24 years later, I'm still here. But is it worth celebrating?
You know the story: Fresh-faced college grad moves to LA to work "in the industry" as a writer. Buys his first car. Becomes a production assistant. Pays $675 a month for a 1-bedroom unit in a Venice fixer-upper. Explores the palm tree-laden city with wide eyes, blaring mix CDs loaded with Jason Mraz and Craig David jams. (It was the summer of 2002.)
This nostalgic entry is brought to you by my annual Los Angeles milestone which usually comes with a small victory lap, a moment to sit back, take stock, and say look what I've built, see what I've done. I've been brainstorming it for a while, but I keep getting stuck because things aren't feeling very celebratory these days. (You could also blame this delay on Madonna releasing Confessions II, which was distracting in a very good way.)
Depending on where you are, you've probably heard some variation on how bleak things have become in LA. With the pandemic, the continued dominance of streaming, two concurrent labor strikes, the looming mergers of media conglomerates, social unrest sparked by ICE raids, and the catastrophic fires of 2025, the entertainment industry (and everyone in it) is facing an existential crisis like never before.
The perfect storm of these economic challenges has altered the production and media landscape, negatively impacting jobs, local businesses, and the livelihoods of many friends and colleagues.
Here's a statistic to chew on: 40% of the entertainment workforce has been diminished or displaced because film and TV productions have moved out of state or overseas. That fun game show you watched on Fox? It was shot on a soundstage in Ireland.
Studio occupancy is low. The lot where I got my first job as a PA in the early aughts, Radford Studio Center? Where they taped iconic shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Roseanne, Seinfeld, and Will & Grace? Half of those soundstages sit empty and are bracing for another change in ownership, creating more uncertainty about the future.
And let's not even begin to touch the very heated discourse surrounding AI. (Seriously, that's a whole other discussion.)
When nearly half of the people you know are facing a career crisis, including yourself, it's doesn't feel great. And it doesn't feel like it's necessarily an entertainment industry problem either.
Granted, for nearly a decade, my full-time job had been with a marketing agency, but it was entertainment-adjacent...as well as the casualty of a merger. Also? Not helping the situation is all of this coinciding with significant personal loss and grief that continues to color my world in different ways – something I'll save for my therapist.
Stats, Stability, and Seeking Support
Whatever statistics you see or hear about the state of Hollywood, it's easy to scroll past them. But I haven't been experiencing them as statistics. I see them as a list of names.
It's one of my closest friends, a reality TV showrunner who's been out of work for over a year. It's an editor colleague who used to complain about being too busy and is now desperate to book anything to keep her small business afloat. It's crew friends (camera, sound, art department) whose group chat has gone quieter and quieter, not because anyone fell out, but because there's less to report when the work dries up.
Anyone who has survivor's guilt in this industry tends to hesitate before posting about a project they're proud of. That said, LinkedIn is littered with updates and announcements that ring hollow depending on what side you're on.
"How's it going?" has become a loaded question among people who used to ask it freely. Some catch themselves, downplaying things that are actually going fine, because stability has started to feel like something you apologize for rather than something you share.
And the cruelest part is that this guilt does the opposite of what it should. It isolates people from each other at exactly the moment we need each other most. Those who are still working pull back a little. The unemployed ones pull back more. Everyone seems to be quietly protecting everyone else's feelings, and somewhere in that politeness, the actual support — the calls, the favors, the "let me make an intro" — seems harder to access.
A Pivoting and a Reckoning
I've watched friends leave the industry entirely throughout the past few years, and the grief in that isn't just financial. It's identity-level. So many of us built our entire sense of who we are around a job title, a craft, a set of skills we spent a decade refining. Walking away from that isn't like changing employers. It's closer to losing a language you were once fluent in.
It's easy to make these pivots sound like a loss, but that's not entirely true. Some people I know who left have quietly built lives that look, from the outside, genuinely better — more stable hours, more time with their family, less of the constant low-grade anxiety that comes with freelancer life. I don't say that to suggest this is some hidden blessing. People didn't choose this. But it complicates the idea that staying is automatically the win and leaving is automatically the loss.
And it's not just individual lives bending around this. It's the city itself. I've lived here long enough to remember when "what do you do?" at a party was basically rhetorical — you were in the industry, or about to be, or waiting tables while you figured out how to be. Los Angeles has always been a company town. Now, while I drive past studio parking lots that don't fill up the way they used to, or hear about small businesses that built themselves around production schedules now struggling, I wonder if I'm watching more than careers shifting. I'm watching an entire city's whole sense of itself pause and recalibrate as it braces for new challenges that seem to pop up every month.
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Where Do We Go From Here?
I don't have a clear answer, and I've stopped trying to come up with one. What I am doing is taking things day by day. Sending those emails. Grabbing those coffees. Editing my manuscript (and my resume, which is always a nice reminder of how far I have indeed come). Volunteering at my local library. Tapping into dormant passions that are helping me focus on one direction while I stand at these crossroads.
I'm grateful to still be here in a city I've truly grown to love. I'm also unsettled by what that continued presence has cost some people around me and how my own staying power comes down to luck rather than merit. I realize both can be true at the same time, and I think the honest thing to do is let them sit next to each other.
So...is this a eulogy, or is it an evolution? I have to wonder what we owe each other now that so many of us are on such different sides of this moment.
Maybe the milestone worth celebrating this year isn't about survival. Maybe it's figuring out, together, how the people still standing show up for the people who aren't, not with guilt or empty reassurances, but with something more useful. I don't fully know what that looks like, but I know the conversation has to start with admitting how complicated and concerning this moment actually feels, rather than pretending otherwise.
Cheers (I guess),
Hiko
@TheFirstEcho
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