The Job Market Didn’t Break Overnight
I graduated from film school in Cape Town in 2020. Three years studying production, two years before that studying film theory in Lund, Sweden. My friends and I had spent the better part of 2018 and 2019 grinding, producing short films and music videos that actually won awards. We were building something.
Then COVID hit. And the creative world didn’t just slow down. It stopped.
What I didn’t know then was that this was just the first crack.
A pattern I kept living through
In 2022, I made a decision. Screenwriting had been my foundation for years, so I pivoted into copywriting. I graduated early 2023 with a portfolio, real writing experience from the film industry, and genuine confidence.
Eight months. Zero interviews. Zero freelance collaborations.
Not because I wasn’t good enough. But because the market had already started to freeze again. This time under the weight of rising interest rates, inflation, and the economic ripple effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Companies stopped hiring. Agencies stopped experimenting with new talent.
The timing, again, was brutal.
I only got my first real opportunity through a personal connection. Someone who had just started a new kind of digital agency, remote-first, built differently. He was the first person who gave me a chance. We still work together today.
The market isn’t just hard. It’s structurally different
I read a post on Reddit recently from a civil engineer who hires occasionally when his company has budget. He described receiving 50 applicants within the first 12 hours of posting a junior position. Most of them were senior-level, highly qualified candidates willing to take a step down just to get in the door.
He asked the same question I’ve been sitting with for some time: what are new graduates supposed to do?
This isn’t a temporary dip in the market. This is something structural shifting beneath our feet. And it’s been shifting for a while.
AI accelerated it, inflation made it visible, and the war made it worse. But the cracks were already there.
What this actually does to people
I want to be honest about something that doesn’t get talked about enough in professional contexts: the psychological cost of prolonged uncertainty.
I’m 33. My wife and I have had months where we genuinely didn’t know if we could pay our bills. That kind of stress doesn’t stay at a desk. It follows you to bed. It quietly erodes your sense of self-worth in ways that are hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it.
When you can’t find work in the field you trained for, you don’t just lose income. You start to lose your sense of belonging in society. And I’ve seen it in myself and people around me, how quickly that turns into depression, anger, and bitterness.
We don’t talk enough about this as a systemic consequence. We treat unemployment statistics as abstract numbers. They aren’t.
The generation gap nobody wants to acknowledge
Many people in my generation (mid-thirties) had just enough time to establish themselves professionally before AI, inflation, and geopolitical instability reshaped the market. That timing was luck. PURE LUCK. It wasn’t skill. It wasn’t better work ethic.
The generation coming up now didn’t get that window.
They’re entering a market where AI handles large portions of what used to be entry-level work. Where senior professionals are competing for junior roles. Where a degree, in almost any field, no longer functions as a reliable signal for future employment.
Some will move abroad and build careers elsewhere, returning later with experience that makes them competitive (my wife). That’s a real option. But it’s not equally available to everyone, and it doesn’t solve the structural problem at home.
I’m forcing myself to stay hopeful
I say “forcing” because I think honesty matters here. Hope doesn’t come naturally in this climate. You have to choose it, actively, repeatedly.
What keeps me going is the belief that the market is changing, and not only shrinking. New forms of work exist that didn’t a few years ago. New ways to build income streams that aren’t dependent on a single employer or a single industry. The agency model is evolving. Freelance is evolving. AI is a threat, but it’s also a tool, and the people who learn to use it strategically rather than compete against it are the ones building something sustainable. I’m one of them.
But I’m aware that not everyone has the resources, the network, or the psychological bandwidth to pivot repeatedly. And a society where an entire generation feels locked out of the future is not a stable one.
So what do we do?
I don’t have an answer. I don’t think anyone does.
But I think the starting point is refusing to treat this as an individual failure. When 50 qualified people apply for one junior role, that’s not a story about 49 people who didn’t try hard enough. That’s a story about a system under serious strain.
We need to talk about it that way.