Everyone's Tired & Nobody Trusts the Robot..
Thoughts on the latest Creative Boom flagship 2026 industry survey..
I read a survey this week that I’d recommend to absolutely no one if they’re hoping to feel good about choosing a life in the arts.
Creative Boom ran their flagship 2026 industry survey - 882 creative professionals, weighted UK and US, nearly half of them with more than a decade of scars to show for it. The findings landed on me the way most surveys do: with the stark, clinical thrill of being told by a stranger that your suspicions about yourself were correct all along.
The headline number is burnout. A massive 69% (heh) of respondents say they've experienced burnout in the past 12 months. And before you assume that's just the kids who can't handle a deadline: mid-career creatives report the highest burnout rate at 77%. That's my cohort. The people old enough to run the projects and young enough to still answer the emails at midnight..
The report’s theory is that it’s the mid-career people running projects, managing junior staff and fielding client demands without the authority to say no who are taking the worst of it. I felt that one in my teeth. There is an exhaustion that comes from being trusted with everything except the power to refuse any of it.
Then there’s the robot in the room…
If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)
86% of respondents now use AI tools in their work. Eighty. Six.
…And yet only 10% of creatives think AI's overall effect on the industry is positive. Sit with that gap for a sec. Nearly everyone's using the thing. Almost nobody thinks the thing is good. We have, as a profession, collectively agreed to date someone we openly despise.
The report puts it better than I can. (Read it here) It describes a community adapting under duress, using AI not out of enthusiasm but because it feels compelled to, while bracing for it; hedging its bets while it waits to see how client expectations, pricing and competition shift awkwardly around it. (Spoiler alert: we don’t have time to wait for that )
And now we arrive at the part where I’d suggest you top up whatever you’re drinking…
Because the money is where the survey stops being darkly funny and just goes dark. Half of the respondents feel less financially secure than they did a year ago, compared with just 18% who feel more secure. And for the freelancers -my people, the dip-pen-and-mild-dread brigade- nearly 47% of self-employed creatives in the survey earn less than £30,000 a year ($39k in the US).
The report is careful to note that this is a workforce stocked to the brim with experienced professionals, 43% of whom have more than a decade behind them. Some of them, two decades+ (ahem.) So this isn't a room full of beginners finding their feet. It's a room full of people who are very good at what they do, earning well below the median salary, with none of the safety net a salary usually drags along behind it. As someone who left a salary and a country to chase this exact life, I read that figure and did the laugh you do when crying seems excessive for a Tuesday morning.
