Technology changed everything, of course. Magazines disappeared; editorial contracts shrunk; streaming meant that writing for film or television was no longer likely to make you rich. Writing books was just going to make you poor. Fashion, once the purview of art, became the property of Instagram. All of these profound reversals crashed up against the hard metrics of the city’s soaring housing market.

In her new book, “Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis,’’ the writer Ada Calhoun delves into the professional and financial anxieties of women in their 40s and 50s, beginning with an account of her own challenges. Faced with the high cost of her family’s third-tier health care plan, the untenable nature of freelance life and mounting credit-card debt, she goes out looking for a “job-job,’’ only to find a teaching position for a six-week class that pays $600.

These dispiriting stories are everywhere. Twenty years ago, fashion photography was narrative and the shoots that played out in magazines thick with pages were complex and beautifully cinematic. In this world, Olga Liriano was a star, first as a casting director and then producer.

Last month, she turned up as the focus of a piece in The New York Post about the declining fortunes of the city’s media class. In the intervening years, she held a series of high-paying jobs but lost the last of them, as a marketing executive at Nordstrom, in a restructuring in 2015.

Now in her 50s, she was living with her parents and working as a sales assistant at a J. Crew in a mall in New Jersey for minimum wage. She felt lucky.

After “Prozac Nation’’ sold many thousands of copies and was adapted into a movie, and after she followed up with two more memoirs, Elizabeth Wurtzel went to law school in her 30s. Along with so many others on the same path, she amassed debt doing it.

She worked for a time for David Boies, the prodigiously talented and controversial litigator. But anyone familiar with her writing would know that she was not cut out for the rigid calculation of billable hours. So with her degree she wrote — for newspapers and digital platforms.