What Happens to the Artist Inside the Marketer?

Morgan Short
Feb 23
5 min read

A lot of marketers are just would-be artists who took the practical path. Think about it. We entered marketing because we were good at writing, or design, or knowing instinctively what makes a message feel right. We took creative risks. We cared about craft.

The KPIs, the dashboards, the conversion rates...that was never what drew us in. Many of us ended up in marketing because we were creative and wanted a way to get paid for it.

The thing is, creativity is a finite resource. When you spend it at work all day, there isn't much left for the novel you've been meaning to write or the instrument collecting dust in the corner.

And now AI is here. And the world is actively debating whether the skills we've spent years building are even worth keeping. A lot of marketers have reached a breaking point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsjFTJpcXrM

Meet Amanda Jackson

Amanda Jackson is a freelance content writer and original research content strategist who has spent the last decade giving her best energy to B2B marketing. She knows she wants to make a career change but hasn't quite figured it out yet. (She recently started a Substack where she writes about career dread, creativity, and the process of figuring out what comes next. She's interviewing people with careers she's jealous of and processing the disillusionment out loud.)

One of her goals for 2026 is to like her work more.

If that sounds like a low bar to you, she says, she's genuinely happy for you. It means you must like your work. She's still trying to get there.

Amanda also hosts Hone Your Craft, a low-key community gathering she created for people who just want to spend an hour making something alongside other people. No agenda. No deliverables. Just a virtual invite, a playlist, and permission to show up with whatever project has been sitting in the corner of your life waiting for you.

She started it because she kept finding herself taking an afternoon off to crochet or work on something personal, and she thought: why not invite others into that?

The gathering itself is the whole point.

The Sea of Sameness in Marketing

Marketing, especially B2B marketing, has a sea of sameness problem.

Amanda describes it well. We come in bright-eyed with good ideas and real creative instincts. We're ready to take risks. And then we learn pretty quickly that risk isn't really what the job rewards. The approvers want what's already worked. What the competitor is doing. What's safe.

So the creative people in the room who came in with all this energy slowly get ground down. Good idea after good idea dies when people write by committee. The craft seems to matter less and less.

And now layer AI on top of that. The constant LinkedIn discourse about whether a text generator can just do what we do. Watching the industry have open conversations about how much money they can save by replacing us. It is, as Amanda put it, exhausting on a fundamental level.

It's not just burnout. It's the commoditization of something we worked really hard to build.

Creativity Is a Finite Resource

Here's the trap nobody warns you about when you take the creative adjacent career path:

You think it's the best of both worlds. You get to be creative at work AND you have time for your own stuff outside of it. But often, what actually happens is that you spend your creative energy during the workday, and when you get home, there's nothing left. Not for the novel. Not for the instrument. Not for the crochet project or the class you keep meaning to take.

So instead of best of both worlds, you get neither. The job uses it all up, and your own creative life just quietly waits....and waits...and waits...until your inner artist is begging to be nurtured again.

The Hobby-as-Checklist Trap

Amanda and I talked about what happens when you try to be intentional about your creative life and it backfires.

Example: Amanda set a goal a couple of years ago to do a watercolor painting every quarter. Simple enough. And then she got to the end of a quarter and hadn't done it, and suddenly this thing that was supposed to be soft and joyful and hers became a thing she had suddenly failed at.

Her therapist asked her: why do you have to do a watercolor?

There was no good answer. She'd turned something delightful into a chore. And when you attach a metric to a thing that's supposed to be playful, you change what it is.

This doesn't mean you can't be intentional. You do have to be proactive to make space for art. The watercolor doesn't just happen. You have to get out the supplies, tape the paper down, fill the cups. There's a logistical reality to making space for creativity. But the moment "I want to do this" becomes "I have to do this or I'm failing," something breaks.

We're so conditioned to measure and optimize and perform that we bring those same instincts to the parts of our life that were never supposed to be evaluated.

Blowing It All Up

We talked about the fantasy. The one where you quit your career entirely and start over in something completely different. Something that doesn't use up your creativity so that when you come home, it's still there waiting for you.

Amanda has thought about it. So have I. She's researched speech-language pathology more than once. I've daydreamed about opening a coffee shop or event space.

One of the challenges is that when you want to make a dramatic pivot, the world isn't ideally set up for that. Once you're ten years into a career, exploration feels almost inaccessible. Shadowing someone requires you to fight for it. Auditing a class in a different field takes real effort to arrange. Career coaches exist but they're expensive and not everyone has access.

The biggest career playground you'll ever have is college, and you're in it at 18 years old, when you barely know yourself at all.

So you pick something. You get good at it. And then a decade later you're like: wait, is this it?

Being comfortable with being a beginner again is one of the hardest things Amanda and I both identified as something we need more of. We don't like being bad at things. Neither of us. And yet that discomfort is exactly where growth lives.

What Success Actually Means

Early in Amanda's career, success meant one thing: Disney.

She wanted to work there. So she did. She worked in communications. She was a photographer. It was amazing and surreal. Eventually she had her moment: okay, I did the dream. Now what?

After that, success became brand recognition. Working at places people had heard of. Names she could say at a dinner party.

Now? She wants to like her work more. She cares about the relationships she has with her clients. She wants to be excited to tell her spouse about her day when he gets home from teaching high school.

By her own definition, she doesn't feel especially successful right now. And she's okay with that. Because she knows it, and knowing it means she can start moving toward something truer.

She mentioned a line she's been returning to from The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad: