I’m not here to whinge about the sorts of things depressed people do. Yeah, life sucks, and for my generation, we learned that from The Princess Bride.
But a week into this hell, I find myself unable to identify what a light at the end the the tunnel would even look like, and whether there’s any way to distinguish it from a train.
I know many of you have it worse than I do, and I’m not trying to suggest otherwise. My job no longer exists. That’s small potatoes against fearing for your life. But this is one battle too many. I’m using short, declarative sentences.
I called my mom today, and it came up that I have no active plans, but I’d not so much complain about not waking up tomorrow. I’m just exhausted. Things have been going backward for 20-plus years, and we were able to paper over it for about three.
What hope is there? I did a coding bootcamp in 2021 because I had nothing official on my resume, and JS was going to be easy. So. Writing is worthless. Editing is worthless. Fact-checking is worthless. Print design is worthless. Navigating data when it’s not in your job description is worthless. And god forbid you attempt to code without your handlers’ approval.
I don’t see what comes next.
Yea… uhhh. I have no happy thoughts on any of this, to be frank. We kind of need a miracle? Historically speaking, though - we are looking at what any other population saw as they went from democracy to dictatorship. Not much comfort in that. All I have been doing is building curated news sources in RSS and getting to know friendly decentralized communities. The sooner I can get off the Meta based socials, the better. Also, I have been reading about past dictatorships. I’m learning about the Nicaraguan one right now. Lot’s of parallels. The one silver lining, I guess, is - after a while most dictatorships turn thier own supporters… violently. Yay?
It’s possible to stretch the truth on your resume so that you get the job, without deceiving anyone.
Can you write good code? Are you willing to do the job? Would the employer be happy with you? If yes, then it doesn’t really matter what the piece of paper says. You have to do whatever it takes to get the interview. I’ve offered to be a professional reference for strangers before. There’s no sense in a desk sitting empty when so many people are willing to do the work.
I can write good enough code that I was pushed out by Gannett for threatening everyone at the director level with accurate data that rendered their jobs largely useless. Our CMS was gathering all of the data they wanted; they just didn’t want to pay for API access, which I believe I heard would be $250K atop our contract for access to our own data. So they overstaffed because they wanted to force people to manually report extant data.
That’s before we even get into what that did to what was left of what we were doing that could charitably be accused of being journalism.
While I appreciate the offer, I can’t do this anymore. I’m not going to try to get back into the corporate world. It is soulless, has no sustainable future and has already stolen the prime years of my life. I no longer believe in the system. Either I die or I don’t, but never again am I spending 95% of my working hours to pay already rich people. That ship has sailed.
k lol
I feel a really similar sense of dread. Although I completed my university studies in a STEM field, there simply aren’t many jobs that seem to be left. I don’t know what will come next, but I stay hopeful that what comes after that will be a better time for all of us. I dream of a more compassionate society, where we make significant progress as individual communities on how to better live in harmony with our environments. Let’s hope that what comes next doesn’t prevent me from helping make that dream a reality.
Good luck with that. Evil will always win because it’s willing to do anything to win, while good - simply by definition - is not. We’re fucked.
Nah man, don’t give up hope yet. People are maybe screwed short term, but collectively, we’ve kicked nazi ass multiple times. We’ve done it before, we can do it again.
Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen soon enough for those of us “of a certain age.”
