[CW: Unhealthy Eating Habits, Doomer]
Seriously... I feel like I'm mindlessly scrolling through job boards all day and occasionally filling out the very rare application for a position that I'm actually qualified for. I'm doing this with the lowest expectations possible because I sense that the chances of me finding a job willing to hire me are like 1 in 1,000,000, and maybe that's even too generous of an estimate. Sometimes, I'll scroll the Play Store to see if I can find any apps that can offer me anything, even if they're side gigs, but it's really not working in my favor.
Sometimes, I feel so stressed and focused on filling out job applications that I either forget to eat or feel too stressed to have an appetite at all. I end up looking at the text on my computer screen so much that I feel like I have a headache. I'm constantly wondering when this entire process will be over.
I keep getting into situations where I feel like I'm "almost hired," like how a job sent me an offer on the 3rd of this month and has never gotten back to me about next steps, even though I sent follow-up emails, or how I started a few work-from-home gigs that have no work available for me whatsoever and have been like this for weeks. That makes it even more frustrating.
It sucks how I learned that even jobs that people will often refer to as "unskilled labor," such as food service and retail positions, aren't even willing to hire me. What makes it even worse is that they'll post their position, I'll apply, they'll reject me, and they'll keep posting it. The cycle just repeats because, irrespective of any desperation they have, they'd rather spend long amounts of time being picky rather than just hiring someone who's immediately ready to work with open availability. These are jobs I have experience with too.
When I first got into this situation, I made it a habit for me to apply to at least 5 jobs each day, but I started feeling so uneasy about how that habit didn't even seem to bring me closer to any solutions. It actually seems depressing how committing to applying to so many jobs led to such a disproportionately unrewarding outcome.
It's crazy how you need a job to literally survive, but it's also seemingly impossible to get one where you're doing the most seemingly basic of tasks.
Capitalists do not mind killing people, whether they admit it or not.
You didn’t do anything wrong, you are far from alone in this. It’s been almost a year and I still don’t have actual consistent employment.
It’s so infuriating to explain to family members that I’m not the lazy one. I keep applying and it’s businesses that aren’t doing their job in finding work for the masses to do.
Jobs are literally now seen by richer folks as treasures to be hoarded as far away from the poors as much as possible. I’m sure someone smarter than me predicted this but this is their workaround from the civil rights act, they can simply economically discriminate by only having networks be their candidate pool. It serves it’s purpose by allowing them to get away with discrimination, and makes sure no power or opportunities accidentally go to any of the icky poors of any race. The only thing I got out of Hillbilly Elegy is that the porks secretly despise poor whites despite the latter always having the former’s back through thick and thin.
I literally want to just start my life and work an entry-level job to learn the skills I need to, but nope, can’t have that. And it gets so jarring hearing “just network bro” time and time again. If I were a nepo baby, I wouldn’t be in this situation. Or they just drop one of the most annoying pieces of advice out there: “maybe you should start your own business?”
That's where I'm at right now. At first my family was supportive, I always made an effort to take and apply their advice, sharing the outcome. But the longer this has gone on. the more and more my family appears to be burnt out on the situation. It doesn't seem to matter how many applications I put it in, it's somehow always my fault in some unquantifiable way. At a certain point I can't help but feel they think I'm lying to them, that I'm actually receiving job offers out the wazoo, millions of dollars mine for the taking if only I had the drive and ambition to reach out and grab it. That's the level of gaslighting I've been dealing with from my mother, currently trying to pay her bills by enrolling herself into a pyramid scheme centered on selling health insurance.
I think AI is making this worse. My boss has been trying to hire someone (he's a capitalist, but he does genuinely need to hire this person, it's actively cutting into his bottom line not having the role filled), and keeps getting promising interviews scheduled and then right at the scheduled time they follow up with a politely worded request to reschedule. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes like 3x in a row I might not have believed it, but I think people are using AI to get a bunch of interviews lined up and then just only going to the "best" one (and clogging up the hiring process for everyone else who could have actually gotten the job by now). The people who've long been predicting hiring is just going to become a circlejerk of AI talking to other AI are 100% correct