My last layoff nearly broke me. It was certainly not the first layoff i’ve experienced and probably not the last but it was the most profound.

I thought after nearly two decades in this business, i had built up the scar tissue and calluses so that nothing would faze me. I thought nothing COULD surprise me. I knew that most agencies are beholden to the bottom line if not the stock price and that no matter how many beer Friday’s or cool office interiors, at the end of the day we all work “At Will”. And i was OK with all of that. It came with the territory so to speak. Layoffs happen, companies are profit centers, often the newest hire is the first gone, etc., i get it.

So when Jack Morton Worldwide approached me to help out on some briefs, it was business as usual. Get a brief, meet some people, deliver ideas, work on the deck and pitch it to client or internal team. EZPZ, something i’ve done countless times. What i didn’t expect was to meet some of the most amazing people i’ve met in the business. Every agency has smart, talented people. But rarely do you find smart, talented, genuinely nice, authentic people who champion you and want to see you succeed. People who immediately respect your experience and advice even over their own because they trust your judgement. No months of “proving yourself” or playing politics trying to gain internal “allies”. I was surprised to hear from other people that so-and-so said good things about you, and so-and-so really talked you up, and so-and-so said you hit the ball out of the park. I was surprised to hear over and over “well you’re the expert here, i trust your call”. I had also been brought in specifically because i came from the gaming and esport world and had been doing consulting work in this space with agencies and direct to clients. There was an interest to potentially create a specialty practice around this or at least explore getting more entertainment category clients, so i felt gratified and excited that a big agency was seeing what i was seeing, a largely untapped market potential waiting to be harvested. Helping me to lead this charge, i found a colleague, fellow gamer, and friend, Scott Varland who at the time was running Jack X NA, a specialty arm of Jack focusing on innovation and tech. Scott along with Edward Scott were partly responsible for championing me as someone that embodied “innovation creative” and could lead the charge in gaming/entertainment category expertise too. I was unaccustomed to being openly complimented in meetings to complete strangers, but Scott would often do that gleefully and i like to think that twinkle in his eye was him getting a kick out of seeing me squirm in my seat. He has been an unfaltering cheerleader for me, even when i’m deep into my own imposter pity party, and remains a good friend to this day.

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, the catch, the inevitable throwing under the bus, the fine print to show itself but it never did. And it felt for the first time in years that i took a long deep breath. Here was finally a place i could put both feet up and not have to worry. Thus, slowly but surely, the cracks in a thick, polished, professionally curated wall slowly appeared. NEVERTHELESS, i live by the motto of hope for the best, plan for the worst. So i did. I did several months freelance first, partly to get myself prepped for a potential move across country, but also to feel out the organization, the executive team, and to see action before words. And everything checked out so when an offer came to put me in a newish created role as SVP, ECD in what was dubbed 1Jack (basically a centralized creative team that would work with the CCO on more integrated work, new business growth, and foster cross collaboration across different Jack offices), i jumped on it and dove in both feet first. I was fairly new to an agency that specialized in experiential work or “brand experiences” as we called it, but i found i loved the physicality of bringing ideas into spaces where people met them in the real world. Seeing rich stories come to life as if walking onto a movie set or seeing what started out as an abstract concept now fit in the palm of your hand. I had always liked some of the experiential work that won at Cannes/Clios/D&AD but felt that too often it ended up as just a pop up, or a one off, and i relished the opportunity and challenge to push the category creative into new areas, bigger and bolder areas.

It helped that my CCO, Shelley Elkins was right there with me leading this charge, and in each other we found some kind of kindred ad nerd spirit (many late nights talking about ads we liked or hated). I was pretty much a solo creative all my career where i never really had a mentor creative. I had plenty of creative bosses who would jab at scripts or key visuals and grunt “this one” or “not that one” but i never had a true mentor. While at Jack, i reported to Shelley but i never felt talked down to, delegated to, or forced to take an idea into a direction i didn’t believe in. She at times was almost too considerate of my feelings, motherly or sisterly at times, all something completely new to me because i had been in a cut throat competitive world for so long. In her i had finally found someone to respect as a creative leader, a model for what this industry sorely needs. Compassion, a sharp creative mind, empathy, and unapologetically into ads — many of which we agreed on what we liked and hated.

If you’re in this business long enough you develop a six sense of sorts. It was mid-December (i had been full time only 6 months) and we had just returned from an annual Christmas party in LA where we finally got to (awkwardly) meet a lot of people we had only seen through Microsoft TEAMS calls, or as i referred to it as “the Devil’s Anus”. Financially, the entire industry had dipped but overall the agency was healthy and we were at a break even state. Yet, something in the back of my head seemed off. In a call with Shelley i distinctly remember asking her “am i OK? as in, is my role secure?” I was assured that i was fine and that my role was not being eliminated. Unbeknownst to her, however, the wheels of fate were already turning.

I’d like to say it was a cloudy, overcast, gloomy day the first week of December when i got a sudden calendar invite for a TEAMS call. It wasn’t though, it was clear blue skies and 68 with low to no humidity. In short i was told i was being laid off, it wasn’t performance based, and there were others also being included in the layoffs including my buddy Scott. In these situations it’s always a “Why me, why now?” type of thing but being a new hire it’s a pretty common thing, although not that usual at the senior level, the first time as a CD/ECD level creative that i’ve ever been laid off. Professionally i wasn’t that worried, i figured i could find another agency job pretty quickly and rebound. I went through all the typical stages of shock, awe, and dismay, but it didn’t really hit me until some weeks (months even) later. After all I had just moved back to Southern California, signed a new two year lease on an apartment and bought a new car. I wasn’t living lavishly by any means but i felt comfortable, and yes i could get extra avocado whenever i wanted to without looking at the price. Now suddenly faced with no income except a pathetic unemployment check of $450/week, i was left with the stark realization that i was literally stranded, without income, in one of the most expensive places to live in the world. I had only been full time at the agency for 6-7 months but i had saved as much as possible so i knew i had some time. What i didn’t know was that the job market apocalypse was just about to crash like a tsunami wave.

It was probably the worst Christmas ever, i don’t think i did much if anything. I sequestered myself in my room and dove into my Twitch streaming and video games to keep my mind off things. I was after all, an Asian American immigrant kid. Pushing shitty feelings into a box and sealing them off to never see the light of day, is an Olympic gold medal sport for us. But a restless unused creative mind is a terrible thing to waste so i started putting time into other things. I wrote my first short film screenplay under guidance from a good friend, who’s a successful short film writer/director (and he teaches it at UCLA), Colin Costello (He/Him), i worked on a pitch deck for a gaming start up with another friend, and started writing a fantasy Young Adult fiction novel that’s a cross between a Harry Potter and Narnia (that i will most likely never finish). All of this was to distract me from the devastation i felt but wanted to ignore. I had let my guard down, enticed by the people i had met at Jack, and through circumstance, now got blasted in the face caught completely unawares. The aftermath of which was a feeling of deep dismay and in some cases anger at myself for letting myself get caught. I should know better is what i kept telling myself. But in the end, i’m not a MidJourney plugin, i am only human and sometimes even the most practiced and professional of us have our vulnerable moments. Mine had just happened at the worst possible time.

I hopped back onto LinkedIn just in time for the job market apocalypse. All of a sudden game studios are laying off thousands, the tech companies are laying off thousands, with agencies closely following. All of a sudden the market is flooded with creative talent all looking for their next gig or opportunity. I was dismayed and horrified. After all, i was an aging, not highly awarded middle-aged senior level creative in an industry that was known for ageism, but also “quiet” racial discrimination with many companies and agencies backtracking or not meeting their flowery DEI promises that they pasted all over their websites and job applications when it was trendy to do so. AND now everyone is looking for work. Nonetheless, you spend your days on LinkedIn, applying, talking to people, networking, most of whom are genuinely sympathetic and a small group who actually follow up. But sadly they are overshadowed by the massive amount of ghosting, false promises, and gas lighting. In my experience this past 1.5yrs since i got laid off, the ratio of good to bad has been 90% bad 10% good. In a platform that basically exists for corporate self interest i’ll never understand recruiters/HR people in agencies or companies ghosting senior level talent who are in a position later on to hire them and give them business. I have personally reached out to talent agencies when i’m in a position to hire because they have kept in contact or hooked me up with a freelance gig. And not just because i’m a senior level talent as well. Ghosting junior or mid-level talent who will be senior level talents in the future is just bad business, yet it’s happening to thousands of creatives on a daily basis. It’s mind boggling.

I also don’t understand people who want to meet and talk with you to “help connect you with so-and-so for a potential opportunity” only to ghost you when you reply with your availability. What’s the point of that? All this is to say that the current job market has brought out the worst in people and it makes me sad more than anything to see this because there are few chances in life where low effort can have such a massive impact on someone’s life. Following through on a simple referral, or connection, or email, or Zoom call, can do so much but cost us so little effort. I spent my entire nearly two decades career working my way up, putting my head down and just grinding through work and agencies and countries. While my peers are having families and buying houses, i’m registering for food stamps, and watching my savings basically dwindle to nothing. Imagine working your whole life and being left financially with nothing to show for it. It’s a terrible, deep stabbing gut wound that just sits there and festers. All sorts of feelings well up, some have fancy names like imposter syndrome, others are just you sitting staring at the wall for hours, others still are even darker and more dangerous. What do you tell your friends and family when you’re looking at homelessness, how do you describe the look on the faces of the car people when you have to give back your car? I couldn’t imagine the feeling of being the sole breadwinner or having kids to support.

None of this is intended to be a commentary to bash recruiters, the broken job application process, or the sham of endless reposted job listings, but instead to highlight and reiterate that people should really treasure and appreciate the impact that even a single gesture can have for someone as well as understand that we all have our personal little hell moments unbeknownst by everyone around us. An ignored DM on LinkedIn may seem trite, small, but for someone else it might be everything. It’s taken me over a year to reconcile my layoff and understand how i feel about it and that’s OK. We all process at different speeds and in different ways. I’m sure if you ask anyone who’s been in this industry for a decade+ they’ll all have that ONE moment like me, where they let the walls go down and got destroyed for it. In hindsight, much like poet Lord, Alfred Tennyson, i don’t regret opening myself up and buying into the promises. Vulnerability just may be the fertile soil of personal progress. I made a few real friends, and real connections, and maybe that’s what this whole shtick is about, getting those few gems out of mountains of shit. I do think that these moments of vulnerability, of getting caught, of getting destroyed mentally, financially, and emotionally are moments of clarity. Clarity on who your real friends are, who are dependable, just how resistant you can be, of just where your limits may lie, and also the absolute shattering of ego when you have to admit you need help. At the end of the day maybe stability is overrated, maybe we need to take the perennial view that a professional career is simply the amount of times we get laid off or fired or resign only to jump into something new with one more scar. Maybe the only true career in the corporate world is one where we work for ourselves. I still love this industry, i love ads, i love creating them and concepting how brands can tell their stories, i don’t plan on leaving any time soon.

In the wise words of the tub-thumping Chumbawambas out there, there’s only one thing to do when we get knocked down, it’s to get back up again. Keep the faith job seekers.