Job-hunting depression is complemented by the false ego boosting that occurs while you’re employed or studying.

When you’re “in”, you are encouraged to overestimate your own contribution to the economy/world. No one keeps each other in check. Then when you’re unemployed, you are forced to confront the reality of your position as a replaceable laborer. Mere personnel. It’s like this at every level, people lying to themselves and each other about their importance, and denigrating the unemployed in order to solidify their own tenuous position.

It's depressing as fuck, it's the most degrading process in modern life together with looking for a flat to rent. They're both novel artificial scarcities designed by the system to keep us impoverished and exploited, trying to make us feel worthless so that we'll accept worse conditions.

Another depressing thing was a study some years ago showing that about 50% of positions offered are actually fake, the main reasons being that if you open fake vacants you can pretend your company's growing, and that you can keep your understaffed team more content if you pretend to be looking for more staff.

I swear the process is designed to discipline labor. It's a weird hazing ritual we've normalized as part of making a living so you feel indebted to whoever hires you for ending the madness.

capitalism is specifically designed to make you feel useless when doing anything that is not producing profits for your boss. it's all nonsense dude, nothing that has anything to do with getting a job has anything to do with who you are as a person.

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.

The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

Theres something very dark and twisted in telling people how high youll jump for them in order to survive. I remember being unemployed last year and doing the dumbest most degrading shit for job interviews.

One literally had me do a math test, which I did poorly at, before being asked to do it again. Then they asked me what I wanted to do for a career, which I told them some generic answer until they kept asking and got a real answer, which I told them ideally Id be a professional musician. Which they didnt like. Go figure.

Like normalize just trying to survive. Come on.

From what it looks like out there, "job hunting" often feels more like "job begging" complete with the acts of humiliation, the requirement to roam around and count on the vanishingly scarce generosity of others.

As a formerly homeless person myself, I think I know those dark thoughts because I've had my own. Sometimes, only spite kept me going.

I have no meaningful advice that you probably haven't already heard, except that I believe that every day you're alive is one day closer to outlasting this.

Holy shit I hate job hunting so fucking much. It feels like it is designed to make neurodivergent people suffer. My last interview was a group interview and fuck I should have just left. Never agreeing to another one of those torture sessions again.

a bunch of shit I'm not qualified for

often these postings are made by HR people who don't actually know shit about the position. my job ad asked for experience in a language that hasn't actually been used in this company for fucking years, i knew that language and then straight up lied about knowing the one we actually use. i apologise if i'm stating the obvious here comrade, but some people in my life don't do this -- 100% apply to shit you're not qualified for and lie about anything that no one can prove. fuck those corpos, good luck

You deserve to live a full and flourishing life, Comrade.

I'm sorry Capitalism failed you. This isn't your fault.

You deserve the world

I'm scrolling hexbear to distract myself from those exact feelings

If you have the chance to do a degree you might as well. It's really not that difficult to at least pass. Like, the standard of work I saw from my worst classmates (who all passed) was sometimes quite astounding. I played video games and smoked too much weed, handed stuff in that I thought was totally shoddy, and still got a first. So do a lot of people.

If you do one, make sure it's one with a lot of practical stuff or placements. That way your grade isn't on doing some academic bullshit essay where you have to self motivate in the comfort of your own home where you'd rather be doing anything else, it's about showing up to a place where you can really feel you're learning a real world skill. And you can then put it on your CV. Very valuable. Plus it's fun, you'll meet people you can hang out with. University is more about gaining people skills and confidence than learning, to be honest.

That said... I'm on the job hunt now and I'm not qualified for fucking anything either, lol. That's on me for doing an arts based degree. Every application takes fucking forever too. But with the experience I got from doing a degree, it feels like I'm at least hitting the dartboard, whereas before i was blindly throwing it at the backboard. Once I've thrown 150 darts, I might just get a bullseye one of these days.

I had a couple stints where I sent literally hundreds of applications trying to get an entry level job with the state that I believe generally entail opening mail and never got a single response. I was told that you needed to call and ask about the applications so I made hundreds of calls and the people who answered generally sounded annoyed and would ask if I knew how many people were on a priority list. My bills are fortunately very manageable at the moment and I've been trying to make self employment work but I'm not sure I really have it in me with some undiagnosed auDHD going on. @Babs@hexbear.net made a post https://hexbear.net/post/3145128 a couple months ago about working at homeless shelters that I've been mulling over, but I've been dragging my feet in DMing her about it.

Yeah, you have my empathy, job hunting is brutally alienating, and as with so many things under Capitalism the cruelty is the point. Hope you manage to find something that doesn't totally suck!

Going on 13 months since I lost my last job. Right there with you comrade. Solidarity

My last job rejection (after a series of interviews), they were hiring 10 people for the role. Despite having held the same job title as I was applying for for about 10 years, somehow I was apparently not desirable enough to be one of ten, let alone #1. Fuck 'em all.

Normally I'm lucky to get an interview at all

Me but with dating sites.

What are expenses? Do you need a certain number of hours a week to make them, or a certain wage on top of that?

I'm worried I'll have start this again soon. My boss and workplace seem very accommodating for bereavement but I've just handed off all my clients and I've been ghosted by workplaces before. Also, casual so "bereavement leave" is just me not getting any hours

stay strong