The Scrappy GenXer’s Guide to Surviving the Worst Job Market of All Time
Or, how I kept myself busy by using the skills I've acquired over my long career.
Three weeks ago, I was texting with my boyfriend in Seattle, ranting about politics as usual. I don’t remember quite what I said about current events, but his response was to the point:
“Fuck The POTUS!”
“Did you just make that up?!” I texted back. “It’s kind of brilliant. The TU struck through, so you’re just left with P.O.S? I love it!”
He had just made it up, he assured me, and reminded me that he is, in fact, brilliant.
“We should put that on a shirt!”
And just like that, it dawned on me that I could put it on a goddamned shirt and that I could probably sell a bunch of them, too.
What I realized in that moment was that I had a set of skills I’d acquired over a long tech career, and I could easily put them to use to potentially earn some cash.
And my need for cash isn’t theoretical. When my contract ended mid-last year, I thought finding a new full-time job or contract would be a cakewalk.
Instead, I have stumbled into the worst job market in a generation. I am 55, highly skilled, with tons of recommendations on my LinkedIn profile. But rather than easily finding a role in any of the specializations I offer, I am engaged in a daily slog, along with hundreds of thousands of other folks just like me, desperately hunting for anything that can pay the bills.
Three days ago, I woke up to an email I’d been waiting for regarding a job: the good news was that the hiring manager liked me, and I would be offered the contract—except, bad news, the team had lost funding, and didn’t know when or how they’d be able to pay for the role.
Net result? No job for me.
Which, OK. Deep breaths and calm blue ocean: I can roll with the punches, and try, try again, and every other peppy aphorism we use to indicate that, you know, I can get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down, etcetera. It’s not the number of times you get knocked down, it’s the number you get back up!
But this was something like the 650th job I’d applied for over the last ten months. That number is not an exaggeration. I tracked them religiously up until job 444, and then I stopped having any kind of faith about them at all. I’m certain that 200+ more have rolled on through since then.
Only a handful have led to interviews, and as of now, precisely none of them have led to jobs.
The thing about being unemployed for ten months is that at the beginning, you have no idea you’re going to be unemployed for ten months. And counting.
What in the actual fuck is happening?
I am no Allen Ginsberg, but I have seen the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by this bullshit late-stage capitalist economy, and I fear—deeply, desperately—that I am going to end up starving and naked on the streets. A primal howl seems like the only fitting response most days.
When not pondering the destruction of a generation of talent, I’ve been pondering with my genXy partner-in-crime, Dana DuBois, why a GenX writer for the New York Times would refer to our generation as “… making candlesticks when electricity came in,” as if we were all instantly obsolete.
Buddy, I wasn’t a candlestick maker for the last 25 years; I was in Seattle, working in tech. I was one of the scrappy people helping to—to kill the metaphor completely—install the electric grid and project manage lamp installation.
I am neither done, nor are my skills irrelevant—even as none of that seems to matter in the slightest towards finding a full-time job.
Three days ago, I wrote a short story for Earth Day, a piece of flash fiction sci-fi with environmental themes. I shared it on my Lawrence Winnerman | Science Fiction Substack, and cross-posted it here on genXy, the Substack I started two months ago with my bestie, the aforementioned Dana.
In these ten months, I have changed and grown. I have a different mindset than I did at the onset of my prolonged unemployment. I am more focused on my writing and on finding ways I can use what I already have.
The most significant change is this: to survive in this new world, under this Trump 2.0 regime, I am going to have to get scrappy—we all are. My gut tells me that it will be in ways that are more innovative and boundary breaking than at any other time before in my life.
I am also realizing that to survive this regime, I will have to stand up and speak out in ways that are uncomfortable to me, and without exaggerated self-importance, ways that may be putting me “on a list” of some kind.
Starting a Substack with Dana focused on Generation X issues and views—many of which are political—seemed like a no-brainer. Standing up a second one to publish my queer dystopian sci-fi seemed like another obvious move. Both are creative outlets, and they just might earn me a buck in the process.
And selling mouthy, sweary political t-shirts? Why the fuck not?
I have owned the domain name Alpacalunch.com for nearly 30 years, vowing that I would one day do something cool with it. My entire career has been about content management systems, e-commerce, and running projects for software development and creative design. I have kept abreast of changes in those fields even as I, for example, saw the first content management systems being built, and am so up-to-date I can skillfully use the latest generation of tools like Shopify, Wix, WordPress, and more.
Far from being stuck making candles, I know how to do typographic layout in Adobe tools; I know how to stand up a Shopify website, and I know how to research and find something like a Print-On-Demand vendor like Printful to print any wacky tee-shirt design I can come up with.
So three weeks ago, when my boyfriend sent me that text and I wanted to put it on a shirt, I did. We bought the first two shirts off the site, and since then, I have added nearly a hundred more.
Some are profane. Some are poetic. Some are possibly banal (but funny). If you’re looking for a great tee to wear to the next protest, consider buying one from alpacalunch.com! Tee-shirts! Hot off the press! Get your tees here and make MAGA cry! Hot, fresh, snatched tee-shirts!
Seriously. Papa needs cat food something fierce.
Over the last month, several of us came up with the idea for The Citizen’s Oath: a freely taken oath to the Constitution to remind people of what is most important in this moment. It matches the oaths taken by our Armed Forces, and by elected leaders and government workers.
The point of it is not to collect signatures, or start yet another organizing group, or to ask for money. At its heart, it is all about getting the message out, and trying to start a mass awareness campaign that helps to push the national conversation towards the responsibilities we have as citizens, and that our elected leaders have to us.
And once again, because I haven’t stopped learning and growing these last 25 years, and because tools have finally achieved a point at which they are so dead-simple to use, I was able to stand up a website for The Citizen’s Oath in a matter of hours.
It has the oath itself, the reason for the oath, and a printable PDF flyer and link to a shirt with a QR code that can be worn to rallies. The entire effort took me less than a day, all told.
I am not saying this to brag. Merely to reiterate my main point: during this prolonged unemployment, I’m not standing still. None of us can afford to do that, morally or financially.
When you have a lifetime of skills and relatively easy-to-use tools, you can accomplish quite a lot!
The unanswered, $64 billion-dollar question is: why is this job market so fucked up, and why are tens of thousands of people like me having such a hard time finding a job?
The holistic answer is complex, and the possible answers are multitudinous:
It’s ageism, or it’s the economy, or it’s the tariffs. Months ago it was the election, then it was the Holidays, then it was the Inauguration, and now it’s the uncertainty surrounding a global trade war.
Or it’s AI, and the interest rates. The end of cheap money for tech, and the beginning of the singularity. Possibly it’s because GenX has aged out of the marketplace entirely, cast by some as those candlemakers in the age of electricity.
Or, more likely, it’s all of these things in combination, and more.
But for now, the truth is—I don’t care. I don’t care what the final correct answer is because I am about to run out of money.
So maybe this isn’t kosher on Substack, and maybe I’m not supposed to say things like this out loud, but fuck it:
Please go buy a sweary political tee-shirt at Alpacalunch.com.
And please go take The Citizen’s Oath and print out some flyers there (or buy a tee!). And spread the word to your friends and family!
And please like, share, restack, and subscribe to genXy and Lawrence Winnerman | SCIENCE FICTION.
I am grateful for your readership and your support!
I can't wait to talk about this in our podcast tomorrow!
I can certainly relate to this I was let go from my previous job on November 7 , applied to over 400 postions, carefully crafting each resume for each position the results after 5 month were maybe 10 interviews and taking a job that pays far less than what I was used to. I think our generation is probably the forgotten generation as we are the smallest by numbers . But we are the most resilient as we are a hybrid of the Silent generation( we inherited their work ethic and the Millenials as we share their social conscience and ability to adapt to technology) Perhaps because of our qualities we are intimidating to the the hiring managers or maybe not. Maybe it's a 40 year trend of the Billionare class that has the politicians of BOTH parties under their thumbs : destroying unions, outsourcing jobs, giving in to AI to replace us : all for making more profits. The Boomers are now retured, they can get away with taking advantage of Gen Z and Millenials and thus GEN X is throiwn under the bus. Just my useless opinion.