Hey brother, can you spare a job?

The Jobs Are Fine, But the Job Market’s Broken

If you glance at the numbers, you might think the job market is thriving. Unemployment hovering around 4%, employers still adding payroll jobs like it’s a growth market, and the stock market—well, it’s got its Prozac days, but the fundamentals seem stable. For years, though, people have complained that they can’t find a decent job. Why is that?

Because the job market isn’t just about the number of jobs. It’s about the kind of jobs, the time it takes to get them, and what people have to become to fit into them. And on that front, we’ve got a systemic problem. Or more accurately, a series of quiet disasters papered over with a lot of window-dressing, outright lies, and macroeconomic cheerleading.

The way we hire people in this country took a hard left when the gig economy came to town and shared a room with COVID. Our response to both of those inflection points changed the way workers think about their jobs, and employers think about their workers, and neither one for the good.

Take public companies, for example. The reality behind the 4% number is that half of the job postings right now aren’t being filled—they’re just pending, for six months or more. That’s not a hiring strategy; that’s paralysis. In 2019, 91% of open roles were filled within six months. Today, it’s 50%.

Imagine running a business where it takes half a year to make a hire. The wheels aren’t just turning slowly—they’re not even attached to the cart. Employers seem scared to pull the trigger, confused as to why that is, and increasingly allergic to what they see as an unnamed systemic risk. So, they ghost applicants, pause searches, and hide behind automated screening software that would reject Einstein for not having enough cloud certifications.

Those who are employed have a different problem. What no one wants to say out loud is that COVID scared nominal wages past the point that an employee could create value with their presence and input, in many—but not all—cases. Things got so bad that you would hire and pay any amount to someone who would just show up, regardless of whether they showed up with intent to do a good job. Those people are still in those positions, still being overpaid for doing the bare minimum at best.

And job seekers? They’ve gone from “quiet quitting” to quiet begging. I know a woman was the COO for company that exited profitably to investors. She made $200k+, ran a team of 49 absolute crackerjacks, and oversaw rev ops north of $100m. Now she’s thrilled to land a job where she’s not insulted on the daily, consulting for basically $150 an hour while she tries to find a place to land, get grounded and make an impact.

Recent grads are casting their nets so wide they’re applying to jobs that have nothing to do with their major—or their sense of self. It’s the anti-passion economy: realists will take almost anything, because the hiring process is so disjointed, the odds of landing your “dream job” have fallen somewhere between winning the lottery and being invited to join the Bilderberg Group.

This isn’t just anecdotal. According to recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while unemployment for people with bachelor’s degrees sits low, a huge share of them are underemployed—working jobs that don’t require their level of education.

And worse, they know it.

The prestige of the degree still gets lip service, but when the barista has a master’s in environmental engineering and your Uber driver is quoting Proust, it’s time to admit the system is handing out credentials like they’re discount coupons and hoping no one reads the fine print.

Interestingly—and this is where the data smirks at conventional wisdom—philosophy majors are doing just fine. Better, in fact, than computer science grads in some cases. The unemployment rate for philosophy was around 3.2%, compared to over 6% for CS. That’s not a knock on computer science; it’s a knock on the idea that vocational degrees guarantee security. In a world where AI can code faster than you can spell “Python,” it turns out that being able to reason, write, and think might be more durable than being able to build an app no one will use.

And speaking of AI—let’s have the talk. It turns out that AI isn’t coming for your job, it’s coming to make sure you never get one to begin with. As with most technologies, we’re throwing AI at the tasks that we least like to do: talking to people, understanding them, thinking around the corners of the maze to see where they fit in the organization. Résumés are being screened by bots (that are biased to feminine names by about 6% according to one study), interviews are being handled by disembodied avatars, and good candidates are falling through the cracks because they didn’t use the right keyword in their cover letter. It’s like handing your dating life over to a spreadsheet and wondering why you’re still single.

This false precision is costing some people their futures. Employers think they’re avoiding bad hires. In reality, they’re avoiding hires. Hiring is now a game of chicken—who’s willing to blink first? The company trying to fill the role, or the candidate who needs the job before their COBRA runs out? Spoiler alert: it’s usually the candidate, who will trade down in order to get a paycheck.

And it wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Boomers were supposed to be aging gracefully out of the workforce, but that isn’t happening at a rate to meet any of the predictions from 10 years ago. The ratio of working adults to retirees is shrinking, sure, but we’ve still managed to create a market where young workers can’t get hired and older workers are forced to keep working because the retirement math no longer adds up, when the cost of core inflation items has been driven up by government fiscal policy. It’s a demographic double-bind: we need more workers, but the system can’t hire them to replace someone who is still working, won't hire them when it can, and is optimized to waste them when they are hired.

This brings me to the real lesson buried under the numbers. The job market isn’t some platonic form of fairness and efficiency—it’s a messy, flawed mirror of our institutional anxieties. It reflects caution where we need conviction. It rewards generalists when we train for specialization. And it punishes ambition at precisely the moment we need people to care about what they do.

We’re telling an entire generation that their job is to survive the algorithm, not to become something worth hiring. And employers? They’re sitting on requisitions like they’re Fabergé eggs—too fragile to touch, too precious to break open. Meanwhile, our best talent is pouring into side hustles, part-time gigs, and burnout-inducing patchwork careers. Reminds me of Ginsberg:

… I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …

So what do you do with all this? If you’re running a business, hire like a human. Burn the job description, look someone in the eye, treat them like you’d want to be treated, and make a decision. If you’re looking for work, stop waiting to be chosen. Get to the actual decision-maker, show him you’ve got what it takes. Build something. Prove value faster than the bot can say no. And if you’re a parent, don’t tell your kids to pick the “safe” major. There is no safe. The world’s moving too fast for safe.

We’re not in a jobs crisis. We’re in a purpose crisis. The work is there. The people are there. What’s missing is the will to connect them with purpose, speed, and a little bit of old-fashioned courage.

The only ones who are thriving are the middlemen—recruiting platforms, bloated HR departments, credentialing bodies—all of whom make money from the friction. But the rest of us? We’re just trying to plant our flag in a landscape that keeps shifting under our feet.

And if you’ve been waiting for permission to get off the career ladder and build your own tower—here it is. The market isn’t going to reward your loyalty. It’s not going to recognize your potential. But you might. And that’s the only job offer that matters.