I’m at wit’s end. I’m three months into a job search like the 30-month one I went through starting four years ago, and things proceed apace. I’ve gotten zero interviews despite 20 years of experience, and even finding things I think I could stand is a fucking tall ask.
I’ve always been of the mindset that if you have a good product, shockingly little marketing is required. And that investing in the product is going to have a far larger ROI than blowing money on trying to convince people your product is better than it is. Just fucking, you know, make it better.
Which is what I’ve always done. Whether it’s a redesign or significantly better editing than the audience is used to, or infographics for stories that no one is going to comprehend from text analysis. Or, process improvement that makes employees lives better even though it may challenge the necessity of salaried positions.
I cannot and will not subscribe to this notion that lying to people for pay is an ethical career. During my one stint in marketing, I got to the point of feeling physically ill that I was making the best money in my life to write saccharine copy about products we internally mocked our customers for buying.
I honestly don’t know how I can find a job that makes life worth living at this point, which is less than ideal when ideation is always on the menu (I last got out of a psych ward in late January, and all they had to offer is “you need to stop wanting what you want.”). I don’t understand why I would want to be alive to be able to pay off debt accrued because society has already discarded me as useless.
I swear to fucking god, I cannot handle being told again that I’m wrong to have the ethics and goals in life that I do. If these do not align with the positions advertised, then the logical choice is simply removing myself from this clusterfuck.
I have provable results from things I’ve done that did align, so why does saving companies six and seven figures several times by teaching myself what I needed to to accomplish my goals over the course of my career make me a bad hire? I’ve rarely worked for competent managers, so I’m generally needed to actually get improvements done. I don’t care about my title, and I’ve topped out at $48K, so it’s not like I’m looking for $150K … but I don’t like selling myself through insipid, meaningless prose just because it’s what others want to hear.
What is the point of even being alive when everyone is telling me I’m wrong to want to accomplish things that improve the lives of people other than shareholders? They sure as fuck don’t need the money. I do, but I don’t count because I’ve not already rolled over and begged to suck at the teat of immoral people who care nothing for the rest of the world, let alone the people without whom they’d have no product in the first place.
Most of us don’t anymore. People have stopped having kids and stopped investing in their communities because work makes it impossible. I look to the future and see forty more years of hell, assuming climate disaster, preventable disease, or an impending WWIII don’t kill me first.
That’s fair, and part of my issue, to be honest. Let’s say I score an $80K job tomorrow that completely aligns … then I’m not worried about buying food, but Trump could still destroy the country this year. Climate change gave Austin the sort of Phoenix summer I flew out the morning after high school graduation to avoid ever facing again, and we’re apparently hell-bent on seeing where Atwood didn’t go far enough.
I spent half a year in a Phoenix high school as an exchange student (technically just as a student, have citizenship, just happened to be born and raised in Scandinavia), and was there through all the summer months. My sympathies.
Was going to say this.
No matter who we elect, people get poorer, health care and education get more scarce, and the legislators spend their time finding ways to spend hundreds of billions more on war.
Wage earners aren’t stupid. They haven’t had a president that is truly in their corner since Lyndon Johnson, and it shows.
There is no point in much of anything when you know definitively that your future is one of poverty no matter what you do.
I read posts like yours and I think of the turn of the old phrase “money can’t buy you happiness” to which I say “but it sure does remove an awful lot of suffering”.
Income inequality is, in my mind, the single largest contributor to all of this. If OP made as much as they should be making, and you did and I did and we all did then I think we wouldn’t have this thread. OP would afford better help than they are getting, more would be available, and I think that we wouldn’t incur so much moral injury from the positions that we are put in because they would just simply be better.
I definitely understand that life is never going to be easy, per se, but it doesn’t have to be this hard.
Don’t give up hope. Organize.