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.