To say nothing of the therapy-style questions I’ve been asked in job interviews — I had a three-on-me where the interviewers asked, “What was your biggest failure, how were you written up, and how did that make you feel?” Individuals remain guarded and blameless, while making excuses.
Finding a good job is multi-layered, with all the permutations you can think of, but it’s also simple; we’re all little fish with too many ponds to choose from.
With the fracturing of culture and news media, young people raised and trained for a world that no longer exists are now supposed to use all our skills for another world to navigate this one. What’s more, we risk failure just searching and must struggle just to reach a little bit of relief. I have four jobs not three, actually, because applying for jobs is itself a job given all the tweaks to my CV, the application, my cover letter, etc. just for the people taking my information to sell it off or process it for their Large Language Models (LLMs) learning.
I am someone who is well-trained with skills to do a wide variety of jobs in communications, media and journalism, but I lack the work history proving I am capable and should be hired. It’s the classic millennial woe of they want 10 years’ experience in a field that has only existed for five years,’ but harsher because I can’t find a job because there is someone out there who will take less money under the table or worse treatment with fewer benefits.
Inequality and poverty thus become the new metrics by which we govern jobs. People will take the job they can do for the essentials they need, and everything else becomes window dressing. Wages may be higher in some fields compared to others in Canada, but my boss isn’t covering anything but my pay.
Manoeuvering finances for groceries, rent, my phone plan and more becomes difficult and costly; someone who can’t pay more than the minimum credit card payment is going to be trapped in debt far longer than someone who can pay it all off in a few large deposits. And this culture of entrepreneurship and individuality means that I must also manage that fear and stress of failure and ruin on my own — and find the strength within to seek out answers by myself.
That is all a lot to deal with while being bombarded with information about the suffering of the world and the greed of a few through social media, which conveniently is also where I could post more and more to try and make some money, all while those tech apps take my valuable time and attention.
Other studies show that people aged 35 and younger have never been more mistreated by their elders, viewed as negatively and with so much responsibility and minuscule economic power compared to them at our age.
So, seek institutions. If you cannot find them, build them. But as people who are young only in age but are veterans in others, we have experiences to bring to bear that can be useful just based on their usefulness. All the tools of growing up a digital native are seen as a waste of time, any experience from the pandemic useless or just a blip, any economic or social capital, always pales in comparison to what is held by elders who did not have to struggle or experience the same difficulties as me and my peers.
