i wanted to talk to you about some historical things more detail on things i’ve briefly mentioned especially now that it’s very obvious the economy is done and everyone below the threshold is bleeding out
back at that 2023/2024 period i was having a conversation with my girl and her flatmate was in the room. it was crippling me knowing that i was forced to get a job i didn’t want for money and equally, the jobs i was far more than qualified for were not even giving me the time of day my hundreds of applications werent even getting through ats systems, let alone whatever weird metric the hiring people were using to this day, i’ve had 3 emails back and 1 interview. my plan for how i was to navigate the post-graduation world had collapsed - it hadn’t gone to plan and i was realising the game wasn’t fair. no matter how good i was, there was no way through any of the normal means to signal that to this particular group of people who decided who would employ me
my girl didnt get it she believed the system was working just fine as intended in hindsight, why was i looking to someone of whom the system was working just as intended
for her.
having a conversation like this, when i would have it, i could tell people wouldn’t want me to have it. i was in the wrong for bringing my struggles up i was venting; i wanted people to listen but i also hoped for solutions
but the look of interest from the flatmate, i could tell she was interested, but earnestly, not as a way to get me to shutup, but as a way to understand something she’d soon be facing
these were irritating times because i’d have to
explain to people everything i’d already tried
else they assume i hadn’t tried the obvious things;
so much exhausting convincing
at that time, i said, there’s something i’m missing something i’m not seeing
my means of putting conversation away to storage
when i brought it up later, because it was killing my spirit, it was a look of such strong irritation that made me shutup i changed the topic of conversation so quickly that she was suprised i was dropping it
with the family, the sympathy only stemmed from covid-19 these people had lost their jobs; they’d seen the bottom, and they’d stared right at it
and for the ones who hadn’t, the contempt, you wouldn’t ever see anything like it
there are all these memes about gen-z this gen-z that look at how they all act! devisive, their gen versus ours
so if i complain how fucked up the game is, they said it’s always been this way get up to speed! u need to learn how play you’re lazy earn your stripes, make your way
the truth is, because of where the problems are, at the root, in that kitchen, and in that groupchat, where i would argue that if an organisation, since before chatgpt, optimised for weird cv metrics for hiring using hiring managers who don’t even understand what they’re hiring for, then the company is optimising for hiring random monkeys who are good at blindly following arbitrary rubrics. they’re not trying to hire the best people
and even back then, the best was about who your friends and buddies recommended so now, where they’re getting gangraped by chatgpt CVs yet are too incompetent to even yet parse the CVs properly using equally capable ai systems, still holding onto brainless ats systems, and still not understanding the difference between the random key terms on the applications
they’re going, again, to turn primarily to personal recommendations from people they know
the future is none of this ever gets fixed
because now it can’t and what happens next makes it not very incentivising to fix
it was all priced in it was by design
you’re better off not even trying to work one of these fake jobs for as long as you can
if u really have to, choose a real job
we’re going into year 2 since i said what i said those days back then of realisation of what the game is im trying to think of all the specific instances of resentment
but i will say, to understand their perspective, and their world model, they are correct. every single one of them.
theres a section of people where the game works very well for them. a section where it doesn’t but they’ve put in their time learnt a cheatcode or two. and there are the ones whose sanity is dependent on believing that as long as they persevere, they will prosper.
You CAN scale the levels in the game You CAN win
my position, for all its merits, provided no solution, was really just depressing Plus, i can see how everyone at the time couldnt see how close my experience was to having an ear right on the ground
in every possible scenario, it was convenient to blame me because of what i represented
the tough thing about that time was when, even in that kitchen, and the many times i was put in this position, i couldn’t make comparisons of my position to other people. i’d pepper my words. if i’d made a comparison, i knew it would be taken as jealousy, and i as someone undeserving. this is the same tactic - the shaming. i couldn’t be honest because it would hurt egos; i could only provide a softened version, and if i was lucky, the other person be gracious enough to fill in the rest of the story
there was only one person i could truly be 100% be honest with im grateful for this person
my insights from this moment fed my perspective on culture too
in the new world, we need to unify our thinking because every time it becomes about preserving ourselves first before giving, it ruins all equilibrium
i still believe but u know what they say about when your confidence starts wavering