A couple years back, I was sitting with my grandpa as he told me about how he got started in his radio career.

It was astonishing to me just how…well, easy it all seemed to have been.

From his telling, he just kind of kept getting jobs he wasn’t even trying to get until he was a local celebrity he wasn’t even terribly interested in being.

Contrast that with trying to find any job anywhere right now, and you can see how the disconnect forms between generations re: what work even means.

Take this example from TikTok user @houseofwhim:

“So my dad is one of those dads that doesn’t believe like how hard it is to get a job right now with, like, the job market. But he’s a teacher, and so he is on summer break right now, and so he’s looking for, like, a part time job for the summer. And I feel like he thought this was gonna be a big ‘aha’ moment, like, for all of his, you know, like, children, like ‘see how easy it is? Like, I went to the store, I talked to the manager, I introduced myself, and then I got the job!’ However, that has not been the case, as we all know from doing that.”

“He keeps going to the stores, and either the manager is not there, the manager is there but won’t talk to him, the manager does talk to him and says that they’ll give him a call, and then they never do… Sound familiar?”

“Like, I hate that he’s learning this in, like, real time, but I’m like ‘ah, we’ve all – all of your children have tried to tell you how bad it is out there, why are we so stressed, and you act like it’s not real. Because again, you’re a teacher and that has – that’s what you’ve been doing, but like for all of us, we’re just, like, what are we supposed to be doing? The job market sucks.”

@eye_oh_knee

#jobmarket #jobs #genx #zillennial #genz #millennial #Tatcha

♬ where is my mind (piano version) – your movie soundtrack

Smoke from a pipe and look concerned from a rocking chair, maybe.

My guy, this is only level one of the nightmare.

Guess what? Nothing is affordable anymore.

Y’all got in on the ground floor and didn’t even know it.

Wait until he realizes he needs to submit a resume, then manually re-enter all of the resume info into a form, then write a cover letter summarizing the resume again while sucking up, so that all of that can get scanned by a bot and thrown away.

The future is here.

Now that you’ve read that story, check out this one about a delivery driver who took a $400 grocery order back because she wasn’t given a tip.