"Entitlement is a disease. It appears to have infected everyone under the age of thirty. I would say the remedy is failure, but it appears the remedy was simultaneous to the infection and they somehow cancelled each other out, but still left the pustules behind..." -- The Overlord
I spent a good deal of time yesterday -- that I will never get back -- 'career coaching' a bunch of certified morons.
How I got roped into this stupidity is not important, but what is is that I was confronted with seven twenty-somethings of varying intelligence, attitude, and self-righteousness, who, on a good day, might be Exhibit 'A' in a dissertation on why abortion should remain legal and applied retroactively whenever necessary.
A few observations on the current, college 'educated' job seeker, in no particular order.
1. They think they know everything...except when they don't know how much they don't know. This is a defect built into every human being of that age (I know I had it) which is a result of being too young to have gained any wisdom for lack of experience. This puts you into a circumstance where, as in this case, people are literally begging you to impart your experience in the hopes of learning something and then refuse to listen to it.
It doesn't matter what you say, it is reflexively rejected because you don't 'live in reality'. What they mean by this is that I don't live in their reality, which is to say, I am not obsessed by my gender, race or genitalia, nor am I convinced that because I went to a day care center with an open bar and a football team and majored in Medieval Basket Weaving with a minor in Binge Drinking, therefore, I know everything. There is nothing left to teach me.
Then why the fuck are you here?
2. There seems to be a general belief that, having gotten by in life to this point by essentially doing the barest minimum in a world of lowered standards, that simply filling in a job application automatically entitles one to a job offer.
And not just 'an offer' but rather one that takes a laundry list of completely unhinged demands into consideration.
No, just because you went to kollege and they gave you a piece of paper in exchange for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, you are not entitled to a six-figure salary out of the gate. Yes, we hiring managers are aware of the rising costs of housing, transportation and avocado toast, but you haven't done this -- whatever it is you think you're qualified for -- for real before and we're not going to compound the potential risk of failure of hiring a neophyte with a waterfall of cash.
Nor are you deserving of three weeks of vacation, because you have this ridiculous idea called a 'work/life balance', before you even start.
Neither are The Rules of the Workplace going to be bent to suit you. So, take your phony diagnoses of ADHD, Time Blindness, the interruption of your dog's bathroom schedule that work entails, your diabetic cat's needs, these are all excuses for doing as little as possible, and shove them up your ass, sideways, and make sure the sharp corners and edges are exposed.
3. Understand that no one cares about your feelings. We're here to make money. That's how Capitalism works, and it works very well. So well, in fact, that few -- if any -- major employers are concerned with such trifling issues like your personal relationships, your menstrual cycle (both real and imagined), your collection of anxieties and depressive mood swings.
In such an environment, you either cut the mustard or you walk the unemployment line.
Your employer is not your psychiatrist, your therapist, minister, rabbi, best friend or kindly old uncle. They are the people who sign your paycheck and they expect that in return for that paycheck, you do something useful and remunerative, with honest effort and despite your personal problems, foibles, or neuroses.
You are entitled to courtesy and respect and at least a minimum consideration for your fragile feelings and perhaps ego, but anything after that is a privilege. It should be considered as such. Since privileges are earned and not bestowed by virtue of the fact that you can breathe and excrete; you're not entitled to anything more.
4. Work Sucks. It always has. But, it is also how human beings have kept themselves clothed, fed and sheltered for thousands of years.
Apartments do not materialize out of thin air. Automobiles, smart phones and designer clothes do not evolve from Nature. There is no magic lamp with a genie inside that grants you three wishes.
In a sense, you are no different than the people of 10,000 BC who had to chase down gazelles with a fire hardened stick. No different than the ancients who broke their backs and lived shortened lifespans stooping in the mines or the fields. The same reality they faced is the same one you do: you either find a means of supporting yourself or you starve to death, succumb to the elements, or die from an infected ingrown toenail for lack of medical care.
Where you ARE different than those short-lived, physically-warped-by-labor, living-precariously ancients, however, is that in your world, you work indoors, in a climate-controlled space, maybe with an ergonomic chair and your food is grown by someone else, delivered to a convenient distribution point and purchased with money, rather than with labor-in-kind, a phalanx of chickens, a wagon-load of chopped firewood, or given in exchange for one of your children.
In fact, life is not so much harder for you than it was for anyone else who ever existed, and in many ways, you lead a life that would have made the robber barons of old jealous, because Capitalism has made everything you've ever needed abundant, fairly inexpensive, and deliverable by Amazon within 24 hours.
Any discussion about time off from work, or the pressure of deadlines, even something as trivial as when your workday starts and ends, would be met with stunned disbelief by anyone who lived 200 years ago or more. You are a privileged generation of people and don't have any sense of context (because, as above, lack of education and wisdom).
Work is necessary and it is only in fairy tales that it never takes place.
Like under Socialism, you fucking Juicebox Marxist.
5. YOU suck. And while this may not be entirely your fault, you don't recognize your own shortcomings and have no interest in either examining them or correcting them. To this point in your life you've mostly been protected from the dread horrors of physical reality. Your parents provided for you; your schooling taught you you were special without telling you how to become special; if not everything then most things were simply given to you.
And somehow, it wasn't enough?
Mostly because no one ever taught you how to deal with adversity. If you got a bad grade, Mommy went and yelled at teacher lady and the grade was changed because who wants to deal with Mommy? If you didn't get enough playing time in Little League because you frankly stink at sports, Daddy had an argument with coach and you got to play an extra inning, strike out an extra time at bat, and make three errors in the field because you regarded a baseball the same way Jasmine Crockett regards the English language and throw like a fucking girl. If you had trouble with another kid in school, you cried like a fucking baby and narced someone out to teacher or principal, and the problem was solved as if by magic.
In none of those cases did you ever overcome adversity by any personal effort. Life, sadly, is about suffering, and the antidote to the suffering is to find ways to either avoid it or mitigate it. This was true when the first human predecessor crawled out of the slime, and it remains a constant to this day.
Grow a pair.
Now, for nearly three hours I had to listen to these whining idiots rage on about how 'unfair' everything is. One would get the impression that necessity to even to continue breathing on one's own was a ghastly ordeal on par with the Holocaust.
Here's how that sounds:
"But, I have filled out n applications and haven't gotten any callbacks."
The number of these applications filled out is ridiculously high, and most likely exaggerated, because we have raised a generation of youth that is innumerate and cannot do math without resort to drawing shaded boxes. I find it highly unlikely that you have filled out, like literally, like 500 applications and no one has given you a second thought, even for the most mundane of tasks that someone is willing to shell out good money for.
You're either full of shit, or more likely, don't have the qualifications for the job postings you're applying for. A good bet is that your useless degree in Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Latin Translation or Latina Lesbian Hunchback Dwarves in American Litt. is not useful in the corporate world, or even at McDonald's.
Maybe you have a conflict between expectations and ability?
"But, I spoke to the HR lady and she said _____."
Understand this: HR is not the hiring manager. HR exists to screen you for potential issues that you might cause with your attitude, stupidity, sexual proclivities, online behavior, criminal anything about you which might come back to bite your employer in the ass.
As such, never believe anything they tell you.
HR does not exist to help you; it exists to protect the corporation from lawsuits.
And it is usually staffed with people with sub-zero IQ's because it's mainly a clerical job revolving around record keeping and enforcing stupid rules, many of which were implemented because people just like you complained 'there should be a law...'.
In some cases, it seems you have made your bed before you entered the workforce with your stupid notions of Utopia, now fucking deal with the consequences.
"But...but...I can't contact anyone at the company to get any feedback..."
That's because you didn't make an effort. you simply filled in an application on your smartphone and expected a job to drop out of the sky.
Understand this: the automated systems that screen resumes and applications exist as a means of deliberately limiting the number of applicants. No hiring manager wants to speak to or interview 250 people before hiring just one.
If the resume doesn't exactly match the requirements listed in the posting, it gets shitcanned. The computer doesn't make value or contextual judgements; it just follows it's programming.
To the letter.
If the application has spelling or grammatical errors in it, it gets shitcanned.
If you've lied to either not reveal something about your education or work history, or to puff those up in expectation that no one checks these things, you get shitcanned.
If you have a spotty work history or appear to change jobs frequently, you get shitcanned.
If your resume was obviously crafted with Chat-GPT, it gets shitcanned (did you think a computer can't recognize the creation of another computer?)
Do you know why? Because no one wants to hire people who don't meet the requirements, who are troublemakers, people who lie, or people who are liable to quit at the drop of a hat.
A piece of advice I gave these morons was this: it's not enough, sometimes, to just fill in the application and never depend upon HR to do any heavy lifting for you. Remember, their job is not to help you, but rather protect the company. Very often, it is necessary to show some personal responsibility, some gumption, some ambition.
Whenever you can, contact the hiring manager directly. Ask questions. Show up on the front doorstep and ask to be heard. Tailor the resume (honestly) to the posting. Use your network of friends and acquaintances and schoolmates to open doors for you. Knock on doors; send e-mails, follow up after the application process, show someone that you really WANT this job.
"But...but...there's usually no one to contact directly..."
Bullshit. You just haven't done the work to find them. It used to be customary, assuming you got to talk to HR lady, even, to exchange business cards with people's contact information on them. Even today, people have e-mail addresses, Linked-In profiles, online bios of their work history or membership with alumni or other organizations.
You've been conditioned to expect shit to fall into your lap. You're not equipped to make things happen with personal effort.
I did not, of course, put all these points to them with brutal frankness. These Snowflakes today dissolve into a quivering puddle of laments and tears if you do so. But even sugar coating the realities did little more than start everyone arguing about how they were the exception to every rule.
So, I'm not really surprised that you're unemployed.
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