Yuck

The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24, a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a résumé and cover letter — four or five a week, week after week.

Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder.

Watch the video if you feel like puking.

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Recession graduates face diminished lifetime wages, alcoholism, shortened lifespan

Well, fuck.

Five, 10, 15 years after graduation, after untold promotions and career changes spanning booms and busts, the unlucky graduates never closed the gap. Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. When you add up all the earnings losses over the years, Kahn says, it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation—or, alternatively, as if the unlucky ones had been saddled with a debt of the same size.

. . .Examining national longitudinal data, Mossakowski has found that people who were unemployed for long periods in their teens or early 20s are far more likely to develop a habit of heavy drinking (five or more drinks in one sitting) by the time they approach middle age. They are also more likely to develop depressive symptoms. Prior drinking behavior and psychological history do not explain these problems—they result from unemployment itself.

. . .But regardless of age, all men were left with an elevated risk of dying in each year following their episode of unemployment, for the rest of their lives. And so, the younger the worker, the more pronounced the effect on his lifespan: the lives of workers who had lost their job at 30, Von Wachter and Sullivan found, were shorter than those who had lost their job at 50 or 55—and more than a year and a half shorter than those who’d never lost their job at all.

All from an article in The Atlantic titled “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America.”  It’s basically the most depressing article I have ever read.

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fuck this recession, item #3497

During my extensive study of pick-up artistry, I came to the conclusion that most guys who embrace its strategy do so in the following manner:

Lonely Dude: “Girls don’t like me! I haven’t had sex in never!”

Mystery/PUA artist: “Well, I just had sex fifteen minutes ago with an 8.9 I met in a bar.”

Dude: “What? How did you do that?”

PUA: “Easy! First, chicks like assholes, so you have to act like an asshole.  Also, you have to touch them in unexpected places at unexpected times.  Can you juggle scarves?”

Dude: “?????”

PUA: “Whatever, look, here are some pick-up lines.  Go to a bar tonight and use them on the ten most attractive women you see.  If they throw their drinks in your face, don’t worry, that’s just their bitch shields talking and they’re probably only 6s or 7s anyway.  Just go to another bar, and I guarantee you’ll find someone who’ll have sex with you.”*

See, it’s a numbers game.  If you go to a bar, chances are that it contains some people who are looking to have sex, and some of those people will be women.  And if you approach enough of those women at enough bars, chances are that at least one of them is going to be drunk enough and/or desperate enough for sex to overlook the fact that you sort of remind her of her abusive ex-boyfriend when you tell her that her nose is adorably crooked.  Or maybe she will be drawn to you because of your resemblance to said ex-boyfriend because she has issues.  Either way, it’s not about the seductive genius of PUA techniques, it’s about spreading your bait as far as it can go.

This, my friends, is how I feel when looking for jobs.  Sort of.  Actually, it’s even worse, because unlike the lonely guys, I am not particularly disadvantaged; I know how to write a good cover letter,  and I’m professional and smart and competent and all that, but I still know that it is almost wholly a game of chance, the odds of which are not in my favor.  And so there’s nothing to do expect keep trying.  Because it’s not about me.

*as for whether she’ll want to date you, well, that’s dubious.

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