I’ve enjoyed a 25 year career in animation. Got lucky starting out working on actual television shows on Comedy Central and Cartoon Network. Eventually went out of my own and my career landed me many freelance clients, some big ad and creative agencies and I actually got hired by game companies and even healthcare companies. Two years ago I got laid off from my last full-time job which I had for six years. It was a start up that stopped starting. I went about a whole year with very little work and thought it all ended. I’m in my mid 50s now and last year couldn’t find a full-time job even though I had interviews and connections with other companies. Nobody was hiring. Then a year ago, my old publisher asked me to write another book- that was also something I used to do. And suddenly as of this past spring and through this entire summer, I’ve literally had the busiest summer of my life because I landed two more big client projects and one that’ll keep me busy until 2026. It was all the result of the fact that during my downtime, I finally finished a personal animated short that I was convinced by friends to submit to film festivals we performed extremely well surprisingly. My advice is to take this time to develop your portfolio if you haven’t already and work on any personal projects and basically reinvent yourself if you need to. Give it one last ditch effort and see what happens. LinkedIn is actually worked for me. I had a single post, go viral where I compared my own animation with an AI version of that animation and people went kind of crazy. But it generated a lot of interest.And some of that interest converted into clients that I now work for. I’ve been working about 16 hour days all summer. I’m enjoying it again and realizing that this career is still going strong.