Transcription
Good morning, y'all. I'm at one of my favorite coffee shops here in Austin. Um, Medichi Coffee. Definitely the best coffee I've ever had. Um, highly recommend. So, if you're ever in Austin, definitely go check it out.
Um, speaking of Austin, this is Damon Cassidy. He's a Jenzie YouTuber who's based here in Austin, and he's put together a video about why Jenzie is facing a career apocalypse. And I want to dive into this because uh, from a millennial perspective, I don't think this is unique to Gen Z. I think what we're experiencing right now is kind of reality catching up with itself. I don't think the economy truly recovered after the 2008 financial crisis. The economy definitely never recovered from de-industrialization that began as early as the 1970s, 1980s, but really ramped up in the 2000s and 2010s. And so I think economic conditions from the past um several decades are now catching up. And unfortunately, Gen Z is caught in the crosshairs. Much in the same way that baby boomers got lucky when they were born. Um, Jenzers are unlucky uh based on when they've been born. And I think the writing is on the wall for them, and they really need to start paying attention. So, if you're a Gen Zer watching this, I strongly urge you to start looking at the facts as they are, not as you think they are. Uh, and with that, let's dive in.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Gen Z graduates are facing the worst job market in over a decade, with enthropic CEO warning that AI could eliminate nearly half of all entry-level jobs just within the next 5 years. And while 72% of Gen Z lives paycheck to paycheck, nearly half are working three or more jobs just to survive, raising the question. So, right off the bat, I want to call attention to this because this is not—I don't think this is uniquely a Gen Z problem. This is a an American problem, and this has been affecting workers for a really long time.
So growing up, you know, I am the product of a working-class family. Um, neither of my parents when I was growing up had college degrees. They uh, my dad works in manufacturing. My mom was like an accounts payable clerk uh at the time um at a local like county family health services clinic. Um, both my parents—probably their combined income—it was definitely less than 60,000, maybe 50, $60,000 a year. So just to give you like a reference point, I graduated high school in 2009. So this would have been, you know, late 90s, 2000s when they were um raising us. So post-.com boom into the the great recession in 2008. Um, both my parents had to work part-time jobs. So my dad—I I remember he got a part-time job working at Walmart. His first day was September 11th, and he was um a cart person, retrieve carts. My mom uh, within her clinic that she was doing accounts payable, they had home health services. So people who are on Medicaid or Medicare that need assistance in their their home, and some of that's medical, some of that's just like running errands and that kind of stuff. Um, she coordinated service providers. So anytime a nurse called off or someone needed service, like she had this binder and she would have to like stop everything she was doing and find coverage. And so she had a little beeper, and um, whenever the beeper went off, like we would be sitting in church and she'd have to go and and find coverage for for someone. So for the longest time, as long as I could remember, they not only did that, um, my dad periodically would work with his brother, especially when there were layoffs and closures at his factory. And then my mom also sold Avon on the side.
So Jenzie likes to call attention to this that they're working a lot of jobs. And that's not abnormal. Um, you know, I've never not worked multiple things at once. Um, you know, I worked um full-time in in Washington DC. Had a, you know, career as a defense um contractor, but then on top of that, I started a business. I was doing eBay. I started a blog. I've flipped stuff online. I've done gig work. So, I I've done—um, I tried doing the Lime Wire Lime scooter uh recharging. I did that once and decided that wasn't worth my time. Um, I've done Door Dash. Uh, I was a babysitter. Um, pet sitting. Like I' i've done all sorts of things, too. So, this isn't a uniquely Gen Z problem, but this has been a problem. My parents are um late baby boomers. My mom's a cusp Gen Xer. So, if that gives you any indication, for working-class folks in particular, this has been the norm rather than the exception.
Why is Gen Z yet another generation promised a future that no longer exists? While obtaining a lifelong career was once as straightforward as simply answering a job post in the local newspaper or a firm handshake prompted by a help wanted sign in the window, today, despite 75% of employers stating they're struggling to fill job vacancies, the second highest rate in two decades, a 2022 study of over 300 job applications submitted by Business.com's departing interns found that only 12% received any response from employers; just 5% expressed interest in the applicant; and not a single application resulted in a hire, where employers were actually more likely to ghost candidates if the graduate met over 90% of the listed requirements. And although job postings have been weaponized to serve employer interests throughout most of modern history, most notably during the civil rights era, where employers flooded local job boards to portray government compliance by suggesting they were doing everything in their power to offer equal hiring opportunities, but just that no one was applying, the recent implementation of ghost jobs has essentially scaled greed and manipulation into a fully normalized and institutionally accepted hiring practice. This was something that I didn't know was happening when I was a teenager. And so I'm not surprised that it's gotten worse. There's always been this like seemingly mismatch between labor supply and labor demand. And I always thought like it was me, my resume was bad, something was wrong with me. And I've recently come to learn that that's not true.
So on the one hand, there are there are ghost jobs. Um, but there's also other qualifiers that you may not be aware of. So when I was in high school, again, I I was in high school from 2005 to 2009. So really right during the midst of the financial crisis, um, it was hard for me to find a part-time job. But in fact, I was never—I did look—I didn't honestly—I didn't want one cuz I was really bought into the whole idea if I just worked hard and did AP classes like I could—um, that would be a better return on my time, especially in terms of college. Looking back, I wish I had just gotten a job at McDonald's. It would have been easier. Um, I ended up just selling candy bars part-time in between classes for a dollar a piece. That was my side hustle in high school. But anyways, I I remember I did apply to some jobs, and I never—I never got them. So there were some jobs where I was overqualified, especially during my off time with with college. I would—I would come home and look for work. And I remember applying to a dining position at Bethany Village, which is like um an an a retirement home. It's where you know folks go um yeah, after you retire. Um, and so working in the dining hall there, and I knew people from church who worked there. That's why I applied there, and um I was rejected because I was overqualified, and I think in part because I was a college student so I wasn't going to be a good hire for them. But I remember um doing applications for Walmart and I did an application for Michaels. Remember this? And there were all these tests that you had to do like—like it wasn't just as simple as like here's my resume, I'm looking for work, here's what I can do. Um, I had to take like a personality test. Like if someone, you know, you've probably experienced this too, but there's questions like if someone—if you see someone slacking off on the job, like what is your response? Um, and I didn't know that, but they were psychologically profiling you. So employers, and I'm—I'm talking at like retail baseline, entry level, they're psychologically profiling you. And I actually have—I've experienced this, you know, recently like oh maybe like a year or two ago. I was just applying for for things here in Austin. I applied to um Whole Foods, and Whole Foods is is headquartered here, lots of locations here, and they had a psychological profile, and I clearly didn't pass the test um because they discontinued my application even though they were hiring. I've run a CPG company, have worked in grocery and retail before, like reliable person, right? Um, not interested in in hiring me because I I apparently didn't pass their psychological test. So they—and this is a known thing. This is—there are psychological tests you have to um fill.
So I I I say that because jobs beget jobs. So if you can't get like your entry level—if you're 16, 17 years old, you can't get the entry-level job, right? Because there's all these like psychological barriers. They don't want kids who are going to college. They don't want people who are overqualified. Okay? You can't get that. And then you can't get any work experience. So you have nothing on your resume. So all's you have are like internships and volunteer stuff and like academic stuff, which some employers might want—in my experience, they just don't care about that stuff. And so then as you're trying to climb up the career ladder, you're handicapped because you don't have experience. Employers would much rather hire a 20, 26-year-old, for example, who's been working for 10 years and has 10 years of experience to put on their resume and has like demonstrated, you know, competencies and leadership. They would much rather have that than some kid who went from undergrad straight to law school or whatever and then is has no work experience and is 26, 25, 26 and entering into the the workforce for the first time. Um, and so I think that's something that's handicapping people, and uh, it's—it's not really—it's not really talked about that much.
Where in a recent survey by My Perfect Resume, 81% of recruiters admitted their organization had posted fake job listings, with 21% acknowledging that half their listings had no intention of resulting in a hire. And while some ghost jobs are simply the result of outdated, forgotten postings, many are deliberately created as a strategic tool to generate billions of dollars in hidden profits, where journalist Bob Sullivan notes that every week, data from 75% of Fortune 500 companies, 85% of the federal workforce, and countless institutions flows into these databases, tracking everything from social security numbers and salaries to healthcare coverage and job tenure, with companies like Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, AT&T, and Microsoft feeding data into these systems, we're okay. So, this is why I think things are much worse than than we realize.
So, you have fake job postings. As he said, they're—some of these are deliberate. Um, and I think they're a strategic marketing tool, right? If you think about—if you think of um popular companies that—like think of a company you would want to work for, right? Um, you know, I I enjoy running and fitness and working out. So, you know, let's say I wanted to get a job at Peloton. Okay, chances are if I want to work at Peloton, I'm looking to to get a job there. I'm also probably a core key demographic and their customer user base—like I'm their an ideal customer profile, right? So, I think a lot of times, this is my own um theory. I don't know if it's true, but I I think what what is happening is a lot of popular companies are creating more job openings than they actually need. One, in part to create the illusion that they're constantly hiring; two, to create a constant pool of candidates so as they churn through people, they always have a bench that they can pull from; and three, as implicit marketing because if you like the—if you're seeking out a a well-known popular company—I'm not talking about, you know, being an accountant at some like random accounting firm in your small hometown. I'm—I'm talking about like a company with a name and a brand that you recognize. Um, it's free marketing because you're probably their customer demographic. And so if they're hiring, they're going to tell their friends. Uh, you know, I've—you see this all the time on LinkedIn, people reposting stuff. Um, and so what all this does is it creates the illusion of jobs. And I think tech companies definitely do this, right? Like they're trying to get the the cream of the crop and the best talent. So you have this illusion of jobs and job openings that don't actually exist. And there's never actually a job at the end of the posting, or in many cases, too, um, they're legally required to. Maybe they have an internal candidate already slated to take the spot, but because of whatever the local um state and local laws are with with hiring, they have to put a opening up for a certain period of time to show that they're fairly competing it. Um, and so this skews—skews the numbers. And so if you see, you know, federal data that says, "Oh, we have 100,000 jobs that were created last month," well, is that actually true? Where are they pulling the data from? What types of jobs are those? Are we talking six-figure jobs at a big tech company or are we talking about minimum wage jobs, you know, flipping burgers or serving tacos at Taco Bell? Um, and we don't get the granularity and and the numbers. And so I think Gen Z is expecting jobs to exist that didn't exist when I was going through this process of trying to find a job when I was in my early 20s and definitely do not exist today.
Globally, Rukonabi, a major job-seeking platform in Japan that primarily caters to college graduates or those just entering the workforce, was caught selling predictive scores gathered through job applications to roughly 40 corporations, including Toyota and Mitsubishi, estimating how likely each applicant was to decline a job offer or withdraw their application. And because Japan's lifetime employment system promises job security for life in exchange for loyalty to a single company, the sale of these cores had an immeasurable impact on someone's entire career path. And while this was only uncovered due to Japan's data privacy laws, unlike the United States, which still relies on so-called business ethics, it turns out that Rukunabi is a subsidiary of Recruit Group, the same media conglomerate that owns both Indeed and Glass Door. According to an analysis by the workforce analytics firm Rellio Labs, as a result of platforms like Indeed, Glass Door, and LinkedIn, online job listings in 2024 were only half as likely to result in a hire as they were in 2020, signaling just how widespread and normalized these deceitful listings have become as a corporate recruiting strategy. And while the Library of Congress has officially recognized ghost jobs as a serious concern in today's job market, the fact of the matter is we're facing not just a hiring crisis, but decades of societal abandonment of the working class, with a culture that blames every rising cost and systemic failure on what should be considered fundamental worker rights, where despite job scams and fake employment agency fraud increasing from $90 million in 2020 to over $500 million in 2024. And even as legislators in New Jersey, Kentucky, and California have proposed bills to address ghost listings, no legislation has been introduced in Congress that explicitly targets this issue or any of the systemic forces that have been undermining the workforce for the last 5 decades, where, in my opinion, one of the most massively understated reasons this continues to happen actually has to do with government tax subsidies.
Where Greg Loy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a national policy center focused on corporate and government accountability and economic development, explains on his website and in his book, *The Great American Job Scam*, how tens of billions of taxpayer dollars are funneled into corporate tax subsidies under the promise of job creation, but instead it often leads to widespread layoffs. Okay, I have a good story about this. I need to read this book. This looks really interesting. So, my hometown um Russell, upstate New York um was booming in like the 50s, 60s and obviously declined with the industrialization. Um, so so there's a lot of empty um factories and abandoned factories up there, and there was an A&P food processing plant. Um, so I I don't know what A&P is, but I I'm assuming it's probably like Kagura and one of those um big food processors. And so they would produce food there. It was abandoned. I don't remember when it closed. It was probably before I was born, so maybe in the 80s. But anyways, it it sat idle. Nothing was happening there. And so all the local government brought in a—they brought—um, Sorry, there's people walking. This is why I get very recording outside. Um, they brought in Walmart. So they essentially developed it. They Walmart came in. It—I think this was like 20 thou—mid-2000s. So it was like one of the biggest Walmart super centers on the east coast at the time. This was when Walmart was pivoting away from like smaller stores into more super centers. Um, developed the whole thing. Now there's like a Cracker Barrel in this plaza, a bunch of retail shops, a hotel, Kohl's, you know, Dick's Sporting Goods, all that stuff. So—So they they developed this um this property, right? Uh, and the deal at the time was that Walmart wouldn't pay property taxes for 10 years. So, there's a 10-year tax moratorium. So, basically, uh, my local city government people at the time basically sold the residents out to Walmart. You know, the promise was here. Okay, we're going to take—we're going to take this abandoned A&P food processing plant. We're going to build Walmart here. We're going to build all these other retail spaces around it. We're going to create all these jobs. Well, they sold out the locals because they gave a tax moratorium so they didn't have to pay as many taxes. And then um the jobs that were created, they're not really good jobs, right? Like Walmart is well known for being one of the top beneficiaries of like food stamps and um Medicare, Medicaid, and all that kind of stuff because they don't pay their employees enough. I've—I've heard this—I don't know if that's true, but I've heard this where um during onboarding, like HR onboarding, like they provide information on how you can apply for food stamps and public benefits after you've become hired, just because you're not going to make enough. Um, and you can read—I highly recommend this—Barbara Ehrenreich's um book *Nickel and Dimed*. She had an experience where she worked um Walmart in and in Minneapolis and talked about this um extensively as well. So these companies don't—they're not paying their workers. Workers obviously depend on government welfare programs in order to supplement their income. Um, but then also a lot of these companies are getting uh perks to to come in. And if you want an even better um case study of this, look at Amazon's HQ2 negotiations. Every single city that um was vying for that came up with lucrative tax incentives and and local economic packages to get Amazon to come in. And it's crazy because I think everyone knew—I mean, maybe I'm biased because I was in in DC at the time, but there was no way it wasn't going to go to to Arlington, Virginia, where it ended up going. I mean, I used to work in an office that was right next to where they were building um HQ2, and it's literally right across the highway from um from the Pentagon. So, it was always going to go there, but that's a really great case study of just how much and how willing local governments are to sell out their citizens for good-paying jobs, which don't always actually end up being created anyways.
Through automation and outsourcing, despite companies still keeping the full tax breaks, ultimately turning into a redistribution of public funds back into the hands of certain government officials in the form of campaign contributions during re-election, where alongside the broken promises of job creation at both the federal and corporate level, worsening economic conditions and the ideological belief that the working class is the only thing standing in the way of shareholder profits has resulted in a labor market that has completely sold off the bottom rung of the career ladder, where unlike America's post-war economic expansion, where hard work and dedication truly did provide a stable career filled with upward mobility, only 15% of current vacancies are now filled with internal candidates, a 75% decrease over the last 50 years, with companies now relying more on outside hiring, often favoring those who already have years of work experience, with Scott Deetman, CEO of Aphincia, a US-based career platform for new graduates, stating, "Employers are unhappy with the level of talent they're getting in the entry-level space. So instead of trying to take corrective action, they've increased experience requirements. In the last 5 years, we've seen a 20% increase in the number of skills"
Required on job listings. Where a study by Generation, a nonprofit network focused on economic mobility, found that of the 1300 employers surveyed across eight countries, including the US and UK, 94% required applicants for entry-level tech jobs to already have experience in a related field. More broadly, out of 3.8 million jobs on LinkedIn, roughly 38.4% of entry-level positions required 3 to 5 years of experience, forcing young workers to be completely dependent on internships as a prerequisite for employment.
With companies such as Surface Now reporting a 50% increase in internship applications this year, while Citadel saw applications rise by 65%, ultimately accepting just 300 of the 69,000 applications it received. And as competition for these positions has intensified, employers have taken advantage of the discounted labor, fueling a further rise in unpaid internships. Where, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 47% of internships in 2022 were unpaid, creating a new form of economic stratification as paid interns averaged 1.4 job offers post-graduation, while unpaid interns averaged less than one, effectively proving that even if you go to college, land an internship, and graduate, your chances of securing a job are severely limited if the internship was unpaid.
Because in the recruiter's eyes, an unpaid internship offers no more credible work experience than a basic service-level job, or this happened to me. Um, and so this is absolutely spot on to get started in Washington, D.C. And again, this will probably vary by industry, so I can only give you the experience I had within Washington, D.C. My first year was all unpaid internships. I think uh one internship provided like a $1,000 a month stipend, but this was, you know, 2014, 2015 in Washington, D.C. $1,000 is not isn't going to get you very far, right? Um, I got my first paid job on a contract after that, and that paid $16 an hour. Um, so to give you a metric of kind of what I was I was working with, but all of the internships were an unspoken prerequisite; you had to have them, and they often led to full-time employment.
Um, and so I actually had this issue where I was working for a defense contractor. Um, and this was 2018. I found out—so I would have been 26, 27 at the time—I was working on a program in the Middle East. I speak Arabic. Had been with the company for two years at this point. Had been on the program for over a year itself. Traveled frequently to the region. I had a unique set of skills and experience that fit the job perfectly. And earlier that summer, um, I think it was in July, a 22-year-old guy, fresh out of college, went to George Washington University. He had been hired onto my contract and and and joined my my program. Great. Fine. Uh, I got a promotion, and I I went from making like $58,000 to I think like $63,000, which really isn't that much. I think it barely kept pace with inflation. And I found out that my my program was mixed. So, I had some folks um on my team who worked for different subcontractors. So, we all worked on the same program; we served the same client, but we didn't work for the same companies. And so I found out these these co-workers of mine were making 10, $20,000 more than I was to do the exact same work. And I was like, "Hey, what gives?"
Um, so I started the conversation with my employer, the number three on the on the contract who managed all the funding. And I I had several meetings with him and sat down with him like, "What's going on?" And basically, he told me I was in the same pay grade as the 22-year-old who had just graduated, fresh out of college, no experience. So him and I, he basically were at the same level. So I was the same as him, and I was in the same pay band as him. And the reason why is because my internships didn't count as real experience. So the—and this is subjective, right?—so so he used that in order to decrease my qualifications to cut cost because this this this contract was poorly managed. Um, they had underbid themselves, and so they were doing as much cost cutting as they could, and I unfortunately was collateral damage in that. Didn't know it at the time. Um, hindsight's 2020. But basically, I uh was told like I wasn't going to get paid more. I was in like a lower pay band than what the other my other co-workers were, even though we were doing the same exact job, same exact responsibilities. Um, if not, like I I brought language skills to the to the program. So, you know, there was, you know, that added benefit, and Arabic's not easy to learn. Um, and so I ended up actually leaving that job because of that, because I, right, right or wrong, I could not for the life of me stand being um, at the same level as a 22-year-old dude fresh out of college. Um, and so, yeah, this is absolutely happens. So, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. You need to have the internships in a lot of places to get your foot in the door to get the jobs, but then those don't count as the experience you think they are. And so you're not going to get the opportunities necessarily that you think you'll get if you have those internships.
Okay, so this is why I—so I left my career in Washington, D.C., um, at the end of 2019 when my employer lost the contract I was on. This was the second time it had happened in like four years, and I was just—I defense contracting was supposed to be stable, and it wasn't, and I was broke, and just—I was done, and I'm glad I left cuz co happened right not too long after. So it all worked out, but um, this is why I didn't pivot to a new career. This is why I have for the better part of the last um, I like five or six years I've been working for myself, piecing together income freelancing, content creation, writing. This is why I've I've hustling like I've been doing this because I don't have any prior work experience that the private sector would want.
Um, if you've been paying attention to the doge cuts, uh, a lot of what's been coming forward is you can see is there's a lot of dereliction of duty at all levels of government. So there's people who are awarding contracts, they're purchasing licenses, they're doing things, they don't really understand what they're what they're doing. They're just like doing things. And so there's a lot of like waste. I'm not saying it's all like fraud and abuse, but there's definitely a lot of waste, and I personally witnessed it. Um, but I felt that when I worked in DoD, my skills atrophied um because we weren't using current tech. Like we were brief, we were compiling um PowerPoint slide decks to brief three-star generals on programs we were managing while my peers in Silicon Valley were using tools like Trello and Asana. So even from a program management standpoint, like I didn't have anything I could transfer over because what I was doing was so backwards and so outdated. And then on top of that, because I had no experience using the software, I had no experience working in the private sector. And like I didn't have the experience itself working with a company, no one wanted to hire me. Um, and and you know, it's it's hard, and I I I found I I couldn't compete. Um, I had nothing nothing of value. I didn't have enough government experience to leverage that inside of a government relations department at a company like, you know, Google or or Facebook or whatever. Um, but I didn't have any introductory like entry-level experience either. And frankly, I didn't even know like the vocabulary like growth marketing or product managers. There might, you know, there maybe there's a transference of skills between being an entrepreneur, starting a business, building something for yourself and product management. That's possible. Um, but again, like I had no exposure to that world. It was completely foreign to me. I had no experience. So, if you're if you're a tech company and you're a startup and you have a choice between someone who has been doing this for a while, um, and someone who has nothing, you're going to choose the person who's who's been doing it for a while. And if they're desperate enough like they'll they'll take whatever income um they can get. So I think the lack of experience—at least in my in my personal experience—lack of experience was a huge uh barrier to entry, and then obviously not knowing how to navigate between public sector to to private sector.
Increasingly competitive and misaligned job market isn't just affecting Gen Z in the United States. Unfortunately, it's a part of a much broader global trend. In Canada, their youth is facing the most challenging employment landscape in over two decades, with unemployment among Gen Z reaching 12.2%, more than twice the rate of the current population in Canada right now. Youth unemployment stands at—costing many Gen Z to adopt the lab people, a satirical response to the overwhelming pressure of competing in a system where meaningful career opportunities are rapidly disappearing. And as nearly 3/4 of all hiring managers continue to consider Gen Z to be the most difficult generation in the workforce, employers are making a calculated bet that AI will evolve fast enough to replace the need for entry-level talent. Or unlike previous generations who were hired based on work ethic with the expectation that job-specific skills would be taught on the job, today's employers are severely reducing their already limited training programs.
With a 2021 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes over 100 countries focused on improving public policy, uncovered that most nations spend an average of 62% of their GDP on active labor market programs like job training, employment incentives, and public hiring initiatives. The United States spends less than 0.1%, the same as Chile, where as a result, despite estimates that 50% of entry-level jobs could be eliminated within the next 1 to 5 years, the broader rise of automation and artificial intelligence is projected to displace another 45.3 million workers by 2030. And while many in Silicon Valley compare the greatest technological advancement in human history to the disruption of the car or calculator, the reality is that the speed at which this is happening is not only eliminating entire categories of work that once served as stepping stones for career advancements, but the complete lack of preparation is coming at the cost of an entire generation. All for the optimistic assumption that it will eventually lead to a better world. And while older members of Gen Z may still have time to self-educate in hopes of combating the uncertainties of just the next couple years, the youngest are only 13, meaning their education and skill development will be shaped entirely by decisions made today.
Or this is what the secretary of educ—this is why I think Gen Z needs to drop out of college right away. And I do not say that lightly. College institutions have not kept up with the pace of change. They were not adequately prepared for my generation when I was in college. They did not adequately prepare me to get a career and a job in the job market; they did not adequately prepare me to understand basic—I'm talking basic things—um, you know, how to write a resume, um, you know, dressing—within like my my department in social sciences like, okay, what types of internships—there's like this unspoken—and I never heard of this because no one like mentored me when I got to D.C., so I was had no idea—but there's like an unspoken uh process you're supposed to follow in order to like climb climb the ranks in D.C. Like you don't just go and get an intern on Capitol Hill and then like work your way your way up. Like you have to go do some time at a think tank. Some people do time at um a contractor, a government contractor or at a consulting firm. You go to K Street for a while. Like there's certain things you're supposed to do, and you know some people like write op-eds and and establish a brand and all that kind of stuff. There's things you're supposed to do, and you don't know unless people tell you to do those things. And unfortunately, a lot of academics, a lot of professors are so far removed from the job market, they can't prepare you. They have no idea. Like my professors would go get jobs at State Department and the United Nations, and it's like, okay, what does that actually look like? What is the actual process for that? Like, you don't just roll up to the United Nations building in New York City be like, I want a job.
And because of all the ghost jobs and and like the algorithm—the algorithms driving a lot of job boards and job postings, like you don't just post a resume either. Like this was always a thing in um in government jobs. You were supposed to white text all of your resumes. Um, so you would basically take the block of text from the description in the USAJobs posting, put it inside your resume, and then white it out. So the employer couldn't read it if they downloaded your app—your resume, but the computer system could. Um, so there's all these like tips and tricks that are very industry-specific that a college-level um like general um career development office isn't going to be able to teach you. Um, but basically you're so—so they were behind. They were behind for us. They couldn't prepare millennials; they definitely can't prepare Gen Z now. So you have kids who are going to, you know, business and and finance programs at universities across the country, and Wall Street has already said they don't want you. They don't want those kids. They're already automating them out. I think um Goldman Sachs is doing it; JP Morgan, it's been well documented like they're one of the front runners in automation, AI. So, one of the top programs, what a lot of people major in—business and finance—there are not going to be entry points for those people at investment banks on Wall Street. What are those kids going to do, right? Um, so I think your best bet now, you should not go to college. It's not worth it. Unless you can pay full-time, unless you're doing ROTC, full scholarship, whatever. If you are not taking on any debt, by all means, go do it. But if you are going to have to finance any portion of your college education, do not go. There are not going to be jobs for you when you graduate. And I don't know, like early millennials have struggled. We are not paying back our bills. Like, we are struggling. Millennials have delayed all sorts of things, right? Millennials are struggling; older Gen Zers are struggling. If you're currently in college or younger, you're going to struggle, too. You're not the exception. Um, so I really do think kids, and if you're you're a parent of a kid, you need to strongly consider pulling your kid from college, not sending them at all.
You have to think about this as well from the perspective of who's in charge of hiring. The people who are in charge of hiring uh are baby boomers and Gen Xers who grew up in a different work culture and a different a different culture at large, but definitely different work culture than Gen Z is growing up today. Um, I've I've written about this, and I think this is really problematic. Um, Gen Z is coming in with an activist mindset. They're coming into companies, and we've not just Gen Z, millennials too. Um, we've seen this over the past few years especially where there's been a push towards certain initiatives—DEI and and that kind of stuff. Um, and that's not coming out of nowhere. Uh, I don't I don't think Bob Iger is sitting at, you know, Disney, and I don't think Tim Cook is is sitting over at Apple like trying to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy and included. Um, I think that's coming from activist employees who are at lower and mid-levels, especially management. Um, and that is has created a hostile workforce. Yeah, there's there's the obvious stuff you can say about Gen Z with like time blindness and um, you know, just a lot of infantilism and just not wanting to work, but I think there is also a calculated risk with hiring Gen Z because of all of their activism that employers don't don't want to risk. You know, this is a great example, but you look at the the Palestine protest on Columbia University's campus. If you're an employer and on your board of directors you have a handful of Jewish members or members who have an affinity for the state of Israel, you know, are and you hire a Gen Z-er who just spent the last year or two protesting Palestine at Columbia. Um, what are they going to do once they're in your company? Are they going to hold your board members hostage until you divest from is from whatever support you have of Israel? Are they going to, you know, barricade themselves and force that they get rid of whatever members on the board have ties to the state of Israel? I mean, these are legitimate questions that um I think employers uh in positions of hiring are are asking. So, if you don't have the experience, you're going to complain, not show up on time, um, and then you're going to create chaos once you're inside the company. And oh, by the way, AI and automation are already here and can basically do what you would otherwise be doing. Like there's just—it's the final nail in the coffin. There's just no no reason to hire Gen Z at this point. It's sad, but I I think the cultural and social narratives uh between the different generations and the power dynamic is really what's at play here.
Kishan had to say about artificial intelligence in schools. I heard—I think it was a letter or report that I heard this morning. I wish I could remember the source, but that there is a school system that's going to start um making sure that first graders or even pre-Ks have AI teaching, you know, every year starting, you know, that far down in the grades. And that's just a that's a wonderful thing. And when considering the United States' track record of creating better jobs for future generations, combined with the complete lack of any favorable political or corporate direction over the last few decades, it's unfortunately hard to imagine that we won't face years of severe unemployment in the job market before potentially realizing any meaningful benefits from AI. Or during the unprecedented outsourcing of manufacturing jobs that dominated the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s, Americans were told that factory jobs were beneath them, that they deserve better, higher-quality careers. Yet, during Reagan's two—so I'm working on—I hope I want to turn it into a book, so if this topic interests you—de-industrialization—please go follow me on Substack over at Tomorrow Today. I'll be publishing more essays on this. I've written some, but I'm going to publish more—trade jobs were delivered deliberately obfuscated for for my generation. I I remember this. I remember exactly what he just said that it was looked down upon. You were less than; like you weren't encouraged to go to trade school. But then I was recently reading a piece in the Wall Street Journal that talked about how basically college or high school juniors and seniors are being treated like D1 athletes where all these trade programs are coming and giving them offers, and they're getting, you know, 60, 70, $80,000 offers right out of high school. And I remember a quote in that where um a guy—I think it was—it was in New Jersey or Philadelphia, but he's with a workforce development board down there, and he was told that, you know, in previous years he would try to go to job fairs at high schools and was shut out. And now all of a sudden that they're welcoming them back. And I think back to my own—my own experience, right?—high school; there weren't really any job fairs at all. There were uh college fairs at the mall. Um, but the high school didn't have recruiters coming in from local industries. They had the army come in, and you know, the kids who went that route went that route, but that was it. Like there was no none of—there was no even mention of working a job before going to college. Like it was just expected everyone would go to college, at least in in kind of circles I I hung out with. Um, even once I was in in college, right? You go to the career fairs at college—using finance again as an example—you would have EY, PWC, you know, all those big names there, Grant Thornton, but you never had like the local plumbing company who needed maybe an accountant, right? You never had any sort of blue-collar industry, even if it was a a support role that that required a high or a college diploma, right? We're not even talking about someone who's uh working as a tradesman, maybe someone supporting in a management role. You never—I never saw any of that. Um, and so I think I think it was deliberately obfuscated. I think there was a concerted effort.
To push kids into college. I don't know if it was a conspiracy to get people into debt, maybe. Um, but I I do think that there were opportunities in the trades, local economy, local government that were not promoted. Bigger companies were were deliberately promoted. College was promoted. And because of this, kids weren't given the option. And even and people are going to say, "Well, you're, you know, you you can make your own choices." Yes, but like if you're 16, 15, 16, 17 years old, like if unless there's an adult in the room guiding you and shephering you and telling you your options, you're not going to know that you you have you're not going to know that you have an option, right? Um, and so it's incumbent on the adults in the room to step up to the plate and give kids an option. And so far, they have not been doing that. It seems like things are changing, but up until now, they haven't done that.
Despite creating 16.1 million jobs, only 28% were considered high-level occupations. The remaining 12.5 million were concentrated in low-wage service work during Clinton's presidency. Even with 22 million jobs, between 40 to 45% were low-skilled, low-wage service roles, with most of the so-called high-wage opportunities not coming from a healthy labor market, but from speculative hype during the .com bubble. And after the Great Recession, mid-wage occupations accounted for 60% of the jobs lost, but just 27% of those regained. Meanwhile, low-wage jobs, which made up only 21% of losses, accounted for 58% of new jobs created, pushing those without a college degree or those unable to secure a job post-graduation into low-skills. This is what I'm saying. This has been happening for a while now. Proving that Gen Z is not only having to compete over increasingly worse jobs, but the belief that better jobs are just around the corner is an overly optimistic fantasy. And even for those able to bypass the rings of Dante's Inferno just to get hired, wages are simply not maintaining the rising cost of living.
Where since 1970, the US dollar has lost roughly 85% of its value, with 25% of that erosion occurring just in the past decade. And despite nominal wage increases, productivity has increased 80% between 1979 and 2024. While wages have only grown by 29.4%, equating to an annual inflation-adjusted increase of just 2%. Where, according to a recent report from Newsweek, Gen Z carries the highest average personal debt at $94,111, far above millennials at $59,181 and Gen X at $53,255. Where, compared to just a decade ago, Gen Z is paying 31% more for housing, 46% more for health insurance, over twice as much for car insurance, and is projected to spend roughly $145,000 in rent just by the time they turn 30, compared to $126,000 for millennials at the same age. And if current trends persist, after-tax, after-healthcare income for the average family is projected to decline by 37% by 2030 with rising healthcare costs accounting for most of the loss.
So if this is true, if this is true and this is talking about, you know, your average software developer, your average like white-collar office job, like why on earth would anyone go to college for that? If your wages, if wages already are not keeping up, millennials were already struggling and they're projected to lose even more as costs continue to rise and currency is continually debased. Um, the math doesn't math there. There's there's and then obviously AI is going to take a lot of jobs, right? Like there's there's no un- unless you are doing AI, you're in Silicon Valley, virtual reality, you're like in a high-demand skill set, there's no way there is no way you can make up these losses. So this is again why I think people should not go to college anymore.
And while society is so unbelievably divided to the point that we fail to acknowledge we're all underpaid when accounting for the fact that minimum wage was intended to provide a living wage. Today, roughly 44% of full-time US workers are not achieving that, effectively resulting in half the American workforce making less than the minimum wage would be if it had remained tied to worker productivity. I watched every single news clip about the job market that that recent graduates are facing and how AI is going to replace entry-level jobs. I also watched the ones that were promoted in Canada. I also subscribed to about 15 to 20, maybe 22 different media outlets and I read every single news article that they had on that. What I increasingly got the sense of was maybe 25%, 20% was discussing the severe implications of 50% of entry-level jobs being just gone between 1 to 5 years and then it was filled with but on the bright side, well, there'll be new jobs created by AI. I think the unfortunate reality in something like that is that yeah, that's true, probably in a hundred years, if we make it that far, 150 years, 200 years, things probably will be quite um prosperous if we can make the right decisions to get there, but it will be at the cost of tens of thousands of millions of people's lives and we failed to address that. People are hurting right now and we're about to just completely shake it all up. And and and I'm even I I don't even fully believe that AI will disrupt as much as they're saying, as quickly as they're saying. But I'm also not going to uh disregard the fact that that technology is is increasing at a speed that we cannot comprehend. Does anybody know what happened between 1710 and 1725? Absolutely not. But I can guarantee you it wasn't as much of the changes that we've experienced between 2010 and 2025.
One of the things that kind of just sent me over the edge was in one of the the uh the the news the one of the videos that I watched was a lady that was saying how college graduates or just Gen Z can overcompensate the increasingly the increasingly difficult job market. And she said that you prioritize human networking, which I absolutely agree on and I have said that in many times in my videos. I personally will never do another online job application. And for transparency, I've actually never gotten a job through an online job application platform. It's only the same. I have all of my jobs came from a personal connection. Um, my all of them um came from someone within the company already handing my resume, not literally handing, emailing, whatever, but to the hiring manager and a personal referral. Um, like that's how almost every job I've gotten and I think that's the case for most people, been through human connection and so that's why I promote that. I've also found a lot of recent success in things through this this channel being able to speak with people about jobs and things of that nature as well as doing men's groups and and other things of that nature. But what she said was she said you need to do things that AI can't do. So start writing letters to those that uh did the interview that helped you during the interview process. So if you got interviewed, you're going to write them a thank you letter for the opportunity for that. The reality is is that if you did 300, 400, 500 job applications and you've had five interviews and none of them resulted in a hire, that you had to go through all of the insanity that I just mentioned in this video, that you're then going to say, "Thank you. Thank you for this heaping pile of garbage." I empathize with what he's saying here. I I understand what the the advice from the lady and again it's coming from an older generation where that was normal, but I understand the frustration.
Another thing that hasn't been talked about in this video yet is just how many of those ghost job posting postings are actually ways for employers to get free work. Um, and this this is happening. So if if this has happened to you, please pay attention and don't ever do free work again. Um, a lot of times these these interviews are multi-round interviews. Um, and they want you to complete a test uh project. And I think this is really prevalent in coding. They want you to demonstrate your compet competency by completing a test assignment. So for as a writer, what that would look like for me is someone might give me um an article brief and have me complete it um and then send it back to them and we'll see if if it aligns. So, I I actually did this with Investopedia. I was uh brought on to do a test a paid test assignment. Um, they didn't like it, so we we parted ways. Um, in all cases, mine have been paid, but what I've heard, especially in tech circles, is that they're not paid. And because there's so much competition for the jobs, people are willing to do the work for free. So what employers have started doing as they've been piecing parsing out um different projects and giving projects to people as part of their application process and they're harvesting free work from them. Um, and you you you're have no contractual obligation to these people and they're taking your work um and you're you're putting in the full faith effort to get the job that they're purportedly hiring for and then they're basically stealing your your IP and your talent in order to advance their own projects without without compensating you. Um, so, so I understand what this woman is recommending to say thank you and show gratitude. Uh, but at the same time, you have to use a bit of discernment because I have a pretty negative view of employers, but I'd say probably a lot of them are um unscrupulous and they're really abusing the circumstances right now to extract as much out of young people as they can with little to no remuneration for whatever they're providing. That is plaguing us. I can't stand that. And so that's where I feel the need to show I'm not being overly dramatic. I'm just trying to be realistic. I'm trying to address, hey, this is a issue. This is a concern. This isn't just some YouTube video. This is a severe concern. I just want to go back and just show some of the reasons why employers and hiring managers are using ghost jobs.
More than 60% of companies who reported posting ghost jobs said they did so to make employees believe their workload would be alleviated by new workers. 62% of respondents said they posted ghost jobs expressly to make their employees feel replaceable. 43% stated they used it to give the perception that their company was thriving despite uncertain economic conditions. 85% go as far to interview candidates despite not actively hiring for the role. Nearly 70% of them said posting fake job listings boosted revenue. 65% said the job ads had a positive impact on morale. 77% reported an uptick in productivity among workers because they were scared of losing their job. And 70% believe this is morally acceptable to do this. And so when knowing that I just can't psychologically tell workers, hey, just tighten up your resume, work on your cover letter, go uh hop on LinkedIn and and network more on there or write a letter to your interviewer. I just feel that we are failing to address the ramifications that we are all about to experience. The fact that I post a minimum wage video and all that happens is that there's just arguments about if we should raise it or if we shouldn't, mostly that why we shouldn't, despite the video never actually addressing if we should or if we shouldn't. It was that none of us are getting paid what we are supposed to. If you adjusted minimum wage for productivity, 50% of Americans are making minimum wage. It's a good point. The way that we have just been divided is unbelievably dangerous. And the unfortunate thing is I am young. I am 25. When I started making this video, I truly believe that if I provided facts and and and I worked really hard on making sure that I provided things in a coherent and structured way that it would help people realize that, oh, we need to come together. And each video just slightly I'm starting to believe that that isn't possible. And I won't give up and I won't stop believing that. But God, it it's getting it's getting very difficult.
And on on a positive note, I know that I'm kind of uh contradicting what I just said. It is very interesting that I released the ghost job video on March 25th, 2025. I would suggest going and re-watching that video and then going and looking at the Library of Congress's uh report on ghost jobs published April 25th, 2025 and seeing maybe some of the similarities there. I just want to say that you can make a difference and that the information as long as you're having productive conversations can actually begin to do something. That video got half a million views. There was a ton of comments, it was able to push it was able to do something. Um, so ultimately what I always end with is how do we make a change? How do we actually make a change? The way you actually make a change is by having productive conversations because it will ripple down. It'll make a larger effect. If you have people making really breaking down dis complex discussions to where people are engaging that makes a massive that that is able to combat the absolute fake corporate media on all sides. It is an absolute just heaping pile of garbage. But ultimately, I hope this was able to provide value. Please don't walk away from this feeling down. Try to realize this is a realistic.
So, this is my whole shtick. I'm going to shamelessly self-promote here. This is my whole shtick on Substack is trying to figure out the game plan for how we're all supposed to navigate this because it is here. Uh this transition period isn't just going to be about jobs. And he didn't cover this in this video, but it's going to restructure society as a whole. Um, so it's going to change how we value ourselves, what how we derive meaning from life. Right now, as he said in the video, you know, um, factory jobs, we were told that those jobs were beneath us, right? And so there's been a narrative about work that permeates all levels of society. And so many of us have gotten, and myself included, have gotten value from our professional identities. And we've kind of melded together our intrinsic identities as humans and our professional identities in the workforce. And as this changes, it's going to have tremendous consequences on on all of us. You know what happens if you know in two years an AI agent takes over and your life's work is just null and void. You know, if you've spent the last maybe you're not in Gen Z, maybe you're Gen X and you've spent the last, you know, 20 years as as a freelance writer and all of a sudden there's no more there's no need for writers anymore. Like what are you what are you going to do, you know? Um, it's maybe too late to reskill and even then like how do you reskill? We haven't even talked about that either. It's it's not like it's going to be like in 2008 when my generation especially older millennials took um refuge inside of universities went back for advanced degrees to wait out the storm of of the great recession. That's not going to be an option this time around. So what is it how is this going to affect our meaning and our value within society? Like we are society, us, all of us, you and me, we are society. So if we've established certain unspoken rules about who is socially valuable, who isn't, like that's going to change how we interact with one another.
Um, government, right? Like obviously the the he talked about productivity gains um diverging from from compensation. So we're all underpaid. We know this. Costs are rising. There's going to be an increased demand on politicians to do something. They're clearly not. I mean the the the the welfare system as it exists isn't going to be able to hold. If if this is true, 50% of entry-level jobs go away and much more on top of that. If all if all of this is true, our existing safety net isn't going to hold. There's just no way. So, we're going to have a huge political um maelstrom in in the coming years. 2028 is probably going to be a pretty significant election because of that. We're already seeing pushes uh on the extremes on both sides. And so our our political institutions are going to break down because they can't meet the needs of of the citizenry. Social institutions obviously are already breaking down in how we have rapport with one another. Economic institutions are breaking down, right? Most a lot of people now um don't have the cash flow to buy things like groceries and gas. They literally do not have the cash in the bank to cover day-to-day expenses. And it's not because they're blowing all their paychecks on brand new Louis Vuitton purses, right? um they're not buying, you know, high f high-end fancy uh Porsches. They they just aren't pay getting paid enough to compensate um with the cost of cost of living. Um, and so the these are going to be real problems and this is all going to be happening within the context of a major technological revolution the likes of which we have never seen before. Even you know I compare this to the Gutenberg press. Um, but even that took centuries you know a couple centuries to play out. The the entire all the transformation the slow retreat of the the Catholic church run political system in Europe, the end of feudalism, the rise of mercantilism and eventually capitalism, all that took centuries to play out um this is all happening within months if not you know years, so this is happening fast, the institutions we have are not capable of meeting the need of the time um which means things are going to have to change and we cannot come to agreement on how how things would change because we're not having productive conversations.
So, I would invite you if you're interested in this. Definitely like and subscribe. I'll be doing more um content like this, but also check me out over at Tomorrow Today on Substack. I write extensively about this. I do think I do think there is a path forward. I think I think we're in a transition period. I think it's going to be tremendously disruptive and I think the goal right now is to become as adaptable as possible. Your goal isn't to succeed. Your goal right now should not be to become the next Jeff Bezos. It's to adapt and make yourself as adaptive as possible. So whatever happens in the next 5 to 10 years, you can come out on the other side and benefit from whatever uh positive outcomes will come from from AI. And I I think it is possible um depending on how this is managed. It is possible. We could enter into a second renaissance um a golden age the likes of which we also haven't seen before. So I I do think that's possible, but we have to get there. And so this period right now that we're in is going to be massively disruptive. It's going to challenge everything you think you know about how the world works, how you exist in the world. um and how we exist with one another. So, I would definitely encourage you to check out some of the other stuff I've written on this. Um, and again, like and subscribe if you found this valuable, and I will see you in the next the next video.