Hey c/self_improvement.
Right now I’m really hitting a bad part of my journey. I’m seriously doubting my reason to keep going. I put in all this work and I almost never see any reward for it. Can’t lose fat no matter how hard I work out. I’m totally unemployable and while I have a summer gig right now, I can’t live through another 9 months of unemployment and I know that’s what’s in my future because no employer wants to touch me with a ten foot pole.
Right now, I’m looking at taking some college courses. But what’s the point if I’m not top of my class? No employer would want to hire me if I’m not perfect in every conceivable way. I have nothing to offer the world that literally everyone else can’t. It’s like I am ontologically inferior to everyone.
EDIT: thank you so much for all these responses.
I’ll be honest, I look at job seeking from an employer’s pov. This isn’t me being whiny, I would think from an employer’s standpoint that if I am getting all these excellent candidates, why bother settling for this less-than-exceptional guy when everyone else is so much better?
And this is what gives me cold feet. I worry about “what if I don’t meet up to snuff? Then this all would be for nothing.” and if I were to get too personal, find out I hate something and then grow bored of it immediately.
Are you so sure there are that many excellent candidates? Just based on the odds it’s pretty unlikely you’re the worst, and people that hire look at more than just the stats, people I’ve known that interview say they would rather hire someone that is easy to get along with or fits the vibe of the environment than the person with the most perfect experience.
If you start some where and it doesn’t work out I think there is still good experience you can get, especially if you get trained for something new. If you hate it you can quit, I don’t think it’s as big a deal to have some short jobs on your resume as people fear, or you can just leave it off.
Looking for jobs sucks though, I hope it gets easier comrade. To me it’s impressive when anyone has motivation in the hellscape we are in, I don’t think you should be so hard on yourself if you aren’t where you’d want to be, none of us signed up for this bullshit!
Thanks comrade, but to answer your first question, I make that assumption judging on how hiring goes. I see the high applicant count and even on hr linkedin pages, they gripe about how many applicants they get. There’s bound to be at least 10 people with more experience, went to a better school, or got a perfectly matched degree than I can ever muster.
What good is “good” if what gets even an interview is “excellent”? Especially when I consider some possible things I might like, such as technology or animation, these are probably highly competitive and cutthroat industries even moreso than usual. I have two people I kind of know that work for a larger tech firm (although I won’t say which one for opsec) and I kind of know this film screenwriter, but that’s about it.
I gave up on the prospect of a fancy career and accepted the blue-collar stuff. Oddly enough, my career has become surprisingly coherent and intertwined with my politics. Since 2019, the labor markets have been haywire and there definitely isn’t the same predictable reserve army of labor that there used to be. Also, temp agencies exist; you can go to them and they’ll place you at a job. It’s certainly predatory, as they take a cut from the first several paychecks. But it’s way better than nothing, and I worked manual labor jobs alongside lots of people whose biggest qualification was having a pulse.
Most people aren’t that super-wow-smart, and the economy employs 150 million people.
Take a bunch of chances, try new/unfamiliar stuff, and in all likelihood you will stumble across something that you’re very useful at.