This Gen Xer spent 28 years in a cubicle and never made more than $70,000. At 59, she made $500,000 in the creator economy

For nearly three decades, 59-year-old Eileen Munoz spent her workdays in a cubicle. To her, the tiny confined desk came to represent everything she felt about her 9-to-5 career in insurance: stuck. 

The most she ever made in a year was $70,000, and she eventually became so burnt out that she would cry on Sundays knowing her cubicle and another full workweek were waiting for her.

Seeing how miserable she had become and how work was spilling into her home life, her husband encouraged her to quit. Finally, in her mid-50s, she did, without much of a plan and assuming whatever came next would be her old job in a different font. Instead, a friend introduced her to user-generated content, or UGC, where brands pay everyday creators to make social media content they can use to market their products. Munoz had never edited a video, filmed herself for a brand or even added subtitles. 

But in 2025, just her second year as a content creator, she brought in roughly $500,000 from UGC and TikTok Shop, where she promotes products aimed at people navigating middle age, including skincare and supplements as well as products related to menopause, thinning hair and aching joints. She also works across home and pet categories.

Munoz is an unusually successful example of an opportunity emerging for Gen X in an industry long associated with Gen Z and millennials. But the creator economy may already be older than its reputation suggests: Fortune reported in 2022 that the average creator was 40, according to an Adobe study. As brands increasingly rely on creators to sell products online, some older creators are finding that the age they once feared would hold them back can actually work in their favor. Marketers still need to reach consumers in their 40s, 50s and 60s, and recent research suggests a creator’s age can shape how credible they appear to consumers.

“I thought, am I too old?” Munoz said. “That is honestly the number one thing that I hear.”

Brands have an age problem

Florian Dost, a marketing professor at Brandenburg University of Technology, coauthored a recent study that found age can increase assumptions of a creator’s expertise while perceived attractiveness tends to diminish those views.

He described a “sweet spot” that varies by platform and what is being sold, noting that one TikTok experiment, for example, put the optimal apparent age between the late 40s and mid-50s.

“I definitely see that brands, but also influencer agencies, have a blind spot for age,” Dost told Fortune. “Selling new stuff to old consumers is the biggest marketing challenge of our day.”

Munoz knows this too, saying brands have plenty of young people to hawk their wares but not middle-aged influencers.

And when it comes to what she buys herself, that age gap matters. 

“I will not buy [skincare] from a 19-year-old, 20-year-old, 30-year-old,” she said. “I’m gonna buy from people my age.”

A second act

UGC was Munoz’s entry into content creation. After she began making money creating content directly for brands, she added TikTok Shop as a separate income stream.

Unlike UGC, where a brand typically pays for a piece of content, TikTok Shop allows creators to post videos featuring products to their own accounts and earn commissions when viewers buy. Munoz says experimenting with those videos and learning what converts viewers into customers helped turn social commerce into her biggest source of creator income.

For Munoz, the transformation wasn’t just financial. Previously, she had spent decades working overtime whenever it was available. Now she works from home in Diamond Bar, California, where she controls her schedule and hopes her creator income will eventually allow her husband to retire, too.

She says the biggest obstacle she hears from other Gen Xers is the assumption that social media belongs to somebody younger. Her generation didn’t grow up filming videos on smartphones or editing TikToks. Munoz didn’t know how to do any of it either.

“If you think you are too old to do UGC or TikTok Shop, that is such a lie,” Munoz said.

Now she wants to use the location freedom that comes with her work to travel with her husband and spend months at a time living in places they once could only visit, from New York to France. 

Which is a striking reversal from the Sundays she once spent dreading the return to her cubicle.

“I feel like crying sometimes,” Munoz said. This time, though, it’s because “it is the best job ever.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com