ground zero for AI displacement. Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine investigation (December 2025) collected firsthand accounts from copywriters across the industry, and the pattern is consistent: companies mandated AI adoption, then eliminated the writers.

The stories are devastating. One agency owner saw revenue collapse from $600,000 per year with 8 employees to less than $10,000 in 2025 — a near-total wipeout driven by small business clients switching to ChatGPT.

A corporate content writer was “forced to use AI until the day I was laid off”. A medical writer’s hours were cut from near full-time to 4–5 hours per month as firms shifted to AI-generated content edited by advanced-degree holders at lower rates.

Bloomberry’s analysis of 180 million global job postings (2023–2025) found that writer job postings fell 27.9% in 2025 versus the prior year — far steeper than the 8% baseline decline across all jobs. The Imperial College/DIW Berlin study found writing-related freelance postings dropped 30% post-ChatGPT — the steepest decline of any category they measured.

The recurring theme: work hasn’t vanished entirely but has been degraded.

Clients now ask writers to edit AI-generated drafts at steep discounts. As one copywriter put it: “I don’t go through the full creative process. I don’t do the hard work that makes me feel alive afterwards. It’s different, more clinical, and much less rewarding”.

Screenwriting

Hollywood screenwriting is contracting sharply — and it’s not just the 2023 strikes. The WGA West’s 2024 annual financial report revealed:

• Total WGA members reporting income decreased 9.4% from 2023 and 24.3% from 2022

• Total member earnings reached $1.5 billion — up 12.7% from the strike-depressed 2023, but still 21% below 2022’s $1.9 billion

• Employment in TV and digital platforms fell 28.5% from 2022

• TV writing jobs specifically fell 42% in the 2023–24 season, with 1,319 fewer positions across all levels

• Writers in news, promotion, and interactive programming saw a 26% reduction in work

The job losses cut across all seniority levels: co-executive producers and above lost 642 positions (40% drop), mid-level roles lost 299 (42%), and staff writers/story editors lost 378 (46%). Screenwriter earnings fell 6% for the first three quarters of 2024, with the number of active screenwriters declining 15% compared to the same period in 2022.

Brookings scholars warned that the deeper danger is the transformation of remaining roles — writers becoming editors of AI-generated drafts rather than original creators, in what was described as “the Uber-fication of Hollywood”.

Book Authors: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Creative Non-Fiction

Fiction Writers

A Cambridge University study (November 2025) of 258 published UK novelists and 74 industry insiders produced alarming findings:

• 51% of novelists believe AI is likely to entirely replace their work

• 39% say their income has already been hit by generative AI

• 85% expect future income to be driven down by AI

• 59% know their work has been used to train AI models without permission or payment

• Genre authors are considered most vulnerable: 66% of respondents listed romance as “extremely threatened,” followed by thrillers (61%) and crime (60%)

• Some novelists reported finding books published under their name on Amazon that they didn’t write

The fear isn’t just direct displacement — it’s indirect. As Cambridge’s Dr. Collett noted: “Most authors do not earn enough from novels alone and rely on income streams such as freelance copywriting or translation which are rapidly drying up due to generative AI”.

Some literary creatives envision a dystopic two-tier market: human-written novels become “luxury items” while AI-generated fiction is cheap or free.

Non-Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction Writers

The ASJA’s “AI and the Writing Profession” survey — the first large-scale report of its kind, covering 1,481 working writers — found:

• 40% of freelancers said AI had reduced their income

• Three out of four freelancers expect writing opportunities to decline in the future

• One in four writers has considered quitting because of AI

• 61% of all writers now use AI tools

• Writers who use AI intensively report $47,000 higher average incomes than those who don’t — but this likely reflects a survivorship effect where only the most established can leverage AI profitably

• 91% are concerned about AI-generated hallucinations contaminating their fields

The UK Society of Authors’ 2024 survey reinforced these findings: 57% of non-fiction writers and 65% of fiction writers believe AI will negatively impact their future income. And 22% of all respondents now use AI in their work, with non-fiction writers (25%) using it at higher rates than fiction writers (20%).

Journalism

American newsrooms are in freefall — for a combination of AI-related and structural reasons.

The Washington Post cut more than 300 jobs in February 2026 (roughly 30% of its workforce), with its executive editor explicitly noting that online traffic had dropped nearly 50% over three years, “partly due to the emergence of generative AI” drawing readers away from traditional outlets.

Condé Nast, Time, the Los Angeles Times, and dozens of digital outlets have all made major cuts. Since 2005, one in four U.S. newspapers has ceased operations.

For working writers, AI tools have simultaneously become a client expectation and a potential source of pay cuts.

Publishing

Publishers Weekly’s 2025 Salary & Jobs Report paints a picture of an industry increasingly uncomfortable with AI: 72% of publishing professionals said AI will be bad for publishing, up from 56% just one year earlier. The concerns break along experience lines: newer employees fear job losses, while veterans worry about copyright erosion and quality decline.

The business side of publishing is growing — the AAP reported total revenue up 4.1% in 2024 to $32.5 billion — but the distribution of who benefits is shifting. AI is accelerating self-publishing dramatically, with tools handling formatting, cover design, distribution, and even marketing. That compresses demand for the human professionals (editors, cover designers, formatters) who traditionally served both traditional and indie publishing pipelines.

Amazon KDP now requires authors to disclose AI-generated content — an early signal that the platforms themselves recognize the flood.

Editing

Editing is being squeezed from both ends. On one side, AI writing tools have eliminated the need for some editorial work by producing cleaner first drafts. On the other, the remaining editorial work is being degraded: writers report being asked to “clean up” AI-generated text rather than doing substantive developmental editing.

The Gracenote editor story from Blood in the Machine is a perfect case study of how editing jobs are eliminated in stages: the company used ML to automate the prioritization half of the job, then outsourced the writing/editing half to cheaper overseas labor. A team of 10 was reduced to 2 in a single month.

Medical writing and technical editing show a specific pattern: firms now generate content with AI and hire higher-credentialed people at lower rates to review it, effectively eliminating mid-career editorial roles entirely.

Songwriting and Music Composition

Songwriting faces a unique threat because AI music is directly competing for the same revenue streams. CISAC’s landmark global study projects that music creators could lose 24% of their revenues by 2028, with AI-generated music capturing roughly 20% of streaming platform revenues and 60% of music library revenues. That’s a cumulative loss of €10 billion over five years for music creators alone.

UK Music’s 2025 This Is Music report found that 66% of UK music creators believe AI poses a direct threat to their career, with only 13% disagreeing. Streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube are already integrating AI to curate playlists and fill catalog gaps.

As Forbes noted, “streaming services stand to save billions by substituting licensed music with AI-generated alternatives”.

Among active musicians, adoption is high but conflicted: 87% of producers say they use AI in their workflows, but primarily for technical tasks like mixing and mastering (79%), while 66% use it creatively for melodies, instruments, or vocals.

One emerging bright spot: licensing. Anthropic proposed paying $1.5 billion to settle copyright claims — roughly $3,000 per book — and HarperCollins negotiated deals worth $2,500–$5,000 per book with major AI companies. If these structures hold, they may create a new revenue stream for creators whose work trained the models.

Poetry

Poetry occupies an unusual position. A University of Pittsburgh study published in Nature Scientific Reports found that non-expert readers cannot reliably distinguish AI-generated poetry from work by Shakespeare, Dickinson, or Plath — and actually prefer the AI versions, rating them higher on quality, beauty, emotion, and originality. Researchers attributed this to AI poems being more “straightforward and accessible,” while human poetry’s complexity was mistaken for incoherence.

Poet Joelle Taylor (T.S. Eliot Prize winner) responded: “A poem transcends mere algorithms; it encapsulates empathy, revelation, passion, and surprise”.

The worry in the poetry world is less about direct job loss — poetry has never been economically viable for most practitioners — and more about cultural devaluation: if audiences can’t tell the difference and prefer the AI, what happens to poetry as a form of human expression?

Teaching Writing

The impact on writing instruction is structural. An AAUP (American Association of University Professors) survey found:

• 62% of faculty say AI has made the teaching environment at least somewhat worse

• 76% report reduced job enthusiasm

• 69% say AI has worsened student success outcomes

• 30% say pay equity has gotten worse

The core problem: if students can generate passable essays with AI, the entire pedagogical model built on writing-as-learning is threatened.

Adjunct instructors in high-enrollment survey courses are the most at risk of displacement, while research-intensive and mentorship-heavy roles remain insulated. A Pew Research survey found that nearly a third of experts predict AI could put teaching jobs at risk within two decades.

Inside Higher Ed projects “steady, incremental reductions” in instructional positions as AI tutoring systems mature. But the more immediate effect is work intensification: faculty now must redesign assignments, learn AI detection tools, and navigate constantly shifting institutional policies — all without additional compensation or time.

Translation and Localization

Translation is among the single hardest-hit writing subfields. The Society of Authors’ 2024 survey found 36% of translators have already lost work to AI, with 43% reporting decreased income. CISAC’s study projects that translators and adaptors for dubbing and subtitling will experience the strongest impact of any audiovisual creative role, with 56% of their revenue at risk.

Creator-focused surveys paint an even grimmer picture. A 2024 UK Society of Authors survey of nearly 800 respondents found that 36% of translators had already lost work directly due to generative AI.

The Common Thread Across All Writing Fields

Bloomberry’s 180-million-job-posting analysis captures the structural reality precisely:

“AI isn’t wiping out entire professions — it is dividing them.” Execution-based creative roles (copywriters, staff writers, technical writers) are being automated, while strategy-driven and leadership roles (creative directors, creative managers, creative producers) are holding steady.

The pattern across every writing discipline is:

• Junior and execution-level work is being eliminated or commoditized

• Remaining work is degraded — editing AI output instead of creating original work, at lower rates

• The “good enough” bar is what kills — not AI quality exceeding humans, but clients accepting AI quality as sufficient

• Income streams that subsidized creative writing (copywriting, translation, editing) are drying up, making creative work itself unsustainable

• Those who adopt AI intensively earn more — but there are far fewer of them, creating a winner-take-most dynamic

Architecture

In architecture, 62% of UK architects are already using AI tools, though 84% view AI as augmenting their work rather than replacing it. The shift is toward AI handling technical execution while architects focus on strategic and conceptual thinking.

Goldman Sachs estimated that 37% of architecture and engineering work tasks “could be automated by AI”, placing it among the most-exposed professional fields.

The structural threat is subtle but significant: AI doesn’t replace architects one-for-one — it multiplies the output of a single architect. Xkool CEO Wanyu He estimates that one architect using AI can do the work of five, meaning practices need fewer people even as productivity rises.

As of March 2025, only 6% of American architects regularly use AI, per an American Institute of Architects study — suggesting the disruption wave has barely begun.

Morphosis founder Thom Mayne has said AI will reduce the size of individual studios to a “more intimate” level.

Dude, don’t insult people’s intelligence by spinning mass layoffs into something warm and desirable.

📰 Where can I learn more?

Some strong outlets that write up AI x Creatives coverage (with sourced rigor):

• The Atlantic — particularly their ongoing “AI & Labor” coverage (e.g., “The Problem With Letting AI Do the Grunt Work,” Dec. 2025)

• The New York Times — their technology and business desks, including the Feb. 2026 piece on AI-washing

• The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) — published a peer-reviewed essay by a University of Chicago computer science professor on AI replacing human artists

• Dezeen (architecture-specific) — rigorous industry coverage with cited sources

• PwC Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey — annual, heavily cited

• World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025 — comprehensive, data-driven

• Challenger, Gray & Christmas — the most-cited firm for layoff data broken down by AI causation

If you’ve read this far, wow thanks for hanging in there. All this stuff in one place is a lot.

My forthcoming pieces will deep-dive into the question “What can I do?” A lot, in fact!

🗳️ If you feel better informed, please like or leave a comment.

Your thoughts and questions do inform future posts, plus help me understand what’s hitting you. This is a crucial, urgent topic; would love to know where you think I biffed and what I’m missing.

More soon, Kat xo

Read time: 3 min 41 sec

Hi, it’s Kat. Don’t worry, this is still a monthly-ish newsletter. I’m writing you (so soon after the last) because my news is time-sensitive and major:

Surprise: You are a paid subscriber now!

Shortly after this email lands, every free subscriber will enjoy paid subscriber perks for 2 months. You can:

• Access the monthly Zoom Q&A (can be coached by me)

• Unlock the members-only posts

• Request specific topics for posts, webinars, tools, or events (made to order)

Just an $11 gift (see why it’s worth much more, below), from me to you. Thank you for reading.

But why 2 months? In case you can’t make it to February’s Q&A, detailed below.

Monthly Q&A, starts Friday February 13 @ 11am PST / 2pm EST

As you may know, paid subscribers can attend a live call with me and other bright, scrappy, spirited, open people who want creative growth.

Some real masterful humans read my newsletter. I’ll never get over it.

After a hiatus, the calls are back! Starting in February, I’ll be hosting them over Zoom every 2nd Friday of the month, at the times above.

Part of it: Q&A and discussion. Recent topics:

• trends I’m seeing amongst my clients

• making art vs. making money

• how to get and stay in flow

• personal branding

• neurodivergence

• how to live a creative, fulfilling life

Another part of it: Coaching. If you want to be coached by me, you can be, for ~10 minutes. I didn’t offer this in the previous iteration of this gathering.

Why join? For starters, a paid subscription to my Substack is just $11 per month.

I have no problem saying this: Getting coaching from me for $11/mo is an insane deal as is. And you get it for free for 2 months. Part of me doesn’t even know why I’m doing it :)

But forget about me, come because you’ll hang with and learn from very cool people with great taste who know a LOT:

I just wanted to say that you are amazing and the group is so good. — Matt Joass

Kat I loved your meetup yesterday!!! It feels like we’re all sitting around a campfire, which I love. — Erin Nolan

That was incredibly insightful and helpful. — Andre

I found the discussion enriching and it definitely had notes of grad school exploration. — Corina

Announcing: Quiet Confetti is now Exquisite Work

What I’m about to say is a bit big-picture, but hang in with me.

Some of you may have read this little flash of a piece:

For years, I’ve been cultivating my theory on how creatives can stand out and make money in the AI era.

Now, I want to put my ideas in writing + hear your thoughts and stories.

(ofc any theory of “mine” is shared with people all over the world AND inspired by many thinkers and feelers no longer with us)

Quiet Confetti was experimental and therapeutic; I loved writing it, and those qualities will continue on in Exquisite Work.

The ripple-out effects of AI for the creative economy, job market, disciplines, and spheres are immense. Not to mention what it’s already doing to our brains.

So now, this Substack/newsletter/blog/grown-up Xanga/whatever will partly set its sights on these wild times we're living in and creating in.

I want to consider and discuss (with you guys!) how AI might impact your paycheck and revenue. Your career and vocation. But most importantly, your heart and soul.

Plus how to navigate it, thrive.

A name change means rebrand in some circles. I worked with the super talented Debbie Cho of Fruit Sandwich, my go-to for web and brand. Since my idea Exquisite Work involves soulfulness1, the logo she created is an auric field shimmering with yes, life, love, and light. Hope you enjoy.2 Obvi loads of you know your way around a brand guideline ;)

To my existing paid subscribers, your support is always empowering and moving to me. Thank you.

Much more to come. What do you want to read about? See you in Zoom on Feb 13.

xo Kat

Happy New Year, homie! Want to catch up a bit? Here’s a maybe overshare-y life update:

I got really sick and had a full-blown identity (mid-life?) crisis

I’m thrilled we’re in 2026, because my 2025 largely sucked.

I spent 8 months of it wrestling with a health condition. A match I was losing most of the time. Until one day, the pendulum started to swing back. I finally got better. Now I feel better than before, if you can believe it.

The condition was so serious that I wasn’t able to work at all; had to take medical leave for months. That part was harrowing. I was both intensely grateful for my loving, patient, supportive partner AND felt like I was being demo’ed down to the studs.

Maybe you can relate to this, but I hadn’t realized how very much I identify with my work: Kat Koh, Creative Career Coach. My company is Kat Koh LLC. My website is katkoh.com, where I talk about my work and… me. Not because I want to nor do I like the attention so much. Because I’m a solopreneur whose brand is literally my name.

Moreover, I coach because work is very important. The number of hours we spend working is second only to sleep (hopefully you sleep more than you work).

No, I’m not going to rebrand. Yes, I have no solutions for this. For now I’m contemplating how harmful it was for me to be so identified with my job (something that can disappear overnight).

I got married to the best person I have ever met

But 2025 wasn’t all bad. Last October, I married my favorite human. He’s brilliant, deeply kind, and puts up with my chaos. It happened on a mountain. We were surrounded by our nearest and dearest. I’m glad we have gorgeous photos, because the day was a blur, like everyone said it would be.

I’m back from the dead! Also a San Franciscan and it shows

To be back to work feels amazing. I’ve always been grateful for how I get to make a living, but that sentiment is tenfold now.

I’m bursting with questions, ideas, theories, strategies, and analysis about how to stand out and make good money as a creative. So curious about the current state of creative industries, spaces, and life — and how best to navigate them.

Where I live, it’s impossible not to think about AI. Can’t swing a cat without hitting 34 incomprehensible AI startup ads on Muni buses or billboards.

Regardless of how you feel about it, AI is not going anywhere. On the contrary, it’s completely consequential to our lives. For a while now, I’ve considered my work to be creative career coaching for the AI era. This shit is bananas, so there’s no other way.

If I’m not helping my clients be AI-informed and feel confident about the AI era strategy we come up with, I’m not fully doing my job.

Chat with me, fee waived

As a little new year gift, use 👉this link👈 to book a 30-min Coaching Interest Chat. It’s typically $25 to book. But not for you, not for the next 11 days. Offer good until Friday January 30.

If you don’t need it yourself, feel free to forward this email to one creative friend who does.

For better or worse, I’m active on LI & IG these days

Lately, I’ve been having much more fun on LI and IG. Whatever hangups I had about them seem to have dissipated. For now.

Feel free to follow along. I try to post things that might be helpful to you. And ofc I post different content on each platform:

• LinkedIn

• Instagram

I hope this new year brings you the love, health, adventure, growth, and good food that you want — and then some.

xo, Kat

Nae insaeng-ui uimi in Korean, el propósito de mi vida in Spanish, mon raison d’être in French, ikigai in Japanese, mein Lebenszweck in German, tsél’ moyey zhizni in Russian, wǒ rénshēng de yìyì in Chinese.

Translation: “my life’s work and purpose”. We’ve always known that clarity of purpose is essential to a meaningful life.

For creatives today, it’s more true than ever. Exquisite Work is finely tuned and profoundly human. It has that elusive “it factor”. It resonates in a way AI-generated output can’t.

Why? Exquisite Work is soulful, and you and I have a soul. When you make something from that place, people connect with it. Game recognize game.

So what’s yours? What does it take to play at that level?

Let’s start with this wild paradox:

1. You are the one and only you. Utterly unique.

2. You are one drop in the vast ocean of humanity. Immersed, interconnected.

Nobody else has your precise blend of mind-body-spirit, childhood, circumstances, experience, talents, personality, skills, resources, community, gifts and vision.

And they never will. So, what’s yours to do?

Hope you’re all enjoying summer!

Due to the added value I can offer my clients, the rates for my 1-1 coaching will be increasing starting Tuesday July 7.

Why the hike?

1. 2025 is my 10th year of running my coaching business and practice. You can check out my education & certifications on my website, or skills & experience on my LinkedIn.

2. Despite inflation, I have not raised my rates in several years due to the dizzying impact of AI / LLMs on creative professionals.

What’s it like to work with you?

One of my clients (a designer who got a full ride to RISD for grad as part of our work together) texted me this the other day:

I can also… just make a list what why you’re great lol

• You got a good vibe

• You have a lot of intentionality

• Your questions are just so on point. I really do love your questions.

• your sessions made me feel present

• you’re good at deciding when it good to be feel-y, strategic, or a little nudgey

• I imagine you’re good at reading people because I felt very seen by you

• I always felt like our session came to a close rather than this feeling of “what did we just talk about?”

I think above all, you were not an invasive coach dragging me through a “program” but you were a nurturing parent or guardian angel who just believed in me. Because when you weren’t actively guiding me, I felt guided.

Reflecting back… your one question, “When you wake up, what’s your energy level?” I mean that really changed everything for me.

You weren’t pushy. Just nudging in that direction. And I just took it seriously.

I will honor my current rates until Tuesday July 7 (i.e. if you book a Clarity Session or we sign 6-month contract before the deadline). Here they are:

• Clarity Session (1 hour): $550

• 6-Month Program (14 sessions): $6,300 up front or $1,100/mo

❗️Even better, you don’t need to use your Clarity Session(s) or 6 months of coaching program right away. You can schedule it for any time in the next year.

Some of you I know intimately, others I’ve chatted with, and still more have been allowing me to hit up your inbox for years. Regardless of whether you take advantage of this offer, thank you.

If you’re a current or former paying client (hey hey!) 👇

Book a Clarity Session

If we haven’t met yet ($25 fee is waived for subscribers) 👇

Book a Coaching Interest Chat

Can’t wait to catch up. Let’s get clear about what’s next for you.

Warmly,

KAT KOH is a career coach for creatives.
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✧ san francisco

PS: Reply to the email if you have any questions!

Hello! It’s Kat. Are you feeling into the slow, steady wind-down of 2024?

Never thought I’d write a gift guide. Then last year, my former manager and friend Wes wrote one that was so rigorous, helpful, oddly fascinating, and… her! Pulling it back up last week saved me many hours. Thanks, .

Hope this list saves you time, that you then spend in a fulfilling way. It’s too long for email; you can click here to view it comfortably.

Read time: 11 mins

P.S. This post is for paid subscribers. If you are a free subscriber, appreciate you and no pressure to go to paid — I have an essay coming out soon. If you want to read the full holiday gift guide, you’re welcome to opt-in to the 30-day free trial (more details here).

I kind of hate shopping, especially online. So if I own something and love it, it feels worth a mention. Everything on this list has 3+ of these 5 qualities:

• Design-forward and artful: It’s smart and beautiful.

• Game changer: I can feel the Before and After of its presence.

• Makes my heart happy: I love using it, looking at it, holding it.

• Quality: The product aligns with my values: good materials, owning fewer but better objects, and saving time (i.e. I won’t have to replace it soon, in theory)

• Value: Considering alignment with my values, the cost is fair if not a steal.

Curatorial Notes: The categories are: Stuff and Things; Health and Wellness; and Digital Products. I have zero affiliate marketing deals with the following brands. I’ve left out really quirky, colorful items reflecting my personal style, which wouldn’t be as helpful to you. There might be a better deal out there when you read this, so double-check with your favorite LLM/AI assistant. Let’s go!

Stuff and Things

1. Syouryu Suzugami Coasters/Plates

Vince proposed to me on Naoshima Island in Japan. Our celebratory drinks came on these quietly stunning, malleable tin coasters. Skilled Japanese craftsmen have repeatedly rolled and “rhythmically hammered” the tin, ensuring durability and minimizing deterioration. We were delighted we could buy them at the hotel gift shop. Great if you’re looking for a memorable housewarming gift, or just want your soul to feel something when you set a mug down. They get a lot of compliments, and the freer spirits start sculpting them. Makes me so happy.

Read more

“I have time blindness,” she declared.

“There’s this thing called the Time Timer that supposedly helps, so I got one,” she added, dropping the link into our Zoom chat.

Her words hit the screen of my mind, looking like a big pull quote in elegant typeface amidst smaller text. The catchy phrase, the weight of her conviction, that branding choice1. We were in a coaching session, and my brain was actively scanning for things said with energy, oomph.

“What is… time blindness?” I asked.

“It’s an ADHD thing. Means I can’t track how much time has passed or estimate how long things will take. The other day I guessed a task would take 20 minutes but it actually takes 2 hours.” She paused. “Or, two weeks if I’m tied up in knots about it.”

In an effort to remain neutral, I painted the room of my mind a tan, matte eggshell. My Seductive Coined Phrase Alert was popping off.

But she’s being resourceful and awesome and trying something new. Now’s not the time for your cultural anthropological field notes, dude.

“Time blindness” is just as sticky as “impostor syndrome” to me. A large percentage of my clients claim to have the latter when we first start working together. Having had loads of it during grad school and my early years of coaching, my compassion runs deep.

But over the years I’ve noticed something worrisome: internet culture seems to have solidified “impostor syndrome” into a mini-identity. Its popularity as a keyword search on Google has been going up and to the right for years.

On the flip side, I’ve learned that “feeling seen” by a coined phrase can cloak true understanding. The brain can so quickly give it unearned weight, turning it into a label of “This is Who I Am”. And letting something define us leads to more “stuck” than solutions. 

“Time blindness”, “impostor syndrome”… both are imperfect attempts to capture a personal, challenging experience. Tidily sums up how you feel, but factually inaccurate because you are not an impostor.2 Nor is anyone truly blind to time.

All to say… I think I might have time blindness.

Leave a comment

I knew immediately I had to try this Time Timer thing. For research, for my clients, of course. Plus I was getting kind of desperate.

I’m not 100% unaware of time, no, and neither is that client. Ah, clock-time — what the Greeks call chronos and what we moderns call “struggle with time management”.

Welcome to the party of being creative. My internal monologue won’t shut up, captivating like a movie trailer at best but mostly just supremely annoying. Brain often feels like a trampoline park hosting multiple kids’ birthday parties at once. I can get so absorbed by what I’m doing I cease to breathe and exist, especially when on a screen. Minutes slip and slide by, pile up in the corner. It’s been a source of quiet anxiety for years.

It looks like an ordinary kitchen timer, but don’t be fooled. When you turn the dial, a colored disk appears to fill in the space of time you choose (e.g. 20 mins, 57 mins, etc). As time passes, the shape of the pie slice shrinks at a snail’s pace, until it disappears. Then, a wholly unglamorous, analog beep beep, beep beep.

Are you a bit bored? I was too. Then it started to blow my mind.

IT CREATES TENSION

The way the color and shape of time slowly shrinks is unexpectedly compelling. It reminds me of how mesmerizing it is to look at heavy rain pour, snow softly piling up, or when the wind sculpts sand into a gorgeous rippled beach.

Like a good time-based artwork something is happening, slowly enough for me track it. There is a part of me that keeps wondering how much of the shape is left. What does it look like now?

Boom. Time awareness.

IT PULLS FOCUS

I don’t love my iPhone’s timer. I don’t hate it. Perhaps worse, I nothing it.

It’s a “set it and forget it” user experience. I do other things and check out. I trust that the beep will go off at some point. So, I dedicate 100% of my focus away from the timer. I’ll turn it off and promptly forget to stop or start doing whatever.

Not so with the Time Timer. Since it is a physical object and has a visually-trackable mechanism for measuring time passage, I noticed myself continuing to glance at it.

We live in the attention economy. Many people get paid large amounts of money to continuously pull our focus onto an app, ad, whatever. But the Time Timer pulls focus quietly, for the good of me. And my nervous system stays regulated. What a concept.

IT INJECTS PLAY INTO THE MUNDANE

Everything feels slightly higher stakes, in a fun way. I’ve been timing myself doing the most ordinary things that before, I just “did”. 

• 10 mins to do my makeup (and…go!)

• 12 mins to pack up before I have to catch the bus (and…leave!)

• 5 mins AND 5 MINS ONLY to respond to this text (and…stop overthinking it and send, don’t lose the thread for a week)

• 14 mins to low-and-slow bake this lemon herbed butter salmon at 375 degrees (and…done!)

Since using the Time Timer, I’ve arrived places on time, early even, and had some fun doing it. Wtf.

IT SOMEWHAT SOOTHED MY EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

The Time Timer is but a tool. Without the power of clear intention behind it, it’s likely to sit and collect dust just like any other object. 

You can say I found the Time Timer at the right time; I’m working this thing like my life depends on it. Because it does.

After a week of use, some soft magic started to glow amidst all the timing of daily tasks. After a month, my appalling backlog of todos has been cut in half. There is more space in my body, brain, life.

It wasn’t long until I asked myself, “What’s important to me that I don’t spend enough time on?” 

Using an oldie-but-goodie coaching exercise I do with clients, I sketched out who I want to be and some habits/actions that amount to that sort of person.

There it was —  how I really want to spend my precious time.

Share Quiet Confetti by Kat Koh

Small, unassuming things — a schedule, a timer, a plant care card, a bone flute — can be portals to the profound. 

When I turn the dial on the Time Timer, I am opting to spend time with clear intention. I choose my choice.

Haven’t felt this empowered over my time in ages. Since about 2020, what I have felt is literally offbeat. It’s out there, you’ve felt and read it: the lockdown and the pandemic changed a lot of people’s sense of time, to varying degrees of staying power.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim.” — Annie Dillard

Dear Time Timer, effective little defender from chaos and whim. My creativity thanks you dearly. 

Thank you to my clients navigating (and thriving with!) an ADD/ADHD diagnosis who told me about time blindness and the Time Timer. I feel grateful for , , Yelena Olin, and for encouragement and golden feedback. Thanks for patiently putting up with offbeat me :)

The credited images in Quiet Confetti by Kat Koh were made by humans who got paid for their work.

The adage “Life is short” feels inaccurate. A monk might say that when lived fully in the present moment, your life can feel luxuriously long.

Here’s the real stuff of terror: the people we love — however complicatedly — can float away anytime, at some unknown moment. 

We humans are cute. Our productivity often wins out over wisdom. We run around making painstaking plans, but the truth is nobody is guaranteed the next Thanksgiving, Monday morning, or even the next hour. This fact rings louder in my head the more my parents’ hair turns silver.

Before retiring, my dad was a painting contractor. His “business suit” was a pair of white Dickies overalls and Timberland boots, splattered like a Jackson Pollock painting.

He and my mom were Korean immigrants living in 1990s Silicon Valley. Long before the heyday of Google Ads, he bought thousands of flyers to “spray and pray”. The folded gray card stock depicted squat, friendly cartoon painters sprucing up a suburban house.

As his unpaid junior assistant, I stuck address labels on the flyers and made a “client book” by drawing lines in a spiral notebook from Target. Dad insisted I use a 0.7mm black ballpoint pen and ruler for this. My baby sister’s handsy curiosity often made my straight lines run jagged.

Sometimes Dad would drag me to Home Depot for supply shopping — the most boring place on earth for a preteen girl. I’d begrudgingly play a poor substitute for the son he didn’t have. On lucky days, we’d exit through the Garden Center.

I adored the book The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and the Eastside San Jose Home Depot Garden Center was the closest I could get to being enveloped in a floral oasis. Row after row of their signature orange metal shelving held hundreds of waxy green, industrially-grown plants. Sometimes, Dad ignored the plants to look at fertilizer or pebbles for interminable minutes.

So I busied myself reading plant care cards. I skipped up and down the aisles, giving the shiny plastic a gentle flick before reading “do’s and don’ts” for peace lilies, pothos, bromeliad, and azaleas. 

Most evenings, Dad buried his head in a newspaper and cradled a Jim Beam on the rocks. Mom barely sat down, too busy fetching the side dishes he wanted — or water, which he was inches away from! — every few minutes. My sister and I teetered between giggling or quarreling, depending on our moods. 

I’d look across the table at this man. There he was, and yet he felt so far away. I could read about the needs of flora, but hadn’t a clue about my own father’s.

Between Dad and me, the past holds a barren field of lonely silences and missed opportunities to connect. Who are the people we call our loved ones?

If we’d exchanged person care cards, I could have seen my dad as a whole person, someone who is growing and needs care. 

Instead of being grumpy on car camping trips, I could have appreciated him wanting to share his love of nature with us. 

I could have realized he wasn’t ignoring us — he was in deep study of current events, reading between the lines to form his own opinion. 

I could have had compassion for him stomping around the house and speaking loudly. He’d served years in the military, and his hearing was already starting to fade from the gunfire exposure.

He might have seen me more clearly too. More than a silly girl tying up the landline. Maybe as someone who needed certain light, water, and soil conditions to thrive.

Instead of getting impatient and frustrated with me, he might have appreciated that I was working well above my pay grade, trying to help him and my mom to understand bills, legal policies, and opaque social interactions.

He might have had compassion for my mistakes. I was straining to figure out how to be a good daughter and older sister by his standards, which felt at odds with discovering who the hell I actually was. 

My sister has a positive affirmation app on her phone. It sits on her home screen, a black rectangle with elegant white serif font. Her message the other day was

My dad and I speak English and Korean to each other, yet don’t understand. I wish he came with instructions. But people don’t. Sometimes we have to write it for them. And then I realize he does have a Person Care Card. It floats around in the substrate of my heart and mind.

Thanks to the unearned luck that keeps graces me, he’s alive and well. I can pick up the phone and hear his voice.

He’s happy when I do, though it rarely seems that way because he’s absorbed in his latest YouTube intrigue, like an explainer on what stocks even are, or a nature doc on the alien-on-earth Japanese spider crab.

There is a recurring blue task reminder on my calendar to call him. Because the act is a push, not a pull. I can’t wait for the pull, to feel inspired; that’ll arise in the endless expanse of grief somewhere ahead, when he’s gone. So I push, make a fumbly call.

It’s awkward and unsatisfying. But in this area of my life, quality of content doesn’t matter at all. The mere act of showing up and being kind is enough. With each conversation, we grow and heal (are they the same?). It’s happening at a glacial pace, but that’s okay. The speed doesn’t matter either.

Very grateful to , , , , , , and , , and for your feedback, comments and encouragement.

The credited images were made by humans who got paid for their work.

In preparation, I was reading ’s Saving Time and talking to people about time all the time. Slowly realized I’m not here trying to chit-chat about TIME in a one-off “tips and tricks” post.

What wanted to come out instead is the piece below, which started as a wee Facebook post in 2015. It’s about hands-down one of the most important events of my life.

On Labor Day 2014, I was hit by a car at 35 mph while biking home from yoga. 

It happened at the edge of dusk and nightfall, on the corner of S. Van Ness and 23rd in San Francisco. Thirteen eyewitnesses, spread across four corners, saw a light blue sedan run a red light and collide into a young woman. When I hit the car’s hood and asphalt, the two blows punched my body, robbing my lungs of air.

What felt like seconds later, two SFPD officers were peering over me. My lime green vintage three-speed was yards away, the front wheel now folded like a taco shell. My helmet had stayed on but was cracked down the side. 

Note to self and the sky: Stopping traffic is seriously bad. That phrase people say as a compliment about someone’s appearance is wildly off-base. 

I spotted a police siren glinting off the shiny eyeballs of a couple. I’d find out later they saw me somersault thrice midair. 

The driver hit the gas and ran. Probably a little drunk, maybe someone’s father or partner, definitely horrified. Fearing paralysis, I looked down at my body and gasped — limbs attached, no blood. En route to the hospital, I made cheery small talk with the paramedic to cope with the shock. My demeanor dismantled his professionalism for a moment. “You know, according to physics, you probably should have died. Crazy lucky.”

How? If the car had hit three inches to the left, my right leg would have shattered. Three inches to the right, it would have sent me careening into death. 

The purest, dumbest luck I’ve ever had. Just a bruised-up pelvis. No broken bones.

The hollow bone

The brain is so weird. You’d think during all this, it would shut the f up. Instead it went, “Bones bee boop bee boop, print!”

While in disbelief over my intact bones, a core memory resurfaced. The meaning of hollow bones.

I’m in the grad library researching a paper for an archaeology class when I flip to a chapter about prehistoric bone flutes. Our ancestors, after killing off most megafauna and realizing fire + food = faster digestion, had way more time on their hands. Time to make fun stuff, like drums out of hide or flutes out of bones.

I dug (haha, so sorry) through books to learn about bone flutes found at the Jiahu site in China, dating between 7,000-6,000 BC. The famous Hohle Fels flute made from a vulture radius bone, discovered in caves in the Swabian Alb region of Germany, dating back 43,000-35,000 years. The Divje Babe "Neanderthal flute" found in Slovenia is thought to be the oldest one, potentially dating back 50,000-60,000 years. It’s made from a cave bear femur bone.

Second note to self: Not all core memories are sexy and have Main Character Energy, I guess.

From the look of these flutes, our ancestors may have noticed that when the bone was hollow, clean, and dry, the sound was beautiful. It became something different, what we call music.

To the Lakota, this is also a spiritual truth. They call it "the hollow bone", believing a person must become “an empty vessel to allow the divine power and wisdom to flow through them unobstructed.”

To become a "hollow bone", one must shed their ego, desires, and attachments through humility, selflessness, and a life of simplicity and moral integrity. 

Frank Fools Crow, a renowned Lakota ceremonial chief and medicine man, has said, "The cleaner the bone, the more water you can pour through it, and the faster it will run."

Bloody, gunky bone

That car hit an anxious, irritating, control-freakish twenty-nine year old, head way up her ass. Like all humans, she was a messy amalgam of everything that had ever happened and failed to happen to her. Just a few pieces:

My parents frantically tried to understand the game of our lives called “How to Survive In America”. Sometimes they could scarcely get ahead before suffering some new, unforeseen setback. So they didn’t notice how disoriented their American-born daughters felt. We learned about democracy, Jim Crow, feminism, and speaking truth to power at our liberal public school, then went home to my dad’s unstable South Korean dictatorship. There, we were subject to his fast-moving emotions. “Abuse of power!” I furiously scribbled in my journals, unable to scream it as I’d like. Stubborn defiance builds like a callus.

It also broke their hearts over and over. Eventually, my parents’ commands for obedience petered out to mere advice. With advice, you have a choice to take or leave it. Not realizing this, I continued to play out the drama of blaming them for everything and trying to do things my way, through willpower. Really. Hard. Against. A. Wall. When they said zig, I zagged. When they offered, I dismissed. When they were upset, I matched them on upset, throwing in contempt for good measure. There were more insidious digs, too — when they were kind, sometimes I felt numb. Rebelling for rebelling’s sake.

Chewing through library books like a chubby little bookworm, my brain absorbed language, the art of narrative, ideas, arguments, rationales. I learned Korean while watching K-dramas with my mom, observing the oh-so creative ways hurt people hurt each other. Words have so much power. I could construct a technicolor, surround-sound narrative in both languages and believe it, hard. Don’t get high on your own supply.

At some point, I fully traded in my parents’ guidance for the pontificating of intellectuals or public personalities. I admired people who “knew their shit” and seemed certain. Those people were a hypnotic algorithm I could get lost in for hours. I mimicked what they modeled. Trade-offs were made, and authenticity lost. But status games often get rewarded in society. So, I managed to build a career I wanted, landing a few coveted internships at art museums and even a scarce full-time job as junior curator. Blind, running fast.

But no one tells you this absurdity: sometimes you can fake it, somewhat make it, only to realize you don’t even want to be there. Nothing is 100% bad or good, and the art world is no exception. The problem was how I had gotten there — by pushing my body and brain to a neon sign lit arrival point while leaving my spirit behind. After realizing this, I started behaving like comedian Taylor Tomlinson would call, “a raccoon trapped in a garbage bag.”

I was “full of myself”: a bone full of marrow and blood vessels and anxious thoughts and pain and other gorgeous human gunk. Flailing, trying to make things happen, panicked, lacking trust, stuck.

There had been plenty of chances to loosen my grip, let go of control, put down my stories, soak up subtle and blunt feedback, just say “Hmm, I don’t know, let me see.”

Astrologers call the years before age thirty a “Saturn return", which just means the universe has had enough of your bullshit and shakes you hard until some of it flakes off. Like mythological Saturn himself, this period is usually a heavy-handed, tough love bitch. Spiritually, materially, emotionally, relationally — it’s all up for grabs.

Sigh, this poor dum dum. One near-death experience, coming right up.

Forced to hollow out

“Having abandoned the flimsy fantasy of certainty, I decided to wander.”
— Kameelah Janan Rasheed

A few weeks after the crash, after years of hogtied indecision, I calmly told the executive director at the museum I was quitting.

“Kat, I think you’re concussed from the accident. I do not accept your resignation,” she said, looking at me in disbelief. “Take a week off and let’s revisit.” I did, we did, and I was even clearer than before.

Being the hollow bone felt like coherence, alignment, having my outsides match my insides.

After my last day, I walked into a warm, lively restaurant and asked for a job. Every staff member made eye contact with me and smiled. The reclaimed wooden tables, blue and terracotta tiles, and warm lighting hugged me as I spoke and it all felt inexplicably good being there.

It was a vegan Mexican place run by what my dad would call “hippies, like Jenny from Forrest Gump.” Before every shift, both front and back of house would sit together at a table weighed down with plates of healthy, tasty food for a heart-to-heart. It was designed to help us “get human” with one another before the stressful slam of the shift. One day, my singer-songwriter co-worker Allison read this Sufi poem to me: 

The Guest House by Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Everything was gently telling me to be the hollow bone. So I did. For four stunning months, I rode an inner tube down the lazy river of life, feeling hyper present and overjoyed to be alive. 

The day’s moments became a daisy chain of little surprises, gifts, and priceless lessons. I walked the same streets as before, tuned to a different frequency. What a privilege to possess one sense, moreover five! One day, Al Gore came into the restaurant with not-his-wife; we gawked and giggled hysterically, daring one another to eBay the remnants of his cashew cacao cake. Two unhoused friends helped each other try on a found pair of shoes as I bawled a few feet away. I wrote a manifesto about how love and creativity are the same thing, under the influence of nothing but a shrimp burrito. 

I’d been so fixated on what I wanted to make of myself, I had not been able to hear what was seeking expression through me. 

Ten years later, I’m not cured. I still worry and fuss about everything and nothing. I forget all the time that people and the universe want to help me, that I’m not alone. I fall in love with how I want it, don’t get it, and then sometimes feel chaotic or unhinged about it. Yet again, a bloody, gunky bone. 

Still a dum dum, but with one meaningful difference: I have a core memory of my ego shattering, spectacularly, lasting long enough to leave a mark. When I’m being just so full of it again, I try to stop. Remember. Let go. Breathe in, breathe out. Wait for it. Dance with it.

They never did find the hit-and-run driver. But even lying on the gurney in the ambulance, I knew criminal justice wasn’t the point. Death had whispered so close I’d felt the puff of its breath on my cheek:

Empty yourself out. Be the hollow bone. Life isn’t created by you, it moves through you.

This thing could not have found its current state without the time, care, and generosity of: , , , , , , Brandon Weaver

The credited images in Quiet Confetti by Kat Koh were made by humans who got paid for their work.