My last day on the job was August 15, 2025.
Ten months ago. Even typing it spills a little ache into my soul.
I actually started looking for jobs in May, once we knew that we were going to have to wind down EJUSA, so the “journey” has stretched into a second year. All this is to say that that’s a lot of days and months condemned to scrolling through LinkedIn, clicking on Notifications, and low key losing my marbles.
I cannot wait to relegate LI back to the category of Ultraprocessed Content I Can Mostly Ignore. But today, and for the past 400 days or so, I need LI.
Which means that nearly every day I hack my way through AI sludge, so many cringy humble brags, and unsolicited advice galore, all in pursuit of the job postings that might lead to a salary and health insurance and, please, some goddamn structure to my day.
My least favorite question in the world is: How’s the job search going? Ultimately, I’ll deem it going well once someone has offered me a job. But I realize there’s nuance inside that spectrum. The truth is that most days, I don’t really know. Should I be shitting my pants right now? Should I at least put on pants?
Even before losing my job, I’d read too many stories about people in their 50s/60s who lost their career, wanted to keep working, but couldn’t get back into the work that they either liked or at least were good at and got a decent paycheck from. I felt grateful that I worked with amazing teammates, that we were growing, that people were paying attention to us. This wasn’t going to be my problem. I would work at EJ until I worked no longer.
Then the bad dream crept closer. Two really good friends—Action Bud and Bodes, with decades of experience in the often-volatile advertising/marketing world—lost their jobs a couple years ago. These guys are beyond smart, hilarious, two of my favorite people of all time. And they haven’t gotten back in the game yet. It blows my mind.
Now we are a power trio. We are Rush, Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. But without a stage to play on.
The unsolicited advice takes so many shapes, but so much of it comes with a common thread of Do Something Different. Rethink your life, your vocation. Change everything. Change this thing. That thing.
But I don’t want to! I really loved my job. And even if the organization I loved doesn’t exist, there are other orgs that need someone with my skills, my know-how, my 15+ years of experience, and my elite fashion sense to drive forward their mission. I am not giving up.
There were two unsolicited pieces of advice that led to Old AF…that are The Why to why this vehicle exists. Because I did not wake up from a fever dream and think: Wow, we really need another newsletter/blog/whatever.
Some “thought leader” captured in my algorithm urged the collective mass of the unemployed to think about the task in your old job that you liked most and basically double down.
That was an easy choice for me. I entered nonprofit communications as a journalist. And before that I was a writer, credentialed by the North Carolina university system as a master of the creative form, no less. I wrote a novel! One a little shallow on plot, and thus unpublished and oddly gone from my archives, but still that’s not nothing. I did publish a few short stories, one was really good. There was a time where I woke up every morning and went to the desk.
Hey, I have a desk! I have paper, pens, a computer! I can still write!
Then another old friend who coaches folks and rebuilds their resumes and offers wise advice suggested I start a newsletter. And monetize it.
DON’T WORRY, I AM NOT MONETIZING THIS!
I appreciate Virginia’s confidence in me. But as of right now, post #3 nearing completion, I’m not sure I want to write anything that I believe people will pay me for.
I wrestled with a lot of ideas and subjects, didn’t feel particularly expert about the vast majority, and recognized that what was consuming my mind was this moment, getting older, the indignities, the possibilities, the uncertainties.
I have never thought about my age as much as I have these past 13 months. So maybe that’s worth writing about?
Last fall, on a particularly sucky day, I took a few of my sweet severance dollars and subscribed to Cup of Coffee, a Baseball and Other Stuff newsletter. Craig’s writing makes me happy pretty much every weekday. He’s got a voice, he mixes equal doses of humor, wonder, intellect, and outrage. And he monetized it! Which is awesome. That is my aspiration—humor, wonder, intellect, and, fuck it, a little outrage.
So that’s what all seven of you, the Significant Seven Subscribers, will get. Words that you might call essays, they will touch on rock, maybe some different sports, some stuff about health because Duh. Who knows what else. But all of it will be within the realm of getting old, and what we do with the best days we have left, which are today and tomorrow.
If you want to know a little more about EJUSA and what the hell happened to us, you can read a bit here.