Hopes and doubts during a pandemic.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 08/06/20)

Here I am with my first blog entry of 2020, in August. Sorry I'm late. Got sidetracked by everything but work. LOL. Well, not really LOL, more like COL.

I'll say this: if the rest of the year is anything like the year so far, the desperation caused by COVID-19 will probably be just as ugly. I've endured some bad years as a creative professional, but this one tops them all, hands down, without question. A total shitshow of epic proportions.

It's a shame really, because in the 4th quarter of 2019, I thought I'd made big strides toward developing new clients and getting a decent amount of repeat business from existing ones. With Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year ahead, I was feeling optimistic about 2020.

Then the news media began to focus more attention on the flu outbreak that began in Wuhan, China. But in all honesty, I didn't think it was something to be too concerned about at the time.

Like millions of people in the US and abroad, the virus proved us so wrong.

Christmas and New Year's came and went, and in January 2020, some of my freelance assignments carried over into January. By the end of January, no new projects were coming my way. I chalked it up to companies getting their budget ducks in a row and planning out the year. Meanwhile, the pandemic was becoming the only news item all day long, and my clients began to pump the brakes on their marketing.

By February, fear had taken hold my clients and their marketing efforts, and from that point on it was a slippery slope into a budget freezes.

Then March rolled in and a lockdown situation was happening everywhere in the US. I'm in Florida, and you all know the story in this state. We all began to adapt to this "new reality." The new reality for me, which continues at the time of this writing, is that no freelance projects have come in, and it has become painfully obvious that any new business development efforts on my part would be wasted time.

The fallout from diminished marketing budgets rippled through ad agencies and design departments all over the country. Layoffs and high unemployment created a surge of fresh new freelance talent for design and writing. This in turn is driving creative fees down, and my skill sets have become a commodity.

For example, take a freelance site like Upwork. You'll see hundreds of projects posted by potential clients with tasty budgets of $100 or $150, for things like a logo or a branding style guide. These items normally fetch thousands of dollars — even for a solo practitioner. It's a well established site, but you'll pay Upwork commissions for jobs you finish, as well as fees required to place bids on jobs. So that $100 job becomes $80 when all's said and done. Oof.

You'll see similar low-dollar budgets with low-end projects at Fiverr or Freelancer (I've deliberately not posted URLs to the aforementioned job sites because they're not paying me to promote them). I have profiles on all three sites, and I scroll through them almost every day looking for projects that pay well — basically until my eyes bleed.

In short, competition is fierce on these project sites. If you don't bid on a new project posting within the first hour or two, you'll be lost in a pool of 10 to 50 bids. The key is to keep tossing bids out. It's a numbers game like anything else, and you just have keep playing the job lottery until something hits.

Having said that, I'm part of the ever-growing category of the under-employed in America. And, it begs the question: what do I do next? Or rather, what should I do next? Do I retrain myself and change careers? If so, given that we're in the midst of a depression, what do I pivot to? (Let's be real: I'm not going to be the next YouTube star or social media influencer. I have a healthy amount of contempt for that form of marketing.)

I read somewhere that human beings have about 10,000 thoughts a day and 90% of them are the same ones we had yesterday. I guess that's the root cause of my doubts. I'm living in a real-world Groundhog Day movie virtually every day. I don't have an inspired answer for what my next career move is right now. I guess opportunity will present itself. All I know is not much is going to be actionable until the coronavirus has been disarmed.

The good news is I haven't spiraled into any form of addiction or depression. I think what keeps my hope alive is the knowledge that the virus won't stick around forever. A vaccine will be developed. The $10,000 question is: when.

Well, that's all I have to share this time around. In a few months maybe we'll ring in the New Year with a new President ahead of us, and the pandemic behind us.

In the meantime, be safe and stay healthy.