It’s Hard Out Here for a 20-Something
Kennedy Lashley was pummelled by pandemic high school. Then she faced an emaciated post-secondary system. Now she’s trying to find work in a market determined to replace her with AI, and she’s one of many. Tales from the lost generation
It’s an age-old dynamic: people in their early 20s bemoan the state of the world, and everyone else tells them they’re being melodramatic. But adulting in 2026 is genuinely hard. This generation had their high school experiences upended by the pandemic. They were thrown into a post-secondary system decimated by the twin financial blows of provincial underfunding and a federal cap on international students. The grads who made it across the stage are staring down the barrel of a hyper-competitive job market. Employers are replacing entry-level positions with AI, obliterating the usual opportunities for new graduates. Job fairs look like Depression-era breadlines. Last summer, 50,000 people applied for 5,000 jobs at the CNE—making competition for the three-week gig as fierce as getting into law school.
Kennedy Lashley is only 22 and has already collided with more than her share of roadblocks. Here, she and other Gen Zers tell us what it’s like to try to launch against all odds.
Growing up, we watched a lot of Studio Ghibli movies. My dad is a comic book artist who has worked for Marvel since the ’90s, drawing for series like Deadpool, Spider-Man and Black Panther. He loved showing me obscure animated movies, and our house was always full of art supplies. On weekends, he would take my younger sister and me along to the conventions where he sold his prints. We’d roam around nearby tables, exploring the different comic book worlds. As we got older, we’d sit with him and help manage the cash.
I always knew I wanted to have a career in the arts. The only question was the medium. I attended Burlington Central High School, which had a dedicated arts wing with a 700-seat auditorium that had professional-grade lighting and sound systems. I took visual and performing arts classes, learned photography and played the clarinet in music class. I also signed up for stage crew, and after school, my friends and I would spend hours painting sets, creating props and arranging lights. We’d often stay late into the evening.
At the beginning of Grade 11, my guidance counsellor suggested that I complete a specialist high school major in arts and culture. It’s a designation on your diploma that shows you took extra electives and completed a co-op placement in your specialty. I thought it was a cool idea: you get some preparation for a career, and it looks good on post-secondary applications. Plus I was already taking so many arts classes that I was well on my way to fulfilling the requirements. I wasn’t sure exactly where it would lead, but I was optimistic that, as long as I was ready to put in the time, I would figure it out.
Then, just before March break, the pandemic hit. My whole life shrank to a computer screen and the four walls of my bedroom. Everything went virtual, and classes where the course material was ill-suited to online teaching functionally stopped altogether. In my last theatre tech class before March break, I was crawling along a catwalk above the stage. The rest of the semester consisted of a single assignment that took me about five minutes: a mock-up lighting arrangement.
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I’d always struggled with science and math, and Zoom classes added a new burden. The Ministry of Education had implemented a province-wide grade freeze, meaning marks couldn’t decrease. But, in the chaos, my grades didn’t go up much either. I found it impossible to focus while staring at a grid of black boxes on my screen. I reached out for help but didn’t get much. My biology teacher told me outright that he didn’t have the time. I met with a math tutor virtually once or twice a week, but there was no one at school holding me accountable. A lot of other students were struggling as well, and no one was learning much.
A year into the pandemic, researchers found that the more time kids spent in online learning, the more depressed and anxious they got. During the second Covid wave, up to 70 per cent of teenagers in the province reported depression symptoms. When that stress became overwhelming, art was my escape. I started immersing myself in video games like The Last of Us, just me and my character against the apocalypse. To keep cabin fever at bay, I literally started to draw on my walls—but I was strategic about it. I painted one wall white for a fresh canvas, sketched out plans with a pencil, then used a fine brush to paint my favourite scenes from manga and comic book panels. Creating art allowed me to expand my world without leaving my room.
In my senior year, the school instituted a four-semester system with a mix of online and in-person learning, and classes were extended to three-hour blocks. It was agonizing. In one film studies class, we watched the entirety of The Godfather—all three hours of it—on Zoom. Even when we were in the classroom, it wasn’t the same as before. There were strict social distancing measures, and people were anxious about getting sick. It completely killed any collaboration, and I felt as isolated as ever.
Related: The rate of psychological distress among Ontario teenagers has tripled since 2013
I needed to complete my co-op placement to graduate, but because of Covid, there were few opportunities available. I reached out to a couple of places, including my local art gallery, but they were operating at a reduced capacity and not taking on students. Some of my classmates resorted to finding a placement with people they knew, so I asked my co-op teacher to let me do my placement with my dad. I spent the semester with him in his home office, where I would scan his completed drawings, erasing draft lines and colour-correcting as needed, then upload them to the cloud for his colleagues at Marvel. This was my first real glimpse into the tedious business of the art world. I started to understand what art meant not just as a passion but as a career—and it didn’t scare me away.
When I finally graduated, there was no convocation. My diploma came folded in the mail, and the “ceremony” was posted to YouTube. It was a no-frills slideshow of senior quotes plus some speeches from teachers that had been pre-recorded on Zoom. There was no prom, obviously. The only thing we were allowed to do was book a time slot to take a photo in a cap and gown on the front steps of the school. We were allowed to bring just one person with us: no grandparents, no cousins, no friends. Cops would be on-site to enforce the rules.
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On the day of my photo, my mom came with me. As we were leaving the school, I saw my best friend across the street. I hadn’t seen her in months. It felt safe to talk given that there was an entire road between us, but still, a cop spotted us and walked over. He brusquely told me to leave, escorting me and my mom away. When I got home, there was nothing left to do but sit alone in my room.
I had always pictured my high school graduation as an exciting rite of passage. I’d been on the same campus with some of the same students since kindergarten. I’d imagined us walking across the stage one by one and throwing our graduation caps in the air together. Now, I knew I would never see many of them again. They had become Zoom profile pictures, then names in a slideshow, then usernames on social media. There was nothing to commemorate the end of this 13-year chapter of my life. It was just another day inside.
Despite everything, I finished high school with an A-minus average. I applied to post-secondary programs at Sheridan, Brock and Mohawk, and I got offers from all three, but I opted for the foundational art program at Mohawk. I liked the broad range of course offerings, which included photography, design and printmaking, and it was close to my family home in Burlington. I was excited to learn, and I figured college would be an opportunity to connect with new people, maybe go to some parties—things I didn’t have the chance to do during high school.
I was wrong. Classes were held in person, but we were all masking, and our desks were separated by Plexiglas. Mohawk screened everyone for Covid before allowing them on campus. It also hosted a vaccine clinic and testing site for the Hamilton area, so there were always outsiders coming and going, many of them Covid-positive. I would drive to school, scan my QR code, go straight to class and then right back home. It was all so dystopian.
My classmates and I started referring to ourselves as the forgotten year
Midway through my first year, I was accepted to Mohawk’s 3D-animation program, and I was stoked. I’d spent so much of my childhood and the pandemic in awe of animation in movies, shows and video games. And there was so much demand for online entertainment during Covid. Streaming services had surged in popularity, and animation was being lauded as a pandemic-proof alternative to live action. Some people even anticipated that the boon to the animation industry would outlast the pandemic. The prospects were good.
The three-year advanced diploma program was supposed to prepare me for a career in one of animation’s highly specialized roles, like character designer or environment modeller. I was so excited to focus my efforts on excelling at one thing. In the first semester of the program, I was engaged and having fun. I’d finally found my path and was ready to lock into something I loved.
Then, one day, a professor casually mentioned that our program was changing. Soon, they said, Mohawk would be overhauling the curriculum—my class would be the last one to graduate from the 3D specialization. My peers and I immediately had the same concern: What’s going to happen to us? The administration assured us that already-enrolled students could finish their studies uninterrupted. But it became obvious that the school was no longer invested in the program.
They broadened the curriculum to include 2D animation, defeating the original purpose of the stream. All the shuffling around meant that we got a bunch of new instructors who didn’t have a good understanding of what we’d already learned. Most of them taught material I’d mastered in first year. I thought that specializing would require a certain level of academic and artistic rigour, that we would go beyond the basics. Instead, I sat through the same lessons over and over with faculty who were still getting their footing.
Bringing a 3D animation to life is supposed to be collaborative. Normally, you’d have a team of people performing different roles: designers would create characters, modellers would sculpt their environments, riggers would craft their skeletons. But, at Mohawk, because the program was in disarray, we didn’t do a single group assignment. Instead of honing a specialty and learning to work in a team, we had to do everything solo.
My cohort started referring to ourselves as the forgotten year. As we progressed, the program was vanishing behind us. We were taking classes that wouldn’t exist anymore as of the next semester. If you failed a course, that was it—you couldn’t retake it, which was particularly problematic for me. I was discouraged and frustrated, and I’d started letting my schoolwork slide. In three classes, I scored a flat 50 per cent—only one percentage point above failing. I considered dropping out, but by my third year, I pulled it together. Still, the program was a shadow of its former self. My cohort had started with more than 30 students. By the time I graduated, there were only 10 people in some of our classes.
The silver lining was that the survivors developed a camaraderie. Covid restrictions had eased by then, and I was finally able to make college friends. In one class, a student announced that they were launching a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. From then on, we hosted weekly sessions, booking a room at the campus library, which had just reopened. It made school a million times more fun. Suddenly, I was surrounded by a whole community of people who loved art as much as I do.
By my last year of animation school, the industry had changed drastically from when I’d chosen my speciality. The biggest difference: AI had arrived on the scene. In 2025, Netflix and Disney both announced the use of generative AI on their platforms. I feared they would go the same direction as the many tech companies that were integrating AI while laying off hundreds or thousands of workers.
In some parts of the industry, there has been major pushback. When the Writers Guild of America went on strike, one of their main demands was for strict regulations so that writers couldn’t be compelled to use generative AI or have their work used to train AI. Voice actors and motion capture performers under SAG-AFTRA went on strike against major video game companies like Disney, Activision and Electronic Arts because they wanted AI guard rails to protect performers.
But, at Mohawk, I was alarmed at the way some professors encouraged us to give in to ChatGPT. One professor told us that creative industries will eventually rely on AI to produce first drafts, which will then be edited by humans. His message was clear: if AI was inevitable, we might as well learn to work with it. The professor taught our senior design course and worked in the animation industry, so it seemed doubly hypocritical of him to champion a technology that devalues our work and takes away our jobs. It was depressing to hear the people we were supposed to look up to embrace AI without bothering to have a critical discussion about it. I don’t care if it seems inevitable. I don’t think there’s any place for AI in creative industries.
Out of my entire cohort at Mohawk, I don’t know a single person who has managed to find a job in our field
That professor also taught a class designed to help us find jobs, essentially Cover Letter and Resumé Writing 101. About halfway through the semester, he brought in a guest speaker who spent the hour-long class expounding the benefits of using ChatGPT to edit our application materials. She instructed us to input writing samples into ChatGPT so it could accurately replicate our writing style. I was sitting at the back of the class, so I could see everyone’s laptop screens—not a single person opened ChatGPT. It was an absurd proposition. How could I feed my brain to this beast and let it pilfer my creative process? Recently, someone online sent my dad a drawing that they claimed was their own—except it was clearly an AI rip-off of my dad’s art. Apparently they didn’t realize they were showing the “art” to the artist they had stolen it from. It’s scary how brazenly proponents of AI are trying to erase and replace real people.
For my capstone project, I created a short film about a rat king and his humble servant. The rats post a PSA for their citizens about a cheese shortage in the kingdom, but the ruler accidentally reveals that he’s stashed all the cheese in his throne room for his personal consumption. I spent eight months working on the film while juggling other coursework. Unfortunately, two weeks before it was due, the rig—the skeletal structure of the characters—glitched out and the rats’ faces couldn’t move. As a workaround, I spent a week drawing out 40 facial expressions by hand so I could stitch them together and switch between them to simulate movement and expression. Then, with only a week left before the deadline, I had to set up three computers rendering around the clock to finish in time. By the end of it, I was so burnt out. I had nothing left to give. But I was glad that I’d finished in time for my program’s end-of-year showcase.
The showcase was our opportunity to share our thesis films before graduation. It was inspiring to see how skilled so many of my classmates were. At the end, my program coordinator got up onstage in the auditorium to give a speech. He told us that the industry is struggling, so we should focus on creating independent work and posting it on social media. I’m sure he had good intentions, but it was a painful reminder, especially coming from someone who had worked at Disney. I’d chosen a program that I thought would help me get a job, and due to factors beyond my control, that program and the industry I was hoping it would prepare me for was falling apart. I was proud of what my cohort had accomplished, but at that moment, it almost felt like those four years had been for nothing.
Out of my entire cohort at Mohawk, I don’t know a single person who has managed to find a job in our field. Most of us have minimum-wage jobs in hospitality or retail. One of the most talented animators from my year was working at the LCBO after graduation. I still have the part-time bakery job that I held all through college. Initially, I’d planned to work there only while I was in school, to pay for supplies and gas.
Success stories are rare. A few years back, a Mohawk student won a contest for young artists. The prize was a paid apprenticeship at Ubisoft, and he’s still working there. Despite the long odds, it’s the type of offer we hold out hope for: winning a city-wide contest for a chance at a job.
Of course, the animation industry isn’t the only one that’s been hit hard. In 2025, youth unemployment rates in Canada reached their highest point in three decades, apart from the massive spike during the pandemic. With jobs being so scarce, I decided to continue my schooling in the hopes of becoming more employable. So in March of 2025, I submitted writing samples to a one-year post-graduate program in screenwriting and narrative design at George Brown College, and I was accepted. I looked forward to rounding out my skill set and being able to script the kinds of stories I’ve been animating.
Since the program didn’t start until September, I spent the summer working and filling up my sketchbook. When I got a call from the school reminding me about course selection, I was hyped. There was a whole curriculum dedicated to video game writing. Plus, I was going to get another shot at a capstone project that could fill out my portfolio.
Then, just three days later, I got a foreboding email: the program was being suspended for a semester. I was disappointed, but I figured it just had low enrolment, so they were pooling a year’s worth of students into one semester. A couple of months didn’t seem so long. I picked up more shifts at work and kept drawing.
In the last week of November, just a month before the program was supposed to start, another email landed in my inbox. Attached was a letter informing me that the program was being suspended entirely. It didn’t say why, but the administration had publicly cited recent federal policy changes and resulting financial pressures when explaining why it had suspended other programs. Just like that, my career planning, my future—it all disappeared, again. The path I’d set out for myself just washed away. I was crushed. I immediately started scrambling for other options, but I couldn’t find anything else that covered film, TV and video game writing without requiring multiple years of study.
I’m still figuring out my next steps. I may sign up for an online writing course in continuing education, but in the meantime, my plan is to keep building my portfolio on my own. My friends and I are working on a pixellated horror video game where the player is an omnipotent AI controlling helpless humans. We have a team of six coders and artists, and I’ve been tasked with character design. We’re inspired by indie media like The Amazing Digital Circus, an animated series that blew up on YouTube and landed a Netflix deal, and Undertale, a hugely popular video game created by one guy and funded on Kickstarter. I guess the hope is to keep making art until something gains traction or my portfolio is substantial enough to make me a competitive candidate for jobs.
I imagine that, for the foreseeable future, I’ll keep my part-time job at the bakery. And I’m lucky to live with my parents—I couldn’t afford to move out even if I wanted to. It’s a catch-22: moving to Toronto would probably make it easier to network, but I’d need a higher-paying job to afford to live there.
When I get discouraged, my dad tells me about what he’s learned after decades in the industry. He says that the most important things are to keep working hard and to be a team player. That advice is timeless, but things were so different when he was getting started. In 1993, when my dad was a couple of years older than me, he dropped out of OCAD. He showed up at Comic-Con, portfolio in hand, and people soon took notice. It didn’t take long before my dad was offered a job at Dark Horse Comics, but he said no: his dream was to work for Marvel, and he believed that he could make it happen. A week later, he got a call from them. One of their artists had seen his work and hired him to draw for their Excalibur series. He’s worked there ever since.
The fact that he turned down an offer from a huge company like Dark Horse is crazy to me. I can’t imagine feeling like I could afford to make a move so bold. When I scroll through LinkedIn, I see artists with a decade of experience posting about how they’re struggling to find work. In order to break into the industry, I’ll be competing with them directly for a limited number of short-term contracts—but I have the disadvantage of a much smaller resumé because I’m just starting out. Some days, it can feel hopeless.
I’ve lost so much time—years of my life spent on an education that’s been disrupted over and over in ways I couldn’t control or predict. But I have to remind myself of my own skills and progress. Over the summer, I finished the sketchbook that I’d started in school, which is a funny way artists mark the passage of time. I recently redrew a character I’d designed years ago, and when I compared the two versions, I was shocked at how much I’d improved. So for now, I’ll just keep plugging away. Here’s hoping there aren’t any more disasters lying in wait.
Editor’s Note: When asked for comment on this piece, Mohawk College said that changes to its animation program did not disrupt the studies of already-enrolled students. A spokesperson said they had not been made aware of any students who were unhappy with their experience but that they are committed to addressing any issues. They added that the animation program is currently wait-listed due to the quality of its faculty and instruction. Burlington Central High School did not respond to our request for comment.
This story appears in the March 2026 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.
