A couple of years ago, I joined a local Discord server with a core group of five who’d get together to see a movie or do a cheese tasting.
(Dune 2 in 5D was a low point, but the homemade cheese was good.)
After some weird Discord bullshit, we rebuilt the server. It’s not particularly active, which is surprising given that as of today, four of us are unemployed (after recreating the server, we chose not to advertise it).
I’m the only one idiotic enough to have gone into journalism. One other guy (the only one still working) drives around town for the city hanging utility-cutoff notices on people’s doors.
Everyone else was in coding, devops or defense contracting.
And yet, here we all are. When there’s this level of unemployment in the span of just 2025 across wildly divergent fields, something has gone wrong.
I’m by far the eldest at 46, so this isn’t an age problem, either. It seems unclear how the economy survives when capable people are unable to find work.
I graduated college in 2019 and most of the people I went to school with didn’t find work or related work. My gf has been looking for accounting work for the past 3 years or so? I keep hearing about the whole AI issue and how that’s making it hard for companies and people to find each other. I also keep reading about people with masters degrees, unable to find jobs, so that’s kinda scary.
I was lucky to find work, but it also terrifies me that if I leave, I’m going to end up with something less stable or harder for me to handle.
It really feels like the whole system is messed up. Makes me a little jealous/fearful when I see people who are able to job hop for promotions.
Sorry my thoughts probably aren’t very coherent today
I dropped out in 2000. This can be an issue, but I lucked out with my first managing editor … his rule was “no one with a journalism degree,” but though his idea was to get domain knowledge, I was able to slither in because I didn’t have one.
(He had also been a speechwriter for Pat Buchanan; I’ve had a wild ride.)