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…

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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.

There was one finding that made me actually cackle... When asked which design trend they were most sick of, the creatives didn't say gradients. They didn't say minimalism. One answer dominated by a wide margin: AI (with more than 70 mentions). Remember when those kinds of stylistic niggles were the biggest bugbear for visual creatives? Happy days…

We used to argue about fucking drop shadows. Now we argue about the end of human authorship.

Growth. 🤌

The awards, predictably, are being quietly abandoned. A full 80% of respondents haven’t entered an award in the past year, and only 12% still believe awards meaningfully help careers. As a former president of two cartoonists’ societies, I should probably be wounded by this. I’m not. I’ve stood in enough awards-night ballrooms, clapping for a trophy I didn’t win, holding a beer the temperature of human breath, to understand exactly why a burnt-out freelancer earning forty grand might decide the entry fee could be better spent on, say, cup noodles.

But here’s the turn. Here’s the bit that I keep coming back to, sober.

When the survey asked what would actually help, the answer wasn’t software. It wasn’t a better AI plug-in or Agent; Networking and community came top, cited by 57.5%, with mentorship close behind at 53%. New tools and technology trailed well behind, at just 31%.

People. The thing creatives say they need most is other people.

The report’s instinct is right: the temptation in a bad year is to retreat. Get your head down, cut costs, skip the conference, let memberships lapse. Become a hermit with a Wacom tablet. I know that instinct intimately, because I am writing this from an apartment in which the most reliable colleague is a snoring dog.

But the survey’s closing line is the truest thing in it, and I’ll paraphrase rather than mangle it: the creatives struggling most don’t want another dashboard. They want a room full of people who understand what they’re going through, and someone a few years ahead willing to offer a hand.

I think that’s why I DO keep going to the National Cartoon Society Reuben Awards every year, and why I meet up with the local chapters whenever there is an event. The NCS has become my ‘found family’, but even more, a huge support network that I simply can’t live without. These are the people who do what I do, who are experiencing what I experience, and they have a lot of knowledge to share -and are more than willing to share it.

It’s also why I keep doing the live shows like Picture This, the lectures, the nights where I stand in front of strangers and make a fool of myself with a microphone. Not because they pay well (reader, they do not). But because for an hour I’m in a room full of people who get it. And on the current evidence, that room is the only thing in this entire industry that’s still appreciating in value.

The robot can have the gradients.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.