My job lost its soul, then I lost my job: how it feels to be redundant at 49.

Greg Bruce spent a decade at New Zealand's largest newspaper in a job he had long aspired to. 'I was in a job I had long aspired to, working with great people, doing work that felt meaningful,' he says.

By the end, all meaning had gone. 'It had been chewed up, digested and shat out as numbers on a spreadsheet, which was deposited into my inbox every morning.'

A middle manager once denied him a pay rise by telling him his writing had contributed only $12,000 worth of value to the company that year. 'I had spent a lifetime building a picture of myself as the type of person who did a certain type of work. The shock of having others disagree in such concrete terms simultaneously unmoored and floored me.'

Greg has three children and many bills to pay. After redundancy he moved out of the office and into his bedroom, where he has spent the past year churning out articles — many for his previous employer, 'because bitterness and resentment are not as powerful as the need to pay the bills.'

'I rarely shaved or made the bed. I would go days without showering. Emotionally and psychologically, I was all over the place.'

His wife is now retraining as a teacher. 'Hopefully this will allow her to get a job at some point next year, at which point we will hopefully no longer be drowning, but will instead make a welcome return to treading water while gasping for air.'

Through the early part of this year, he spent many nights lying awake in bed trying to come up with ways to make cash. 'Having proved unable, I turned to AI, spending hours typing and retyping variations of "How can I get rich quick?" into various chat windows. AI gave me a lot of ideas — most of them unsuitable — but more importantly it gave me hope.'

He joined the 'creator economy,' launching a newsletter called Exit Strategy. 'It tells the story of my attempt, aged 49, to go in a new direction and to create a new self — one in which I am no longer a journalist but someone financially secure.'

In its first three months, nothing he created earned a single dollar, except the newsletter itself, which has 26 paying subscribers.

'Redundancy has taught me many things but the main one is this: When you have enough money, you have lots of worries. When you don't have enough money, you still have lots of worries — but you only have time to deal with one.'