When Work Stops Working
Thoughts from my 5-year job search.
If I ever end up on there, it’s almost always by accident and against my will. And yet they continue to email me! Every day! Something’s always happening on that damn site — but what the hell does that have to do with me?
The general attitude on LinkedIn is defined by either the unearned smugness of a hall monitor or the type of desperation you only see in a Safdie brothers film.
I once worked with someone who had a personality for LinkedIn. One time, she complained when a coworker showed up late because her father had just died. And she reported me for working from home the half-day before Thanksgiving.
I’m an abolitionist, but whoever created that website should be in a prison worse than a Saw trap. I know everyone throws around the term fascism a little too liberally these days — and I really need you to stop because I’ve been doing it for every minor inconvenience in my life as a bit for years, but it’s less funny when y’all are doing it too — but I think LinkedIn might actually be fascist.
I can’t imagine what goes on there. Having a job is embarrassing enough — why flaunt it? It must be some kind of kink.
If you’re the type of person who posts on LinkedIn, who comments on LinkedIn, who shares personal details about yourself on LinkedIn: Your lifestyle is diametrically opposed to mine. Networking signals a lack of moral rigor. Whenever someone tells me they got their job through social media, I wonder when we all stopped feeling shame.
Problem is, I’ve been told — by landlords and my parents and the like — that I need an income to live. What’s next, a credit score and social security number? God, these people.
So, what do I do? Well, for three years, I was either un- or under-employed (what’s known as “freelance”). I looked at LinkedIn a lot but I didn’t post there once. Would I have gotten a job sooner if I had? Maybe. But I think it’s important that one maintains her dignity.
For a while, my passion was writing cover letters. I decided I would become the poet laureate of cover letters, filling them with the charm and aplomb that could only indicate an admirable, saint-like work ethic (I was drinking a lot at the time).
Turns out, I only started getting responses when I used an example cover letter from the internet and just plugged in the keywords from the job listing itself. If ChatGPT had existed at the time, I probably could have gotten at least 10 job offers within six months. This is the type of degradation they talk about in 120 Days of Sodom.
And the cover letter is just the first circle of hell. Go a little further, and you’ll find Virgil narrating how I watched decades-old media training courses on YouTube to learn how to do a job interview. Even with TJ Walker Success’s tips and tricks for how to pivot, spin, deflect and, most importantly, package my message, I still had to take an 8 mg Buspirone 30 minutes before I needed to be on Zoom just to be able to perform my personality for people who only agreed to talk to me in the first place because I handed over a cover letter crowdsourced from the internet.
Did this get me a job? Well, yes. But at what cost? THANK GOD the people’s revolution is coming to America soon. As I recently texted a friend after she told me she’d applied to 200 jobs in one month and received 0 interviews in return, we’re either on the brink of sweeping New Deal-style social programs or the guillotine. And from the attitude of the current ruling class, it seems they’d actually prefer the guillotine. When the time comes, comrades, please oblige them.
The most fucked up part of all this? We were happy to be exploited! While Gen X bitched and fucking moaned about working office jobs and living in 4-bed, 2.5-bath suburban houses and owning things (bless their hearts, how did they survive?!), Millennials were undertaking an arrangement that’s surely a violation of the Geneva Convention, what’s known as the “unpaid internship.”
Look, you have to understand: We were in the club in our best business casual attire. We got paid in “experience.” We were just grateful for the opportunity. Having spent years being called entitled and self-centered by the likes of Time magazine, my generation was eager to pay our dues.
God help us, our favorite movies and TV shows were about having jobs and doing jobs. The Devil Wears Prada, The Office, Mad Men, The Hills, America’s Next Top Model, Ugly Betty. Never mind the Millennial magazine editor/writer industrial complex (Never Been Kissed, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, 13 Going on 30, Sex & the City — to name a few).
Take the original girlboss herself. Sophia Amoruso went from exalting the neoliberal virtues of hustle culture and bootstrapping and capitalism (and giving name to that neologism that’s still used to refer to a particular brand of careerist woman) (derogatory) in 2014 to bankruptcy in 2016 to where she is today: overseeing a venture fund and a Substack.
It’s just too bad no one wants to work anymore (well, except for the fact that productivity has steadily gone up and up and up since the ’80s, increasing 86% from 1979 to today, which means workers have continued to generate more income than previous generations for decades now) (and in 2025, productivity is now almost 2.7 times higher than hourly pay, because instead of going into paychecks, all that income has been diverted almost entirely to the C-Suite and shareholders).
And no one’s applying for all the jobs that are hiring (oh well, except that as of September, there were more unemployed workers than open positions for the first time since the start of the pandemic).
And no one’s motivated at work, even though wages are up (except we’re living in a rental market where the median rent increased by 21% between 2001 and 2022 and the median household income only increased by 2%).
Everyone seems to know work isn’t working anymore. From The Cut to The Atlantic, all the media companies that lay off their staffs every December/January are discussing how everyone’s applying and no one’s hiring — and AI’s breaking the entire process in the meantime. They’re talking about how there are two different economies (also a consequence of, wouldn’t you know it, AI). Fast Company proclaimed that it’s “Layoff Season!” on its latest cover. Even when you have a job, there’s no certainty you’ll get to keep it.
You can assume, however, that you’ll never go anywhere with it. Don’t expect any longevity or upward mobility. Absolutely never expect a raise — if you need a higher salary, you’ll have to take your chances in the LinkedIn mines. Thankfully, the government refuses to do anything about the cost-of-living crisis, or I’d have to worry about the viability of the oncoming revolution.
The average relationship between a CEO and their workers today could best be exemplified by the relationship between the coyote and the roadrunner.
To any CEO reading this, what do you do? Quickly.
Because I’ve never heard nor personally experienced a CEO (or any C-suite executive) who wasn’t playing Legos and calling himself an engineer. Everything you people do is not only useless, but 99% of the time, your only goal seems to be impeding, disrupting or overloading the people actually doing the work and generating the money that buys you all those plastic bricks. Get a job!
In the meantime, all my friends are fucked. My friends are UNEMPLOYED. They’re JOBLESS. They’re getting LAID OFF. They have HOURLY WAGES. They’re working at THE LOFT. They’re on LINKEDIN.
But I’m not even worried. I’m excited for the future, in fact. Because now everyone is waking up to what I knew years ago when I was getting my MFA in cover letters. Work culture in this country is ugly — both aesthetically and spiritually. And I’m glad it’s ending. We’ve reached the point of unionizing, single-payer healthcare, and universal basic income.
Otherwise… the guillotine, she never misses.