'How is this not a recession?': Reddit voices a generation's frustration

A post on Reddit's r/recruitinghell has captured something that official economic statistics struggle to measure: the lived experience of a generation that followed every rule and still ended up with nothing to show for it.

The original poster, 29 years old with a college degree and two years of fruitless job applications behind them, laid out the situation in terms that felt less like a complaint and more like an indictment.

“I’m looking at the world we currently live in, and it truly feels that robots and AI have taken over all aspects of life. To the point where there is no physical means to make a living or any income at all,” they wrote. “Having a bachelor’s, which used to be a ticket to the middle class, is entirely worthless. The same companies are paying 1/3 of the salary they were paying to the generation that is retiring right now.”

The post went further: “Jobs don’t exist. Labour unions have no power. No means to buy a house or start a family unless you work two to three jobs and make six figures. How can we pretend something is not seriously wrong?”

“My supervisor had a master’s in communications”

“I spent four years working retail after graduating, and my supervisor had a master’s in communications,” one user replied. “Nobody talks about how the whole system shifted from ‘get a degree, get a good job’ to ‘get a degree and maybe you’ll get a callback for a $40k position that used to pay $65k ten years ago’ and somehow we’re supposed to act like that’s normal.”

The salary collapse the original poster described, with companies paying a third of what they paid the retiring generation for equivalent roles, is a theme that runs through almost every corner of this conversation. Credentials have not just stopped opening doors; they have stopped guaranteeing even a floor.

“If you have a job, things look normal. If you don’t, it’s a completely different story”

One comment captured the reality of the current economy in a single sentence: “If you have a job, things look and seem normal. If you don’t, then it’s a completely different story," their comment stated.

The reply that followed complicated even that framing: “I have a job, and things absolutely aren’t normal. It’s an unskilled manual labour job that’s hiring, but no one will apply for that because it’s beneath them with their computer degree.”

It’s a detail that sits uncomfortably in the middle of the entire situation: the jobs that exist are often not the jobs that educated workers feel able to take, and the jobs that educated workers trained for are either gone or paying a fraction of what they once did.

Impact of technology to the job market

“The ‘booming’ economy right now is just five companies sending a trillion dollars back and forth to each other, hoping the bubble doesn’t pop,” one user wrote, emphasising the disconnect between stock market performance and the lived economic experience of most workers. Take note: most of these “five companies” are those that are in tech and artificial intelligence.

Perhaps the most philosophically charged response in the thread came from a commenter who located the root of the problem not in policy failures or corporate greed, but in a fundamental question about what technology is actually for.

“I’m very worried about our future. What is happening? I don’t think humanity needed AI ever. We were quite fine without it. It’s doing more harm than good. Tech from 2010 was fine, you guys. So what? We can do some stuff faster; that’s just helping the shareholders. It’s okay to take time to do something. The process in itself is part of life. Very disappointed that we are making the movie Idiocracy into reality.”

It’s a perspective that many in tech circles would probably dismiss as naive, but that an increasing number of workers who have watched their roles automated, their salaries compressed, and their career paths disappear are finding harder and harder to argue with.

The original poster ends with a question that the thread can’t fully answer: “How can you apply to jobs for two years straight and still find nothing? If this is not a recession, I don’t know what is.”

Read also: 'We're not failures'—Reddit's brutal portrait of America's worst job market in 17 years